Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday - Summary & Quotes

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Three Takeaways

Note: The following are excerpts from Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius by Ryan Holiday.

1. Zeno the Prophet

The story of Stoicism begins, fittingly, in misfortune. On a fateful day late in the fourth century BC, the Phoenician merchant Zeno set sail on the Mediterranean with a cargo full of Tyrian purple dye. Prized by the wealthy and by royalty who dressed themselves in clothes colored with it, the rare dye was painstakingly extracted by slaves from the blood of sea snails and dried in the sun until it was, as one ancient historian said, “worth its weight in silver.” Zeno’s family trade was in one of the most valuable goods in the ancient world, and as it is for many entrepreneurs, their business was on the line every day. No one knows what caused the wreck. Was it a storm? Pirates? Human error? Does it matter? Zeno lost everything—ship and cargo—in a time before insurance and venture capital. It was an irreplaceable fortune. Yet the unlucky merchant would later rejoice in his loss, claiming, “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck.” For it was the shipwreck that sent Zeno to Athens, on the path to creating what would become Stoic philosophy.”

One day, Zeno found himself taking a break from the fray of business, browsing titles in a bookshop, looking for something to read, when he learned that a talk had been scheduled for that day. Taking his seat, he listened to the bookseller read a medley of works about Socrates, the philosopher who had been put to death in Athens a century before and whose ideas Zeno’s father had introduced him to as a boy.

On one of his voyages before his shipwreck, perhaps inspired by a similar trek that Socrates had made, Zeno consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life. The oracle’s response: “To live the best life you should have conversation with the dead.” It must have struck him there in that bookstore, possibly the same one his father had shopped in years before, as he listened to the words of Socrates read aloud and brought to life, that he was doing precisely what the oracle had advised. Because isn’t that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us?

As the bookseller read from the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Zeno was hearing Socrates’s teachings as they had been conducted in those very streets just a few generations before. The passage that struck him most was “The Choice of Heracles,” itself a story of a hero at a crossroads. In this myth, Heracles is forced to choose between two maidens, one representing virtue and the other vice—one a life of virtuous hard work, the other of laziness. “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.” And then he heard Vice offer a very different choice. “Wait a minute!” she cries. “Don’t you see what a long and hard road to the joy she describes? Come the easy way with me!”

Two roads diverge in the wood, or, rather, in a bookstore in Athens. The Stoic chooses the hard one. Approaching the bookseller, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: “Where can I find a man like that?” That is: Where can I find my own Socrates? Where can I find someone to study under, as Xenophon had under that wise philosopher? Who can help me with my choice? If Zeno’s misfortune had been to suffer that terrible shipwreck, his luck was more than made right for having walked into that bookshop, and made doubly good when in that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by. The bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed.

To Zeno, the purpose of philosophy, of virtue, was to find “a smooth flow of life,” to get to a place where everything we do is in “harmonious accord with each man’s guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe.” To the Greeks, each of us had a daimon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don’t are not.

Zeno would eventually move to what became known as the Stoa Poikilē, literally “painted porch.” Erected in the fifth century BC (the ruins are still visible some twenty-five hundred years later), the painted porch was where Zeno and his disciples gathered for discussion. While his followers were briefly called Zenonians, it is the final credit to Zeno’s humility and the universality of his teachings that the philosophical school he founded didn’t ultimately carry his name. Instead, we know it today as Stoicism, an homage to its unique origins.

Is it not also fitting that the ancient Stoics chose a porch as their namesake and their home? It was not a bell tower or a stage, nor a windowless lecture hall. It was an inviting, accessible structure, a place for contemplation, reflection, and, most of all, friendship and discussion.

2. Epictetus the Free Man

At some point, in his thirties, Epictetus was made free by fact and law as well as spirit. Now life presented him with new choices, the same choices each of us gets when we enter the world as adults: What would he do for a living? How would he spend his freedom? What would he do with his life? Epictetus chose to dedicate himself fully to philosophy. Unlike the other Stoics, who had been senators and generals, advisors and wealthy heirs—professions that were influenced by their philosophy—Epictetus was one of the first to choose what today we might call the academic route. It would be a life closer to Cleanthes’s or Zeno’s than Athenodorus’s or Cato’s.

