Stoic Collection: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Seneca’s On the Brevity of Life, Virgil’s Aeneid, Epictetus’ The Manual for Living, Hesiod’s Works and Days, & Cicero’s On Friendship

Welcome to the Stoic Collection! Each work within this series has afforded value to the movement of stoicism to an enormous degree. This collection contains the following famous works: Marcus Aurelius – Meditations Seneca – On the Brevity of Life Virgil – Aeneid Epictetus – The Manual for Living Hesiod – Works and Days Cicero – On Friendship The Meditations is divided into 12 books that chronicle different periods of Marcus’s life. Each book is not in chronological order and it was written for no one but himself. The style of writing that permeates the text is one that is simplified, straightforward, and perhaps reflecting Marcus’s Stoic perspective on the text. Depending on the English translation, Marcus’s style is not viewed as anything regal or belonging to royalty, but rather a man among other men which allows the reader to relate to his wisdom. A central theme to Meditations is the importance of analyzing one’s judgment of self and others and the development of a cosmic perspective. As he said “”You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite””. De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life) is a moral essay written by Seneca the Younger in 49 AD, a Roman Stoic philosopher, to his father-in-law Paulinus. The philosopher brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that men waste much of it in meaningless pursuits. According to the essay, nature gives man enough time to do what is really important and the individual must allot it properly. In general, time can be best used in the study of philosophy, according to Seneca. The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem’s twelve books tell the story of Aeneas’s wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem’s second half tells of the Trojans’ ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed. The Enchiridion or The Manual for Living is a short manual of Stoic ethical advice compiled by Arrian, a 2nd-century disciple of the Greek philosopher Epictetus. Although the content is similar to the Discourses of Epictetus, it is not a summary of the Discourses but rather a compilation of practical precepts. Eschewing metaphysics, Arrian focused his attention on Epictetus’s work applying philosophy in daily life. The Works and Days is a didactic poem of some 800 lines written by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod around 700 BCE. At its center, the Works and Days is a farmer’s almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts. Scholars have seen this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of colonial expeditions in search of new land. In the poem Hesiod also offers his brother extensive moralizing advice on how he should live his life. The Works and Days is perhaps best known for its two mythological aetiologies for the toil and pain that define the human condition: the story of Prometheus and Pandora, and the so-called Myth of Five Ages. Laelius de Amicitia (On Friendship) is a treatise on friendship by the Roman statesman and author Marcus Tullius Cicero, written in 44 BCE. Cicero writes about his own experience with friendship. Cicero ponders the meaning of this friendship by using the relationship between Scipio Aemilianus and Laelius to expound his views. —- ISBN: 9781521078549