Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in everyday life. He is a sought-after speaker, strategist, and the author of many bestselling books including The Obstacle Is the Way; Ego Is the Enemy; The Daily Stoic; and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key. His books have been translated into over 30 languages and read by over two million people worldwide. He lives outside Austin, Texas, with his family.

Stephen Hanselman has worked for more than three decades in publishing as a bookseller, publisher and literary agent. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he received a master's degree while also studying extensively in Harvard's philosophy department. He lives with his family in South Orange, New Jersey.

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* We can imagine he did not approve of Zeno’s trick on Aristo.

* This is the idea Carneades used to insult the Romans with.

* Just as Zeno’s incident with the lentils is loaded with class implications, so too is Cicero’s association with the “lowly” chickpea.

* It is interesting that the most cited writer in Seneca’s works is Epicurus. Seneca said we ought to read like a spy in the enemy’s camp, always looking to learn from our intellectual and philosophical opponents.

* Seneca also took the time to write a vulgar satirical send-off to Claudius entitled Apocolocyntosis, or “the Pumpkinification,” which was a final middle finger to the man who had taken so many years of his life in Corsica.

* Seneca’s brother Novatus, under his adoptive name, Gallio, makes an appearance in the New Testament (Acts 18:12–17).

* In the Middle Ages, it was thought that Seneca the tragedian was an entirely separate figure from Seneca the philosopher. James Romm marvels at Seneca’s range: “It is as though Emerson had taken time off from writing his essays to compose the opera Faust.” This is incomplete. It’s as if Emerson founded Transcendentalism, wrote Faust, and served as Lincoln’s vice president.

* In 2018, James Romm would translate a selection of Seneca’s writings entitled How to Die. It is 256 pages.

* Arulenus Rusticus lived to see six more emperors, until Domitian put him to death in 93 AD for a book praising Thrasea’s courage and example. His grandson, Junius Rusticus, would attend the lectures of Epictetus and become the philosophy teacher of Marcus Aurelius.

* It should be said that Byrd could have used a lesson in the Stoic virtue of justice and fairness earlier in life, for in the early 1940s he joined the Ku Klux Klan. Though maybe he did later get the message, repeatedly apologizing for this sin and actively supporting the efforts of the NAACP.

* His grandson, Sextus, would be a philosophy teacher of Marcus Aurelius.

* The Stoics were very early on equality between the sexes. Three centuries earlier, Cleanthes had written a book titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman.

* Modern Greece actually kept leftist political agitators in Gyara from 1948 to 1974. For all the passage of time, people don’t change that much.

* Given the dates of his exile, this is mostly likely Aristobulus of Chalcis, husband of Salome.

* The dye Zeno’s family traded in was made by slaves in backbreaking conditions. Seneca owned slaves, and so did Marcus Aurelius. Though to be fair, Epictetus himself, at least from his writings, was fine to openly discuss slavery and never questioned its fairness or morality.

* Thomas Jefferson would later incorporate Epictetus’s rule into the “Canon of Conduct” he wrote for his son, saying, “Take things always by their smooth handle.”

* Almost unbelievably, Justin’s bones would be discovered in a church safe in Baltimore in the 1960s, and finally buried in the 1980s.

* Gregory Hays, one of Marcus Aurelius’s best translators, writes, “If he had to be identified with a particular school, [Stoicism] is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would not have been ‘Stoicism’ but simply ‘philosophy.’”

* Lucius was the son of an earlier chosen heir of Hadrian who had died before he could succeed the emperor.

* For those times when he did fall short, Marcus had this advice: “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep on going back to it.”