He denied the existence of the gods as direct actors in the world, and thought that the pleasure or pain of an action was the sole gauge of its goodness. His philosophy represents a turning away from the public world of the city state to the private world of the individual. Reason permeates all things. God, the soul of Zeus, fate, divine providence and divine law are all the same thing. The role of the wise man is to use his reason to figure out this divine reason and to determine the couse of action which is in accordance with divine reason.
Stoicism is thus a natural outcome of the Hellenistic experience.
The world is not divided up into little city states, but a cultural unity, and so is the universe. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism represent efforts for the individual to find a place in the new huge Hellenistic world. In the second and first centuries the Romans took over most of the Hellenistic world. The Hellenstic world saw the spread of Greek culture throughout the Near East. The Hellenistic world was interested in the individual's place in the broader world.