Lessons in Stoicism

Why the Stoic on the Internet Isn't What He Looks Like

A man walks into a school in a small Greek town and asks the teacher what to do about his angry brother. The teacher, a former slave named Epictetus, gives him an answer he didn't ask for. Nothing. You can do nothing about your brother. The problem, Epictetus tells him, isn't your brother at all. The problem is the man standing here in the doorway, asking the wrong question.

This is what real Stoicism looks like, and it isn't what most people think. The "stoic" with a lowercase s is the man who frowns into the middle distance, swallows his feelings, and tells you to suck it up. He's all over the self-help sections of bookstores and all over social media, posing in sunglasses next to misquoted Marcus Aurelius. He is not what Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus actually taught. John Sellars wrote this short book — under a hundred pages — to clear the air.

The three Romans at the heart of it never met each other in the flesh. Seneca, born in Spain, was tutor and then adviser to the emperor Nero. Epictetus, born a slave in what is now Turkey, eventually ran a school in the Greek backwater of Nicopolis. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 to 180. They lived across a hundred-year stretch and never crossed paths. What they shared was a philosophy founded three centuries earlier in Athens by Zeno of Cyprus, taught from a colonnade called the Painted Stoa — which is where the word Stoic comes from.

The earlier Stoics — Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus — wrote piles of books and we have almost none of them. The texts didn't make the jump from papyrus to parchment when the technology changed, so we know them through fragments and quotations preserved by later writers. What survives whole is the three Romans: Seneca's essays and letters, Epictetus's lectures transcribed by his pupil Arrian, and Marcus's private notebook, the Meditations, which was never meant for anyone else to read.