Hierocles, the Stoic Who Drew Circles Around Your Heart

Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher of the second century AD, best known for one unforgettable image: the circles of concern. He pictured each of us at the center of a set of expanding circles, from self to family to community to all of humanity, and taught that the moral task of a life is to draw the outer circles steadily inward.

Most of the famous Stoics are emperors, statesmen, and former slaves. Hierocles is none of these. We know little about his life, but he left behind one of the most beautiful ideas in all of Stoic ethics.

That idea is a picture, and once you see it, you do not forget it. Let me draw it for you.

Who was Hierocles?

Hierocles was a Stoic teacher active in the second century AD, around the same era as Marcus Aurelius, though the two moved in very different worlds. He was a working philosopher, not a ruler.

Much of his writing is lost. What survives are fragments of a handbook called the Elements of Ethics and several passages preserved by a later anthologist. From these pieces we can still see a thinker focused on practical matters, how to live in a family, how to treat your parents, how to meet your duties to other people. He was, above all, a philosopher of our connections to one another.

The circles of concern

Here is the idea that made him last. Hierocles asked you to imagine yourself surrounded by a series of concentric circles, like ripples around a stone.

The first and innermost circle is your own mind and body. The next contains your immediate family. Beyond that lies your extended family, then your neighbors, your fellow citizens, your countrymen, and finally, the outermost circle, the whole human race. Each circle holds people you naturally care about, with the warmth thinning as the circles widen.

Most of us treat this as fixed. We love the inner circles intensely and feel almost nothing for the outer ones. Hierocles saw the moral work of a life precisely there, in refusing to leave it fixed.

Drawing the circles inward

This is the heart of his teaching, and it is genuinely radical. The goal, Hierocles said, is to pull the outer circles toward the center.

The life lived well consists in steadily drawing distant people closer, treating cousins more like siblings, neighbors more like family, and strangers more like neighbors. You work to contract the circles, to bring the whole of humanity nearer to the warm center where you keep the people you love. You will never collapse them completely, but every step inward is a step toward justice and kindness.

This is the Stoic idea of oikeiosis, our natural sense of affinity, expanded on purpose to include more and more people. It gives a concrete shape to the wider Stoic conviction that all people are kin, the idea of sympatheia, the interconnection of everything.

Why Hierocles still matters

In an age that pulls us toward our own small circles and against the distant ones, Hierocles offers a quiet, demanding alternative. Care wider. Draw people in rather than push them out.

His circles turn an abstract ideal, the brotherhood of humanity, into something you can actually practice. Who is in your outer circles, and how could you treat them a little more like your inner ones? That is the question Hierocles leaves you with, two thousand years later. To see where his thought sits in the school, start with what Stoicism is and the four virtues.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Hierocles the Stoic?
Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher of the second century AD, known mainly through fragments of his handbook the Elements of Ethics. Little is recorded about his life, but his surviving work focuses on practical ethics, especially our duties to family, community, and humanity. He is most famous for the image of the circles of concern, one of the most enduring ideas in Stoic moral philosophy.

What are Hierocles’s circles of concern?
They are an image of our relationships as a set of expanding circles centered on the self. The innermost circle is you, then your immediate family, extended family, neighbors, fellow citizens, and finally all of humanity. Care naturally weakens as the circles widen. Hierocles used the picture to show how our concern is structured, and how it might be deliberately reshaped.

What did Hierocles teach about how to treat others?
He taught that the moral goal is to draw the outer circles inward, treating more distant people with the warmth we usually reserve for those close to us. We should work to regard cousins more like siblings, neighbors more like family, and strangers more like neighbors. This deliberate widening of our natural affection is how the Stoic ideal of universal human kinship becomes a daily practice.

Is Hierocles related to the idea of sympatheia?
Yes, closely. Sympatheia is the Stoic belief that all things, and all people, are interconnected parts of one whole. Hierocles’s circles of concern give that grand idea a practical, human shape, showing how to extend your care outward until it begins to match the universal kinship the Stoics believed in. His circles are sympatheia turned into an everyday moral exercise.