Almost immediately, Epictetus gained a large following. His school and his standing were enough that by 93 AD, when Domitian banned philosophers from Rome, Epictetus was one who was driven to exile. In a way, it was fitting that he chose Greece—a city called Nicopolis—because this idea of returning to teaching philosophy was a return to the Greek Stoicism that Zeno and Cleanthes had helped pioneer. Epictetus’s life was no soft affair and he could expect no tenure, but in choosing to teach, he was explicitly turning away from the Stoicism of the imperial court. He would not be complicit in some deranged emperor’s plans. He would not suffer vainly to rein in their worst impulses. He would not be a cog in the enormous imperial hegemon. He would instead pursue truth where it could be found.

This hardly meant he was fleeing the responsibilities or the reality of the world—he just had no interest in political machinations or acquiring wealth. It was wisdom he was after: how to get it, how to apply it, how to pass it on to others. “If we philosophers,” he said, “apply ourselves to our own work as zealously as the old men at Rome have applied themselves to the matters on which they have set their hearts, perhaps we too could accomplish something. Epictetus’s most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experiences as a slave. Although all humans are introduced at some point to the laws of the universe, almost from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person. As he came to study and understand Stoicism, he adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life.” 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).

Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this stark categorization, what remains—what was so central to Epictetus’s survival as a slave—is to focus on what is up to us. Our attitudes. Our emotions. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what has happened to us. 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.” “Every situation has two handles,” Epictetus taught. One of these handles was weak and one of them was strong. No matter our condition, no matter how undesirable the situation, we retain the ability to choose which one we will grab. Are we going to choose to see that our brother is a selfish jerk? Or are we going to remember that we share the same mother, that he’s not this way on purpose, that we love him, that we have our own bad impulses too? This decision—which handle we grab, day in and day out, with anyone and everyone we deal with—determines what kind of life we have. And what kind of person we will be While it should not surprise us that in times as tough and cruel as Rome in the first century AD, students would flock to hear the insights of a man who had triumphed over so much adversity, it is interesting how affluent and powerful Epictetus’s audiences became, even as he taught more than five hundred miles from Rome. From all over the empire, parents sent their children to be schooled about life by a man who in the hustle and bustle of the court they would have dismissed as a mere slave. Even the powerful themselves came to sit at his feet. At some point a young Hadrian, the future emperor, passed through Nicopolis and met Epictetus. How many lectures he sat in on, what kind of questions he asked, we do not know, but the historical record shows us that he admired this Stoic, and when he became all-powerful, he tacitly endorsed him (the Historia Augusta tells us that Hadrian was known for dismissing unfit philosophers from the profession entirely). Soon enough, Epictetus’s lectures would make their way to a young Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian’s adopted grandson and future king.

Epictetus’s focus on powerlessness was not only an insight about the power structures of his time. He was looking at what makes us fundamentally human. So much is out of our hands. And yet so much remains within our grasp, provided that we decline to relinquish it. If a person wants to be happy, wants to feel fairly treated, wants to be rich, according to Epictetus, they don’t need life to be easy, people to be nice, and money to flow freely. They need to look at the world right. “It’s not things that upset us,” he would say, “it’s our judgment about things.” Our opinions determine the reality we experience. Epictetus didn’t believe it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed,” he said. “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”

It’s a message that everyone ought to learn as a kid . . . or before they become king. And what of the situations that are outside our control? How is one supposed to deal with that? Exactly as Epictetus did while he was a slave—with endurance and equanimity. It is from Aulus Gellius that one of Epictetus’s most famous sayings is preserved: [Epictetus] used to say that there were two faults which were by far the worst and most disgusting of all, lack of endurance and lack of self-restraint, when we cannot put up with or bear the wrongs which we ought to endure, or cannot restrain ourselves from actions or pleasures from which we ought to refrain. “Therefore,” he said, “if anyone would take these two words to heart and use them for his own guidance and regulation, he will be almost without sin and will lead a very peaceful life. These two words,” he said, “are ἀνέχου (persist) and ἀπέχου (resist).” Persist and resist. The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.”

