This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Stoic sources treat courage as a considerably wider virtue than steadiness under physical attack. Diogenes Laertius's summary of Stoic ethics lists species of andreia beyond battlefield bravery: endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, stoutness of heart, and love of work, each naming a different way correct judgment holds firm against a different kind of pressure, not only the fear of injury or death but the discomfort of sustained effort and the temptation to give up. A Stoic reading of courage therefore covers the willingness to keep working at something difficult as much as it covers standing one's ground in danger.
The claim that only the wise person is truly courageous follows from how the Stoics defined the passion andreia corrects. Phobos, fear, is an irrational judgment that some future circumstance outside a person's own control and character is a genuine evil. Since Stoic doctrine held that nothing outside a person's own choice, their prohairesis, is genuinely good or bad, a fully wise person literally has nothing left to fear in the strict sense: injury, poverty and death are all classed as indifferent, so no correctly reasoned judgment could count them as evils worth being disturbed by. Ordinary boldness in the face of real risk, on this view, is not yet the virtue: a reckless person and a Stoic sage might act identically in a dangerous situation, but only the sage's action rests on a judgment the Stoics considered actually true.
Later Roman Stoicism, particularly Seneca and Epictetus, brought andreia down from this austere ideal to something closer to a working discipline: Epictetus's Enchiridion repeatedly frames the philosophical life itself as an act of courage, the willingness to see one's own judgments clearly and to stop blaming external events for one's own distress. This popularizing shift, from a virtue only the sage possesses in full to a discipline any student of Stoicism can practice imperfectly, is a large part of why Stoic courage survived into later Western ethical vocabulary at all.