There is a group of students at Brown University who want to remove a hundred-year-old statue of Marcus Aurelius because Marcus and Rome were “colonizers.” There’s an easy critique of the Stoics that they were all “a bunch of old rich white guys.” That Stoicism was a philosophy of the status quo, of accepting the way things were.

This, of course, would have been news to the Stoics in the ancient world, and not just because they were born in Turkey and Iraq and Syria and Libya and Egypt. But because for roughly four centuries in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Stoics were “renegades of their time and age.” They fought against tyranny (Thrasea). They marched to the beat of their own drum—challenging conventions and expectations of elite society (Cato). They challenged gender roles, bringing women into philosophy (Musonius). They spoke out about corruption and unfairness (Antipater).

They were a constant thorn in the side of the powers that be, of the status quo—coming to be known for a generation in the 1st century as the “Stoic Opposition.” A title that earned many Stoics exile, torture or death. When they first came to Rome, the conservative leadership found Stoicism so transgressive they tried to ban it!

The Stoics were and remain renegades. They question. They fight. They refuse to compromise. They demand only what is right. They insist on virtue even if the world around them is falling to pieces. They don’t always succeed, they aren’t always appreciated, but they do it anyway.

It’s what the philosophy demands. It’s what leadership and privilege demand. The Stoics stepped up and showed that philosophy wasn’t just something they talked about, but something they did. And they did it in the face of convention, of the status quo, of the old rich white guys in power.