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Stoicism: A Guide to Living Peacefully
Change your thoughts, change your reality.
Some 2300 years ago, a merchant by the name Zeno found himself shipwrecked and stranded in Athens. With not much else to do, he walked into a book store and picked up a book that happened to be about Socrates.
Fascinated by what he was reading, Zeno set out to find and learn from the finest philosophers the city had to offer. Over the next couple of years, he studied under a wide array of philosophy teachers before eventually founding his own school.
Zeno started teaching by standing on a porch in the central market in Athens and talking to anyone who happened to pass by. Soon, he had a following of men hanging around and discussing philosophy with him.
The Greek word for porch is stoa, and the men who met there to talk philosophy became known as Stoics; the men of the porch. Over time, the ideas they were discussing became increasingly popular and over a thousand books came to be written about stoicism.
We’ve lost almost all of those books to antiquity, but we still have the works from three fascinating Stoics who are widely influential to this day: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.
