From the Daily Stoic: Of course, it seems quite old to us. Seneca lived 20 centuries ago. Cato was born in the year 95 BC. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, the dates and names and places feel so unfamiliar to us with the passage of time. Who can pronounce Chrysippus? Who remembers Athenodorus or Arius?
From a perch here in the 21st century, not many.
Yet it’s interesting to remember—as Marcus was pointing out—that Stoicism was ancient to the ancients too. It’d been old for a long time. Nearly 400 years separate Marcus Aurelius and Zeno. Seneca knew well the works of Cleanthes but about 230 years separated them and 56 years separate Seneca from Marcus Aurelius (some 10 emperors ruled between Seneca’s boss Nero and Marcus, the philosopher king). Between them were generations and generations of Stoics, reading, talking about, translating and publishing those works.
And there were generations of Stoics after, too.
Montaigne, whose fascinating essays (grab our favorite copy here) helped popularize and recontextualize the Stoics, was writing in the 16th century. George Long’s famous translation of Meditations was published in 1862 and Thomas Wentworth Higginson did his American edition of Epictetus in 1865. These were modern editions of ancient texts that now feel ancient to us!
More here.
