Anarko on Nostr: 🌊 SURF 'N TURF 🏝️ -THE ISLAND LIFE- You can’t be a student of the Stoics ...

🌊 SURF 'N TURF 🏝️
-THE ISLAND LIFE-

You can’t be a student of the Stoics without reading the Stoics. Beyond the quotes, beyond even the obvious well-known Stoic texts you have to really read the Stoics.

The Penguin Classics translation of Seneca’s Letters of a Stoic is great, but you’re missing out if you stop there—he has hundreds more letters that have been published than what’s in the Penguin book. He wrote many essays, including four that we have on the topic of grief, alone.

There are so many great collections of his writings: On The Shortness of Life. How To Die. How To Keep Your Cool. Hardship & Happiness. (All these titles available at Painted Porch, by the way.) And that’s not even getting into the fact that Seneca was the most famous playwright of his day and that many of these survive to us as well.

Epictetus is more than just the Enchiridion, you know. The Enchiridion is a handbook, a kind of greatest hits collected by his student Arrian. A fuller sense of the slave turned philosopher is available in what’s known as Discourses (you can get both books in this Penguin edition). But did you know that some of the speeches of Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, also survive? They’re collected in a small but wonderful book called That One Should Disdain Hardships, translated by Cora E. Lutz.

And what of Marcus Aurelius? We’ve talked before about the importance of reading multiple translations. Gregory Hays is our favorite (leather edition here) but there are other great editions, like Robin Waterfield’s annotated Meditations that will give every student of the Stoics a fuller understanding. There is also a collection of letters that Marcus Aurelius wrote to his beloved teacher Fronto, which you can read some 1,900 years after they were written.

Seneca himself said we had to linger over the works of the master thinkers. Marcus Aurelius said he learned from another one of his teachers to never be satisfied just getting the gist of things. He meant that we have to read deeply, not just stay at the surface or with the popular texts. This is great advice not just for the study of Stoicism but for all things. It’s a torch General James Mattis (a fellow Stoic and author of a great book called Call Sign Chaos) picked up when he said that someone who hasn’t read deeply and extensively on a subject can be said to be functionally illiterate.

Don’t be that.

Be well-versed.

Be well studied.

Read these books.

Pura Vida 🏝️

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