The Stoic of the circles. Almost nothing is known of his life, but one image survives: you stand at the centre of rings of people, and the work is to draw them inward.
Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher active around the middle of the second century AD, in the age of Marcus Aurelius. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius calls him a serious and upright man and quotes his scornful verdict on Epicurus. That is almost all we know of his life. He should not be confused with Hierocles of Alexandria, a Platonist of the fifth century who wrote on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras.
A papyrus from Hermopolis in Egypt, published in 1906, turned out to contain part of his Elements of Ethics. It argues that every animal perceives itself from the moment it is born, and that this first awareness of self is where all concern for anything begins. The Stoics called the process by which that concern widens oikeiosis: making things one's own.
The passage he is known for survives because a fifth century anthologist, Stobaeus, copied it out. Each of us, Hierocles writes, stands at the centre of a set of circles. The first holds your own mind and body. The next holds parents, brothers and sisters, spouse and children; then uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins; then other relatives; then neighbours, fellow citizens and people from nearby towns; and the outermost circle is the whole human race. The task is to draw the circles in towards the centre, treating each ring a little more like the one inside it: to call cousins brothers, and uncles and aunts father and mother.
His date rests mainly on Gellius. The papyrus is incomplete. The excerpts in Stobaeus are headed simply with his name, and that they come from the same man as the papyrus is a scholarly judgement, though a widely shared one.
The circles put the boundary in an unexpected place. How close a stranger feels at the outset is not yours; nature and upbringing set that. How you treat that stranger, and how you speak of them, is yours, and it can be practised. The site has an exercise built on this image, among the Stoic exercises.
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