Why You Should Do Your Own Writing

There is something strange you find when you study the early Stoics. Not Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus , but the Stoics who influenced them. The names you don’t hear much: Cleanthes. Posidonius. Panaetius. Aristo. Antipater. Chrysippus. What you find—beside the fact that these were living, breathing, human beings with all sorts of interesting experiences—is that you start to notice just how big a role they played in the shaping of the classic Stoic texts we know and love. For instance, the interesting analogy about how a philosopher should be like a wrestler—a fighter dug in for sudden attacks—that Marcus Aurelius famously makes in Meditations ? That actually originates from Panaetius, a Stoic philosopher from the 2nd century BCE that Marcus studied. There are allusions to the insights of Aristo and Antipater and Chryssippus in Seneca. A deep dive into Epictetus shows not only how he was influenced by Zeno , but reveals how many unattributed quotations of Epictetus appear in Marcus Aurelius! So what is this philosophy then? Just a bunch of people repeating the same old insights? Hardly. Remember, Stoicism is a practice , not merely a set of principles. The act of sitting…