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

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

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Highlights & Notes

It was Seneca, a Stoic philosopher of the Roman era, far removed from the academy, who would say quite bluntly that there was no other purpose to reading and study if not to live a happy life.

the Stoics were most concerned with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said.

Its four virtues are simple and straightforward: Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

Cicero once said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. So the Stoics instruct us wisely not only in how to live, but in how to face the scariest part of life: the end. They teach us, by example, the art of going out well.

The word “stoic” in English means the unemotional endurance of pain.

What the Stoics were after, what we remain interested in to this day, were lights to illuminate the path in life. They wanted to know, as we want to know, how to find tranquility, purpose, self-control, and happiness.

If philosophy is anything, it’s an answer to that question—how to live. It’s what we have been looking for. “Would you really know what philosophy offers to humanity?” Seneca asks in his Moral Letters. “Philosophy offers counsel.”

Because isn’t that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us?

“You must,” Zeno would have heard the character Virtue say, “accustom your body to be the servant of your mind, and train it with toil and sweat.”

Just because someone has anxieties or self-doubts or was taught the wrong things early in life doesn’t mean they can’t become something great, provided they have the courage (and the mentors) to help them change.

He was also the first to express the four virtues of Stoicism: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.

“Well-being is realized by small steps,” he would say, looking back, “but is truly no small thing.”

Philosophy, like life, requires work.

To Cleanthes, labor and philosophy were not rivals. They were two sides of the same coin, pursuits that furthered and enabled each other.

Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble. And possibly even more admirable if you deliberately forgo status in the pursuit of what you really love.

The genius brings new light and work into the world. The genius is the prophet. The creator. The apostle comes next—a mere man (or woman) who communicates and spreads this message.

Zeno, the prophet. Cleanthes, the apostle of Stoicism.

It is clear that Cleanthes abhorred debt and luxury, preferring the freedom of a humble life to the slavery of extravagance.

To Cleanthes, suffering—if in pursuit of virtue—was a good and not an evil.

I praise Cleanthes, but praise Hades more, Who could not bear to see him grown so old. So gave him rest among the dead, Who’d drawn such a load of water while alive.

that virtue was the path to happiness and from virtue came a better flow of life.

Being remembered by history does very little for you after you’re dead … but it’s hard to be indifferent about your legacy.

All that remains, Aristo would have said, is how we lived our lives, how close we came to virtue in the moments that mattered.

But running, particularly endurance running, with its length predetermined and competitors separated by lanes, is as much a battle of one’s mind and body against themselves as it is a competition against anyone or anything else.

“Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,” Chrysippus would later say, “but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is not wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.”

As with Zeno, the loss of a fortune became a piece of good fortune, because it drove Chrysippus to philosophy.

Let no one think that ideas that change the world do so on their own. They must, as a wise scientist would later say, be shoved down people’s throats. Or at least defended and fought for.

There is sometimes no better way to strengthen your defense than to learn your opponent’s offense, and this is precisely what a good philosopher does.

It’s a timeless but unsung role in the history of countless philosophies, businesses, and even countries: The founding generations have the courage and the brilliance to create something new. It is left to the generations that follow—usually younger, better prepared, and far more pragmatic—to clean up the messes and excesses and contradictions that those founders created in the process.

There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.

The smarter we are, the easier it is to fall in love with our own voice, and our own thoughts. The cost of this is not just pride, but the quality of our message.

If only the jostling rivalries of the early Stoics could have reflected this idea a little better. If they could have realized that there was no “winning” since they were already on the same team, since they already agreed on the big things, imagine how much trouble they would have spared themselves. What a better example they would have set for us today.

It’s a reminder all these years later for everyone considering their legacy. It’s not what you say that lives on after your time; it’s not what you write or even what you build. It’s the example that you set. It’s the things that you live by.

“The seller should declare any defects in his wares, in so far as such a course is prescribed by the common law of the land; but for the rest, since he has goods to sell, he may try to sell them to the best possible advantage, provided he is guilty of no misrepresentation.”

Money made life easier. Virtue, on the other hand, was the work of our life.

This is what the pursuit of virtue is in real life. We study. We train until things become second nature. The moment arrives. We commit. We hold up what’s right as our target. We take action. But much happens after that—much of it not remotely up to us. Which is why we know that our true worth doesn’t reside in whether or not we get a bull’s-eye. In the real world, we miss. Sometimes by a lot. But we have to keep trying. The more we work on it the better we get. The more shots we take, the more times we’ll hit the target and the more good we’ll do.

What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee and vice versa, Marcus Aurelius would later say. It was an insight he drew straight from the life and work of Antipater.

just as we shouldn’t commit violence against one another, we shouldn’t commit injustice against one another, and that we should treat others’ interests as not alien from our own.

