Chains and Crown

"Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things." —Epictetus, Enchiridion

One was born a slave. The other ruled an empire. They lived by the same philosophy.

Epictetus was born into slavery in Phrygia, a lame boy who did not even own himself under Roman law. Marcus Aurelius was born in a cradle of marble and rose, unexpectedly, to the imperial throne. The two never met, and between them lies the whole distance the ancient world could put between two men.

This book follows both lives—from servitude in Rome and exile at Nicopolis to the campaigns on the Danube and the private notes that would become one of the most widely read books in Western philosophy—and shows where they converge: virtue, not fortune, as the worth of a life; the discipline of telling what is up to us from what is not; death as part of nature; adversity as training for the soul.

Then it brings the school into ordinary days. Anger, anxiety, grief, work, friendship, gratitude, humility, and the daily examination of conscience—the practices the Stoics actually taught, set out as they taught them.

Forty short chapters in five parts, with a glossary of Stoic terms and a chronology. For readers who have met Stoicism through modern handbooks and want the two men themselves: what they said, in what circumstances, and what it cost them.

If the same wisdom served both extremes of human experience, it has something to offer the life in between.