One of the four cardinal Stoic TERMπάθη. In the matrix of passions (good/evil × present/future), λύπη occupies the slot apparent evil in the present: the soul judges "what I am experiencing now is an evil for me" — and from this false assent arises an "irrational contraction" (ἄλογος συστολή) of the soul. Chrysippus' formula: λύπη ἐστιν ἄλογος συστολή ("an irrational contraction"). Λύπη is a pneumatic contraction inverse to the "expansion" of TERMἡδονή: one and the same soul-pneuma in one case "swells" at an apparent good, in the other "shrinks" at an apparent evil. Both errors are the consequence of false evaluative judgments of the ruling part.

Species of λύπη: ἔλεος (pity — distress at another's "undeserved" misfortune); φθόνος (envy — distress at another's "undeserved" good); ζῆλος (jealous envy); ἄχθος (heavy dejection); ἀνία (vexation); ἀγωνία (anxiety); ἀδημονία (anguished uncertainty). Each subspecies is a concrete assent to a concrete type of false evaluative impression.

Λύπη has a special status in the Stoic system: the other three cardinal passions all have eupatheia-correlates (the sage's rational analogues: ἐπιθυμία → βούλησις, ἡδονή → χαρά, φόβος → εὐλάβεια). Λύπη has no such correlate. The Stoic explanation: the sage never judges anything to be a present evil, because the only genuine evil is vice, and vice is up to me — it does not "happen to me" but is done by me. Hence there can be no rational "proper grief": the sage is never sad.

SVF III 391–442; III 463 (the doctrine of the missing eupatheia-correlate); DL VII 111; Stob. Ecl. II 90 W; Cic. Tusc. III (the whole — an anatomy of λύπη), especially III 22–27, 76–80; LS 65. In Marcus: Med. 2.10; 06-18; 7.22; 09-40 (pray not for the thing's absence but not to λυπεῖσθαι over it); 9.42; 11.18.

In 02-10 λύπη is the state under whose sway the agent acts in offences born of anger: «μετά τινος λύπης καὶ λεληθυίας συστολῆς» — "with a certain pain and a hidden contraction." A telling detail: Marcus uses precisely the word συστολή (contraction), which is the standard Stoic definition of λύπη in Chrysippus. So Marcus is not merely describing anger here — he is classifying it in the vocabulary of Stoic pneumatics: anger operates through the λύπη-mechanism (contraction), because the angry person is suffering a past or anticipated injury. This is a typically Marcan move: an everyday phrase in which the technical idiom of the school is recognisable. See TERMhedone — its opposite and paired passion.