His formula for virtue was “in choosing continually and unswervingly the things which are according to nature, and rejecting those contrary to nature.” It was about making sure that our self-interest didn’t override the inner compass each of us is born with.

Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. This is the Stoic way.

Panaetius argues that if we are to live an ethical life and choose appropriate actions, we must find a way to balance: the roles and duties common to us all as human beings; the roles and duties unique to our individual daimon, or personal genius/calling; the roles and duties assigned to us by the chance of our social station (family and profession); the roles and duties that arise from decisions and commitments we have made.

Everyone can have a life of meaning and purpose. Everyone can do what they do like a good Stoic.

Humanity is given these instincts toward virtue by nature, and we can thrive and live nobly if we learn to live consistently with our own nature and our duties, while making the most of the resources we have been given.

All things end. Philosophy is there to remind us of that fact and to prepare us for the blows of life.

As he no doubt learned from his teacher, Panaetius, like the pankratist, you must be prepared at all times for the unexpected blows of life—if not to block them, at least to absorb and endure them without whining.

Still, who would you rather be? Because there is a cost to cheating, to stealing, to doing the wrong thing—even if society rewards it. Would you rather go out like Rutilius with your head high or live in denial of your own undeniable shame?

You can lay violent hands on me, Zeno had said, but my mind will remain committed to philosophy.

It’s a timeless question: If you actually knew what “success” and “power” looked like—what it did to the people who got it—would you still want it?

“Best,” to the Stoics, did not meaning winning battles. Superior did not mean accumulating the most honors. It meant, as it still does today, virtue. It meant excellence not in accomplishing external things—though that was always nice if fate allowed—but excellence in the areas that you controlled: Your thoughts. Your actions. Your choices.

We have competing parts within us, and what matters in life is which side we choose to turn ourselves over to. One must design one’s life,

that the good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil we do lives on and on.

This is the mistake we make. We fight fire with fire and end up burning ourselves. Nobody remembers who started it and our scars stay forever, if we even manage to survive the conflagration. When we are angry, it’s almost always better to wait and do nothing. And as far as our enemies go, if possible, we ought to let them destroy themselves.

That is the critical question of nearly everything Cicero did, as it is for so many talented, ambitious people: Were the motivations sincere? Or was it all part of some plan? Are they training or résumé building?

Cato believed in courage. Cicero believed in not getting killed.

They are words well written, as was nearly everything Cicero produced. What was missing, it seems, is any personal absorption of them.

Would that he had been able to endure prosperity with more self-control, and adversity with more fortitude… . He invited enmity with greater spirit than he fought it.

Most strong-willed leaders have a temper. It’s the truly great ones who manage to conquer it with the same courage and control with which they deal with all of life’s obstacles.

We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought—without even the benefit of getting paid for it.

Reputation didn’t matter. Doing right did.

The results of doing well, though, “will not disappear as long as you live,” he said. And conversely, even though taking a shortcut or doing something bad may bring a few seconds of relief, “the pleasure will quickly disappear, but the wicked thing will stay with you forever.”

better friend, no worse enemy.

A Stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.

We must do what needs to be done. We must not waver. We cannot be afraid.

More, she had proved that courage—and philosophy—don’t know gender. They know only the people who are willing to put in what it takes and those who aren’t.

At the core of Stoicism is the acceptance of what we cannot change.

“Live among men as if God were watching, and speak with God as if men were listening.”

A lifetime of training prepares us for the moment of our final act.

The Stoics would have never argued that life was fair or that losing someone didn’t hurt. But they believed that to despair, to tear ourselves apart in bereavement, was not only an affront to the memory of the person we loved, but a betrayal of the living who still needed us.

Wisdom is the knowledge of what things must be done and what must not be done and what is neither, or appropriate acts (kathekonta). Within wisdom, we’ll find virtuous qualities like soundness of judgment, circumspection, shrewdness, sensibleness, soundness of aim, and ingenuity. Self-control is the knowledge of what things are worth choosing and what are worth avoiding and what is neither. Contained within this virtue are things like orderliness, propriety, modesty, and self-mastery. Justice is the knowledge of apportioning each person and situation what is due. Under this banner Stoics placed piety (giving gods their due), kindness, good fellowship, and fair dealing. Bravery is the knowledge of what is terrible and what isn’t and what is neither. This included perseverance, intrepidness, greatheartedness, stoutheartedness, and, one of Arius’s most favored virtuous qualities—one he illustrated well in his own life—philoponia, or industriousness.

Our personalities suit us differently to different paths of ethical development. We all have different launching points, but these inborn tools together with hard effort will get us to where we want to go.

