You may well know someone — you, perhaps? — who is stoic, epicurean, skeptical or cynical.
That’s because these four adjectives represent philosophical and psychological shortcuts for coping with a confusing, frustrating and even infuriating world, just as they did when they came into use more than two millennia ago. But their meaning has been corrupted — and therein lies a tale.
The terms first bubbled up at a time that was, in a psychological sense, remarkably similar to our own. This was the so-called Hellenistic or Greek-like period, which lasted about three centuries, from Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BC, to the Roman Emperor Augustus.
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