 While Epicurus held that the sage would not engage in politics except in “some special circumstance,” Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school (see the entry on  Stoicism),  held rather that a true sage “will engage in politics unless something prevents it” (Seneca, De Otio 3.2, as translated and quoted in Sharples 1996: 124; SVF 1.271). As we shall see, a Stoic commitment to politics generally took it to be part of nature’s rational plan for human happiness, though this was not incompatible with a Cynic tincture of questioning whether existing laws are truly in accordance with the natural law (Vogt 2008). The question however of the nature of the polity in which politics was to be exercised remains contested as a matter of the interpretation of various Stoic figures, who across the lifetime of the school encompassed both the early generation of the school’s leaders (Zeno and his successor Chrysippus) and later figures thriving in the Roman period who wrote variously in Greek and in Latin (for an overview, see Laurand 2005). To be sure, the polity in question was invariably figured as a city, according to the account given in Dio Chrysostom (36.20: “ They [the Stoics] say that a city is a group of people living in the same place and administered by law” (SVF 3.329, as translated in LS 67J). But which people? Whether the members of this city were to be all humans together with the gods, or only human sages and the gods, and whether the city is to be envisaged as a distinct foundation or as identical with the cosmos, has much exercised both Stoic thinkers and subsequent interpreters. And which law? How does or should the law of a particular city relate to the natural law? These questions are canvassed further as this section unfolds.