We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise.

He believed that only character decided difficult matters, and did so clearly and cleanly. No calculating, no consideration was necessary. The right thing was obvious.

This part of Seneca, his earnest commitment to self-improvement—firm but kind (“See that you don’t do that again,” he would say to himself, “but now I forgive you”)—was beloved by his teachers and clearly encouraged.

Life takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. As Seneca would later write, we should never underestimate fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. Just because we have worked hard, just because we are showing promise and our path toward success is clear has no bearing on whether we will get what we want.

“Believe me, it’s better to produce the balance-sheet of your own life than that of the grain market.”

Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future. “This is our big mistake,” Seneca wrote, “to think we look forward toward death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.” That was what he realized, that we are dying every day and no day, once dead, can be revived.

If the breaking day sees someone proud, The ending day sees them brought low. No one should put too much trust in triumph, No one should give up hope of trials improving. Clotho mixes one with the other and stops Fortune from resting, spinning every fate around. No one has had so much divine favor That they could guarantee themselves tomorrow. God keeps our lives hurtling on, Spinning in a whirlwind.

Fate had caused him to be born to wealth and had given him great tutors. It had also weakened his health and sent him unfairly packing twice, just as his career was taking off. Fortune had behaved, all through his life, exactly as she pleased. For him, as for us, she brought success and failure, pain and pleasure … usually in exactly the form he was not expecting.

You control what you do and say, not whether people listen.

“It is, first, to have what is necessary, and second, to have what is enough.”

“the greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself.”

But this is what Stoicism trains us for: to be able to focus in even the most distracting of situations, to be able to tune out anything and everything—even creeping death—so that we lock in on what matters.

“He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears.”

A Stoic must learn when to walk away when the cause is hopeless.

Such is life: Sometimes our enemies, by nature of their fears and their designs, pay us the ultimate compliment.

You do your job, I’ll do mine, the Stoic says. You be evil, I’ll be good. Let everything else come what may.

We can train ourselves to be satisfied with the difficulties fortune has chosen to give us.

And he was a serious proponent of the “manly” life that exile necessitated. When he was in Rome, even at the height of his powers, Musonius sought out cold, heat, thirst, hunger, and hard beds. He familiarized himself with the uncomfortable feelings these conditions brought about and taught himself to be patient, even happy, while experiencing them. By this training, he said, “the body is strengthened and becomes capable of enduring hardship, sturdy and ready for any task.” Exile did come, and he was ready body and soul. Good times returned as well, and for this he was ready too.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears … and sometimes the perfect student is exactly what’s needed to bring out the best in a teacher.

A remaining fragment from Musonius captures why he would have pursued such a case. “If one accomplishes some good though with toil, the toil passes, but the good remains,” he said. “If one does something dishonorable with pleasure, the pleasure passes, but the dishonor remains.” We must do the right thing, no matter how difficult, Musonius was saying. A Stoic must avoid doing the wrong thing, even if the reward for it is great.

“What indictment can we make against tyrants when we ourselves are much worse than they? For we have the same impulses as theirs but not the same opportunity to indulge them.”

“Philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper and by deeds put it into practice.”

“Lameness is an impediment to the leg,” he would later say, “but not to the will.”

The Stoics believed we decided how we would react to what happened to us. Epictetus, as we each hold the power to do, chose to see his disability as only a physical impairment, and in fact it was that idea of choice, we shall see, that defined the core of his philosophical beliefs. To Epictetus, no human was the full author of what happened in life. Instead, he said, it was as if we were in a play, and if it was the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.” And so he did.

As a writer, Seneca may well have been the person who introduced Epictetus to Stoicism, but by his example he clearly influenced Epictetus even more: Freedom is more than a legal status. It’s a state of mind, a way of living.

“It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind,” he would say, “than to live anxiously amidst abundance.”

“The philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital,” he would later say to his own students. “You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.”

“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious,” Epictetus said, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way. Which of these forms of slavery is more shameful? Which of these can we stop right now?

It was, he said, simply “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” Or, in his language, what is up to us and what is not up to us (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin).

Epictetus believed that as powerless as humans were over their external conditions, they always retained the ability to choose how they responded. “You can bind up my leg,” he would say—indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken—“but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.”

“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

Persist and resist. The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.

actor. The ability to accept life on life’s terms, the need to not need things to be different, this was power to Epictetus. “Remember,” he said, “that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another… . Where our heart is set, there our impediment lies.”

How rare but glorious the man or woman who manages to do so. How much better are the lives of those who try to rise above than those of the masses, who complain and whine, who sink to the level of their basest instincts. “From now on, then,” Epictetus said, “resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”

You can only lose what you have. You don’t control your possessions, so don’t ascribe more value to them than they deserve. And whenever we forget this, life finds a way to painfully call it back to our attention.

