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.

Did the ancient philosophers invent the self-care movement?

I am a fan of Seneca (c.1 BC-AD 65), the politician, orator, and Stoic philosopher whose writings included letters, philosophical essays, dialogues, tragedies, and satires.  Seneca unfortunately got in the emperors’ bad books:  Caligula was jealous of his rhetorical skill; Claudius banished Seneca after accusing him of adultery with Caligula’s sister; later, Seneca became Nero’s tutor and political advisor, but  Nero falsely accused him of conspiracy after his retirement and ordered him to commit suicide. 

In those mad times—madder than ours?—Seneca managed to write many calming essays that fit in with today’s self-care movement.  Instead of slaving at jobs for other people, or wasting all our leisure on trivial pursuits, we must take time to do the things  we’ve always wanted to.

In De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), Seneca observes that rich and poor alike complain that life is too short.  (The quotes from Seneca below are my translations from the Latin.)

It is not that we have little time, but that we waste much. Life is long enough and is liberally provided for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole is well spent; but when it flows away through luxury and negligence, and when it is devoted to no great thing, we feel that, driven by necessity, the life we did not understand was passing has passed.

Seneca can be whimsical.  He mocks the men who claim they are too busy to pursue their dreams.  He says that idlers who have “leisure” are just as nonsensically busy.  He writes ,

Do you call those men idle who spend hours at the barber’s, making sure that any hair grown in the night is plucked, conferring about each hair one by one, having their disheveled hair arranged properly, or a comb-over if they are balding ?  How angry they are if the hairdresser has been careless, as if he were shearing a “real man”!  … Which of these fops do not prefer their country to be disordered rather than their hair?

We’re not revolutionaries:  off to the hair salon we go!  But we agree that we could use our time better.  Seneca believed we need time to think, ponder, read, write, and do things for ourselves, even if we cannot answer the big questions. Mind you, I don’t see the Stoics’  recommending the coddling aspects of self-care–the manicures, massages, and so-on–but Seneca knew we had both more and less time than we think.

And, no, it isn’t a waste of time to read Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon and Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers series!