3. Marcus Aurelius the Philosopher King

Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were, to borrow Epictetus’s metaphor, assigned difficult roles by the author of the universe. What defined them was how they managed to play these roles, which neither of them, Marcus especially, would ever have chosen. Consider the first action that Marcus Aurelius took in 161 AD when his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, died. When Octavian had become emperor, Arius Didymus, his Stoic advisor, had suggested that he get rid of young Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. “It’s not good to have too many Caesars,” the Stoic had told his boss, joking as he suggested murder. Nero had eliminated so many rivals that Seneca had to remind him that no king had it in his power to get rid of every successor. Marcus Aurelius found himself in an even more complex situation. He had an adoptive brother, Lucius Verus, who had even closer ties to Hadrian’s legacy. What ought he do? What would you do? Marcus Aurelius cut this Gordian knot with effortlessness and grace: He named his adoptive brother co-emperor.

The first thing Marcus Aurelius did with absolute power was voluntarily share half of it. This alone would make him worthy of the kind of awe that King George III felt upon hearing that George Washington would return to private life—“If he does that, sir, he will be the greatest man in the world”—but it was just one of several such gestures that defined Marcus Aurelius’s reign. When the Antonine Plague hit Rome, and the streets were littered with bodies and danger hung in the air, no one would have faulted him for fleeing the city. In fact, it might have been the more prudent course of action. Instead, Marcus stayed, braving it like the British royal family during the Blitz, never showing fear, reassuring the people by his very presence that he did not value his safety more than the responsibilities of his office.

Later, when due to the ravages of the plague and those endless wars, Rome’s treasury was exhausted, and Marcus Aurelius was once again faced with a choice of doing things the easy way or the hard way. He could have levied high taxes, he could have looted the provinces, he could have kicked the can down the road, running up bills his successors would have to deal with. Instead, Dio Cassius tells us, Marcus “took all the imperial ornaments to the Forum and sold them for gold. When the barbarian uprising had been put down, he returned the purchase price to those who voluntarily brought back the imperial possessions, but used no compulsion in the case of those who were unwilling to do so.” Even though as emperor he technically had unfettered control over Rome’s budget, he never acted as such. “As for us,” he once said to the Senate about his family, “we are so far from possessing anything of our own that even the house in which we live is yours.” Finally, toward the end of his life, when Avidius Cassius, his most trusted general, turned on him, attempting a coup, Marcus Aurelius was faced with another test of all the things he believed when it came to honor, honesty, compassion, generosity, and dignity. He had every right to be angry. Incredibly, Marcus decided the attempted coup was an opportunity. They could, he said to his soldiers, go out and “settle this affair well and show to all mankind there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.” It was a chance “to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.” An assassin would soon enough take down Avidius, hoping almost certainly to impress himself to Marcus, and in the process revealing just how different a plane Marcus Aurelius was operating on. As Dio Cassius writes, Marcus “was so greatly grieved at the death of Cassius that he could not bring himself even to look at the severed head of his enemy, but before the murderers drew near gave orders that it should be buried.” He proceeded to treat each of Avidius’s collaborators with leniency, including several senators who had actively endorsed this attempted coup. “I implore you, the senate, to keep my reign unstained by the blood of any senator,” Marcus later appealed to those who wanted vengeance on his behalf. “May it never happen.”

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.” Yet there is, in studying Marcus’s life, an impression that he was somehow different, made of special stock that made his many difficult decisions easier. The common perception of Stoicism only compounds this—that somehow the Stoics were beyond pain, beyond material desire, beyond bodily desires. But Marcus would not have accepted this explanation, for it sells short the training and the struggle he experienced as he worked to get better. “Alone of the emperors,” the historian Herodian would write of Marcus Aurelius, “he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.”

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Learn more about Lives Of The Stoics on Amazon.

Buy Lives of the Stoics: Print | Kindle | Audiobook

If you enjoyed this summary, please consider buying me a coffee to caffeinate my reading sessions.