Progress is wonderful. Self-improvement is a worthy endeavor. But it should be done for its own sake—not for congratulations or recognition.

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

Forget everything but action. Don’t talk about it, be about it. “Don’t explain your philosophy,” Epictetus said, “embody it.”

You owe it to yourself and to the world to actively engage with the brief moment you have on this planet. You cannot retreat exclusively into ideas. You must contribute.

In any case, it would be a personal copy of Epictetus’s sayings that made its way from Junius’s library directly into the hands of a young Marcus Aurelius and changed the course of a man’s life. A book given. A book read. Such a simple exchange, but done between the right two people at the right time—as it was here—can be enough to change the world.

Rusticus had managed to do the thing that so few teachers manage, even with lowly pupils: He reached Marcus Aurelius.

Why did Marcus remain good while so many other rulers have broken bad? His relationship and deference to a wise, older man like Rusticus explains a lot of it.

But these external things don’t deter a Stoic. Marcus believed that plagues and war could only threaten our life. What we need to protect is our character—how we act within these wars and plagues and life’s other setbacks. And to abandon character? That’s real evil.

His dictum in life and in leadership was simple and straightforward: “Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” No better expression or embodiment of Stoicism is found in his line (and his living of that line) than: “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.”

It was not all emotions he worked on domesticating, but the harmful ones, the ones that would make him betray what he believed. “Start praying like this and you’ll see,” he wrote to himself. “Not ‘some way to sleep with her’—but a way to stop wanting to. Not ‘some way to get rid of him’—but a way to stop trying. Not ‘some way to save my child’—but a way to lose your fear.”

“Recognize that if it’s humanly possible,” he said both to us and to himself, “you can do it too.”

“Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand,” Epictetus had said. “Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”

Meditations is not a book for the reader, it was a book for the author. Yet this is what makes it such an impressive piece of writing, one of the great literary feats of all time. Somehow in writing exclusively to and for himself, Marcus Aurelius managed to produce a book that has not only survived through the centuries, but is still teaching and helping people today.

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind.

You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible—and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom. But what if some other area of my action is thwarted? Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately take its place, one that better fits the life you are building.

“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”

He didn’t need to travel to relax. “For nowhere can you find a more peaceful and less busy retreat than in your own soul,” he wrote. “Treat yourself often to this retreat and be renewed.”

—It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.

His writings reflect this insight, time and time again. “Think of yourself as dead,” he writes. “You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” On another page he says, “You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.

We all die, we don’t control that, but we do influence how we face that death, the courage and poise and compassion we bring to it.

Finally, on March 17, 180, at age fifty-eight, he turned to his guard and said, “Go to the rising sun; I am already setting.” Then he covered his head to go to sleep and never woke up. Rome—and us, her descendants—would never see such greatness again.

“There is no role so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now,” Marcus Aurelius would write. He probably meant the role of emperor, but the meaning can easily be extended: The role of parent. The role of spouse. The role of a person waiting in line. The role of a person who has just been given bad news. The role of a person who is rich. The role of a person sent into exile or delivered into bankruptcy. The role of a person who finds themselves enslaved, literally or otherwise.

Most of all, the Stoics taught us by the fact that they tried. What matters is what we can learn from their successes and their failures in this lifelong pursuit. “Show me someone sick and happy,” Epictetus said, “in danger and happy, dying and happy, exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show me! By God, how much I’d like to see a Stoic. But since you can’t show me someone that perfectly formed, at least show me someone actively forming themselves so, inclined in this way… . Show me!”

As was true in the ancient world, there are also countless other Stoics with less glamorous occupations, who nevertheless experience trials and tribulations that they endure thanks to the wisdom these philosophers helped discover. They are parents. They are citizens. They are teachers. They are mortals with the same desires and fears, hopes and dreams as everyone who has ever lived. Like you, like Seneca, like Epictetus, like Posidonius, they are trying to do the best they can. They are trying to be the best version of themselves they can be. They are reading and practicing, trying and failing, getting back up and trying again. As we all must do.

Every one of us dies, the Stoics said, but too few of us actually live. Too many of us die before our time, living—unthinkingly—the kind of life that Seneca described as hardly being different than death.

As Epictetus wrote, “Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible to be a person stretching to avoid error.” That’s what Stoicism is. It’s stretching. Training. To be better. To get better. To avoid one more mistake, to take one step closer toward that ideal. Not perfection, but progress—that’s what each of these lives was about. The only question that remains for us, the living heirs to this tradition: Are we doing that work?

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