This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid who’s reinvented himself over the past decade as a speaker for the dead: specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and above all Marcus Aurelius, the figureheads of the ancient school of philosophy we now know as Stoicism. It “centers on four virtues: courage, temperance, justice and wisdom,” Williams writes. “Marshaling these will give you complete self-control, enabling you to react with equanimity to all outside stimuli, and not whine about stuff.” Wealth “should mean nothing to the stoic, which makes it ironic that some of the richest people on Earth claim to live by stoicism.”
That last line comes as an obvious jab at Holiday’s popularity among not just sports stars and celebrities but big money-makers in Silicon Valley as well. But then, Stoicism was meant to work for anyone, no matter their socioeconomic status: Epictetus was a …