Most people’s concern for others operates like a spotlight: intense on whoever is directly in front of them, nearly absent for anyone beyond arm’s reach. This is natural. It is also, the Stoics thought, a failure of philosophical development — one that can be corrected.
The second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles proposed what is perhaps the most elegant framework for moral growth in the ancient world: a set of concentric circles radiating outward from the individual. At the centre: the self. Then the immediate family. Then the extended family. Then the neighbourhood. Then the city. Then the nation. Then humanity as a whole. The task of the Stoic, he argued, is to practise drawing the outer circles inward — to feel for the distant stranger something approaching what you feel for the person next to you.
He called this practice oikeiôsis: the expansion of appropriate concern. It is one of the most practically useful and least-known ideas in Stoicism.
Who Hierocles was
Hierocles of Alexandria wrote in the second century CE, around the same period that Marcus Aurelius was keeping his private journals. Very little of his work survives. What we have are two fragments: a text on ethics and a set of extracts preserved by the later writer Stobaeus. The circles passage is from those extracts — a short, precise description of a practice that has outlasted almost everything else Hierocles wrote.
He was not the most famous Stoic philosopher. He was not a statesman or emperor. But this particular idea — the expanding circles — has proved more durable than many of the more celebrated contributions to Stoic philosophy. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum used it as a framework for cosmopolitan ethics. It turns out that Hierocles, writing in the second century, identified something structurally true about how human moral concern can and should develop.
The circles described
Hierocles describes the circles in spatial terms. Each person stands at the centre of a series of rings. The innermost ring is the individual: your own body, your own reason, your own soul. The next ring is the immediate family: parents, siblings, spouse, children. The next is the extended family: cousins, uncles, aunts, family friends. Beyond that: the neighbourhood and local community. Beyond that: the city or town. Beyond that: the country. The outermost ring is humanity as a whole.
The point is not that you owe the same duty to every person in every ring. Hierocles is clear that obligations differ by proximity — you have more duties to your family than to a stranger in another country. What the circles are for is not a calculation of obligations. They are a description of where most people’s moral concern actually stops, and a prompt to push it further than it naturally goes.
The practice is simple to state: in every decision, in every allocation of attention and resources, try to include one more ring than your instinct suggests. Act for the neighbourhood when you might otherwise only have acted for the family. Consider the city when you might have stopped at the neighbourhood. Think of humanity when you might have stopped at the nation.
Why the Stoics thought this mattered
The Stoics were cosmopolitans in the original sense of the word. Epictetus — a freed slave who became one of the most influential philosophers of the ancient world — said that when someone asked where he was from, the Stoic answer was not a city or a country but the world. This was not sentiment. It followed directly from the Stoic belief that all human beings share the same rational nature. If rationality is what gives a person dignity, then every person who can reason has the same fundamental dignity. The distance between them is accidental.
The circles practice is the method for making that belief operational. You cannot simply decide to feel the same concern for billions of strangers that you feel for your child. The feeling does not work that way. But you can expand your circle of active concern, decision by decision, a ring at a time. Over time, the Stoics believed, this expansion becomes habitual. What was effort becomes instinct. What was philosophy becomes character.
The practice in modern life
Hierocles’ circles are not an instruction to sacrifice the near for the distant. The practice does not ask you to care less about your family in order to care more about strangers. It asks you to not stop at your family when a small extension of concern would include others who need it.
Notice where your concern naturally stops. For most people, genuine concern — the kind that produces action, not just sympathy — stops somewhere around the extended family or the immediate community. This is not a moral failure. It is a fact about human psychology. The circles practice starts with noticing it.
Practise one ring further. When you would normally act for yourself, ask what acting for the family would look like. When you would normally act for the family, ask what acting for the community would look like. The practice is incremental, not revolutionary. Hierocles does not ask you to save the world. He asks you to include one more ring than you usually would.
Use the circles as a decision filter. When allocating time, money, or attention, ask which ring of the circle is affected. A decision that benefits only you is not necessarily wrong — but a decision that could easily be extended to benefit others at little cost to yourself is worth reconsidering. The circles prompt the question. They do not determine the answer.
The connection to oikeiôsis
The Stoic concept behind the circles is oikeiôsis — usually translated as “appropriation” or “affiliation,” but better understood as “making one’s own.” The Stoics believed that all human beings begin with a natural affiliation to themselves — a care for their own survival, their own wellbeing, their own rational development. The task of philosophy is to extend that same care outward, progressively, until it includes all of humanity.
This is why the Stoic tradition produces such emphasis on community and on duty to others. It is not altruism in the modern sense — a sacrifice of the self for others. It is the recognition that what makes you valuable, your rational nature, is also what makes every other human being valuable. Acting for others, in Stoic terms, is not a cost. It is an expression of who you are.
Starting tonight
The circles practice does not require a formal sitting or a dedicated ritual. It can be run as a brief reflection during the evening review: whose interests did I consider today, and whose did I not? Where did my concern stop, and could it have gone one ring further without cost?
That question, asked consistently, is Hierocles’ practice in miniature. It does not produce the cosmopolitan sage overnight. But it moves the needle, consistently, in the direction the Stoics thought a life should travel: outward from the self, toward the world, one ring at a time.