Of course, it seems quite old to us. Seneca lived 20 centuries ago. Cato was born in the year 95 BC. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, the dates and names and places feel so unfamiliar to us with the passage of time. Who can pronounce Chrysippus? Who remembers Athenodorus or Arius?
From a perch here in the 21st century, not many.
Yet it’s interesting to remember—as Marcus was pointing out—that Stoicism was ancient to the ancients too. It’d been old for a long time. Nearly 400 years separate Marcus Aurelius and Zeno. Seneca knew well the works of Cleanthes but about 230 years separated them and 56 years separate Seneca from Marcus Aurelius (some 10 emperors ruled between Seneca’s boss Nero and Marcus, the philosopher king). Between them were generations and generations of Stoics, reading, talking about, translating and publishing those works.
And there were generations of Stoics after, too.
Montaigne, whose fascinating essays (grab our favorite copy here) helped popularize and recontextualize the Stoics, was writing in the 16th century. George Long’s famous translation of Meditations was published in 1862 and Thomas Wentworth Higginson did his American edition of Epictetus in 1865. These were modern editions of ancient texts that now feel ancient to us!
In time, the same thing will happen to The Daily Stoic, which is now approaching its 10th birthday—our leatherbound edition will last a bit longer than most of the paperbacks but eventually they’ll fall to pieces like all the old books you see ignored on library shelves. The same thing will happen to this email and to the people reading it. ‘Ancient’ isn’t some fixed period. In fact, it is more a process—a process like entropy—that is acting on all things at all times. We’re all in the process of becoming ancient, and everything new will someday become ancient. By the same token, everything ancient was itself at one point, shiny and new.
P.S. To the ancients, referring to someone as “well-read” meant someone who had dove deep on a few classic texts to the point they truly understood them, not someone, as we typically think today, who had read lots of books. That’s why we created our premium edition of The Daily Stoic—to give you a book to carry around as a companion and read day after day, year after year, so that you too can become a “well-read” Stoic thinker.
Bound in genuine leather and with all-new illustrations for each section of the book, this premium edition features a level of quality not possible on mass produced books. Head here to learn more about what makes it so special and to grab your copy today!
