Research Information System
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
Ancient Stoic thought often framed the art of living in therapeutic terms. This paper reconstructs how Athenaeus of Attalia, a late Hellenistic and early Imperial Stoic physician and architect of the Pneumatist school, conceives healthy life as a diaita spanning body and soul from infancy to old age. Reading the fragments preserved by Oribasius, I argue that Athenaeus integrates medical regimen with philosophical paideia, recommending diet, exercise, and habituation as a unified therapy. On this reading his pneumatist physiology, especially the doctrine of the sustaining cause (aition sunektikon), provides the causal-physiological rationale for that integration. I further contend that this education-centered vision of health is compatible with Seneca’s account of oikeiōsis as the staged cultivation of one’s nature. The paper thus brings to light a novel connection between Stoic medicine and ethics in the framework of education: in Athenaeus, education is not merely ancillary to health but its organizing principle, and thus integral to living in accordance with nature.