Writers and publishers are savvy about readers’ needs. There is a market for self-help books, and now, more charmingly, for books on Stoicism. Hundreds of books on Stoicism have been published in recent years:  David Fideler’s Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living, Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Live Like a Stoic:  A Handbook for Happiness, and many books with titles like Think Like a Stoic, How to Think Like a Stoic, and Live Like a Stoic.  And then there’s the ever-popular Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Am I or am I not a Stoic? It’s both more complicated and simpler than you think.  The Stoics recognize four emotions, pleasure and pain, desire and fear.  If you want to lead a good life, and that is the goal, reason must conquer emotions. But the system is more complex than that:  it is logic, physics, and ethics. 

The three main stoic virtues are fides, virtus, and pietas, and if you have read Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, in Latin, you are familiar with them. Fides means faith and trust. Virtus literally means “manliness” (the first syllable, vir,  means “man“), but also excellence, courage, or the best in any endeavor.  Then there’s pietas, the recognition of obligations to the gods, one’s nation, and the family.  Virgil’s Aeneas, forced by pietas to sacrifice personal happiness after the fall of Troy, is a reluctant leader of the surviving Trojans in their journey overseas to found a new homeland in Italy. This will bring no happiness to Aeneas’ generation. The brutal ending of the epic, when Aeneas erupts in rage during a battle, throws the concept of pietas into question. 

I used to fancy myself an Epicurean, but I recently returned to Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, graceful writer, satirist,  tragedian, and tutor and political advisor to Nero.  I read Senecus’s Letters in graduate school,  and was delighted by his elegant, pointed style, lucidity of explication, and the slight edge to his wit.

In his philosophical treatise, De Brevitate Vitae (On the Brevity of Life), Seneca explores the concept that life is too short. (The following is my translation from the Latin.)

“We do not have too little time, but we lose much.  Life is long enough, and is granted generously for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole life is well-spent; but when life slips away through debauchery and carelessness, and when life is applied to no good cause, and when the final necessity compels the end, we realize that our life has passed without our understanding it was going.”

Seneca has no sympathy for the complaints of working men who do not use their time well.  Too many devote themselves to pointless tasks. Some waste time networking with men who do not think well of them. And then there are the high officials who don’t retire gracefully: they die in court or in the midst of a financial transaction. But the most astonishing story is that of Sextus Turannius, a canny old man who was forced to retire at 90. He insisted that his family deck him out like a corpse, wear mourning, and conduct funeral rites until his boss hired him back.

Seneca is a critic, but he is also a comic genius.  Take his satiric portrait of the dandy who wastes hours of his life at the barber.  The following is my translation from the Latin:

“You call them leisurely who spend hours of their lives at the barber’s, where any hair that has grown in the night is plucked, a council is held about each individual hair, where either a dislodged hair is replaced, or one thinning hair is combed over the forehead…”

 Reading this in Latin was a charming experience.  Whatever else Seneca was, whatever he did or not do during Nero’s regime, he was a brilliant writer whose letters and philosophical writings have fascinated and comforted readers for centuries.