Description
Nearly 2,300 years after a ruined merchant named Zeno first established a school on the Stoa Poikile of Athens, Stoicism has found a new audience among those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. The philosophy's embrace of self-mastery, virtue, and indifference to what we cannot control is as urgent today as it was in the chaos of the Roman Empire. In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. Organized in digestible mini-biographies of both well-known and lesser-known Stoics, this book vividly shows what Stoicism was like for the people who loved and lived it, dusting off powerful lessons from their struggles and successes. More than a history, every example in these pages, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius — slaves to emperors — is designed to help the reader apply philosophy in their own life. Holiday and Hanselman unveil the core values and ideas that unite figures from Seneca to Cato to Cicero across the centuries. Among them are the ideas that self-rule is the greatest empire, that character is fate, and that Stoics benefit from preparing not only for success but also for failure, learning to love, not merely accept, the hand they are dealt. A treasury of insights and stories, this book can be visited again and again by readers in search of inspiration from the past.
From the bestselling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience, and virtue.