About This Library

The Stoic Library presents complete public-domain translations of primary Stoic works.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius appear in translations by George Long (1862) and C. R. Haines (1916). The Enchiridion of Epictetus appears in translations by Elizabeth Carter (1758) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1890). Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius are given in Richard M. Gummere’s three-volume translation (1917–1925). The lectures and fragments of Musonius Rufus appear in Cora E. Lutz’s translation (1947). Epictetus’s four surviving books of Discourses and Oldfather’s selected fragments appear in W. A. Oldfather’s translation (1925–1928). Each text is in the public domain and presented with its original numbered divisions.

Why these authors

Most of Stoicism is lost. For nearly five centuries it was one of the great philosophies of the ancient world, and it produced a vast literature. Almost none of it survives. Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the founders who wrote hundreds of books between them, come down to us only in fragments and in stray quotations by later writers.

What we can still read whole belongs mostly to Stoicism’s Roman period, and even that is a thin sample of what once existed. The four authors gathered here are among the best of what remains. Two of them, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, wrote in their own hand. The other two did not: like Socrates, Epictetus and Musonius Rufus left no writings of their own, and their teaching reaches us only because their students set it down. Arrian recorded Epictetus; a student named Lucius recorded Musonius. These four are not the whole of Stoicism, only what survives.

The four voices in time

The four are closer than they look, but not evenly so. Musonius Rufus taught Epictetus directly, teacher and student. Marcus Aurelius, though, never met Epictetus, who died when Marcus was still a boy. What reached Marcus was the book: he read the Discourses closely (he thanks the man who lent him the copy in the first pages of his own Meditations) and quotes Epictetus again and again. So the thread runs teacher to student to distant reader, not one unbroken classroom. Seneca stands apart from all three: the Latin voice among them, a near-contemporary of Musonius writing in Rome a generation earlier.

Marcus is unusual for another reason. The Meditations were private notes, written to himself with no reader in mind. That they survive at all may owe something to the plain fact that their author was an emperor, and an emperor’s papers get kept.

A personal note

My introduction to Epictetus was a novel: Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, whose hero is locked up, sent the wrong book by a clerk’s mistake, and finds a dead Greek slave waiting for him in the cell. The charisma of that slave gripped me; Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, did not, at least not when I first read him. My cousin Elliot, however, was gripped, and eventually he convinced me to give Marcus another shot.

After Elliot died, I formed a secret society (cult), consecrated to Our Master Epictetus and Heavenly Sovereign Marcus Aurelius. Though unlike our rival Cabals, we do not hoard these texts: we give them away, delighting in the spread of wisdom and virtue.

Gerald Norby

For Elliot Rembert, who found beauty in the foam that flew from the mouths of wild boars.

Printed editions

The reading here is free and in the public domain. If you would like modern printed editions to keep, mark, and carry, you can buy them on Amazon.

• Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays (Modern Library) a clear, contemporary rendering of Marcus.
• Epictetus: The Complete Works, translated by Robin Waterfield (University of Chicago Press) a recent, highly readable rendering of the Discourses, the Handbook (Enchiridion), and fragments.
• Seneca: Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius, translated by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long (University of Chicago Press) the first complete modern translation of all 124 letters, scholarly yet readable.
• Musonius Rufus: That One Should Disdain Hardships, translated by Cora E. Lutz (Yale University Press) the Lutz translation hosted here, in a modern Yale edition with a fresh introduction.

Further reading

Two books I personally recommend beyond the primary texts:

• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, by Donald Robertson My sister gave me this book, but the title cheesed me out, so I didn’t read it for years. I guess I just wasn’t ready for it, because when I finally opened it, I loved it immediately. Meditations is a private journal. This book operationalizes it, and puts it within the context of modern psychology.
• A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe Beneath Tom Wolfe’s big, brawling satire of ambition runs a quieter current: one desperate man discovers Epictetus and tries to live by what he reads.

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