Write 5 pages with APA style on Gladiator. Two of the most dominant philosophies of the Greek and the early Roman periods concerning the meaning of happiness have been Epicureanism and Stoicism. Acade

Write 5 pages with APA style on Gladiator. Two of the most dominant philosophies of the Greek and the early Roman periods concerning the meaning of happiness have been Epicureanism and Stoicism. Academic philosophers, as well as common people, recognize the relevance of these two philosophies in giving a significant guideline toward how to lead a happy life. Epicureanism and Stoicism are the most popular schools of thought developed subsequent to Plato and Aristotle and their central outlook on life relating to happiness or well-being of human beings has been greatly individualistic and cosmopolitan. Both the Epicurean perspective and the Stoic perspective aimed at individual self-sufficiency notwithstanding the involvement of society.

According to these philosophical views, every individual needs to create a new form of social union unlike the city-state, and be trained to dwell in it. “Both the schools agreed on making individual happiness the aim of life. They differed in defining happiness and in the method by which it might be secured. The Epicureans advocated the temperate satisfaction of every desire, sensual and intellectual. the Stoics taught the suppression of the emotions and the subordination of immoral desires to demands of reason.”

(Jayapalan, 41) Therefore, both Epicureanism and Stoicism were concerned with the meaning of happiness in individual life and they sought to offer an explanation of how to secure happiness in life. The major similarity between the two perspectives is that both the schools of thought considered individual happiness as the aim of life. However, they differed in the definition as well as the methods of achieving happiness and well-being in individual life. In this paper, an insightful exploration of the conversation between Marcus Aurelius and Maximus in the film Gladiator from the Stoic perspective and the Epicurean perspective has been done in order to distinguish the basic concepts of the two moral philosophies to the problem of how to reform the moral condition of the Roman Empire.

In order to comprehend the general conception of happiness developed by each philosophy, it is fundamental to realize the history of the origin of both the philosophical schools and the basic ideas purported by them.