This chapter opens the discussion with the questions: what is it to be a Stoic and why would one would want to live like a Stoic? It offers answers to this question — answers that are considered incomplete, misleading, false, or completely hopeless — in an effort to provide contrast, thus painting a clearer picture of the view of Stoicism presented in the succeeding chapters. The answers were derived from miscellaneous popular notions of what it is to be Stoic, or what it is to be stoical about something.
Keywords: Stoicism, stoic, philosophy