Best Stoicism Books: Where to Start
Almost everyone arrives at Stoicism through a modern paperback and never reaches the originals. That is the wrong way round. The three ancient Stoics whose work survives are short, readable, and better than almost everything written about them.
Start with the ancients. Use the modern books afterwards, to understand what you have read.
The three who survive
Stoicism ran for roughly five hundred years and we have the complete works of three men, all Roman, all late. Everything earlier is fragments.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
A working emperor's private notebook, never written for anyone else. Start here. Gregory Hays' translation is the one that reads like a person talking; Robin Waterfield's is the most careful.
Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus
A former slave, lecturing. Harder and more bracing than Marcus, and the source of nearly everything Marcus is doing. Robin Hard's translation for completeness, A.A. Long's for clarity.
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
A rich man writing to a friend about how to die well, while serving Nero. The contradiction is part of the reading. The complete scholarly version is Letters on Ethics, translated by Graver and Long.
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca
Thirty pages. The best single thing to hand someone who says they are too busy.
The ones around the edges
Not Stoics themselves, or not entirely, but you cannot read the subject without them.
On Duties (De Officiis)
Cicero
Worth being exact: Cicero was not a Stoic. He was an Academic sceptic who found Stoic ethics the most convincing thing available, and this book preserves a lost Stoic treatise by Panaetius. Much of what we know about middle Stoicism comes through him.
Tusculan Disputations
Cicero
His argument that virtue is enough for a happy life. The Stoic position, put by a sympathetic outsider.
Lectures and Sayings
Musonius Rufus
Epictetus' teacher. Short, practical, and startling on women's education and on diet. Cynthia King's translation.
Modern scholarship worth the time
Stoicism
John Sellars
The best short academic introduction there is. Sellars is a working scholar writing clearly, which is rarer than it should be. His Lessons in Stoicism is the shorter popular version.
The Inner Citadel
Pierre Hadot
On the Meditations specifically, and the book that changed how scholars read Marcus. Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life is the wider argument.
Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life
A. A. Long
The most careful book on Epictetus in English.
The Therapy of Desire
Martha Nussbaum
Serious, demanding, and sharply critical of the Stoics in places. The best argument against the position you will find.
Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction
Brad Inwood
A hundred and fifty pages by one of the field's major figures. Start here if you want one book before the ancients.
The popular shelf
Widely read, widely argued about. Useful as a door in, less useful as a destination.
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
Donald Robertson
Marcus' life braided with cognitive behavioural therapy. Robertson is a therapist and the CBT connection is real history, not a stretch.
How to Be a Stoic
Massimo Pigliucci
A philosopher of science working through the practice honestly, including where he thinks it fails.
The Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday
The book that brought most people here. A page a day of quotations with commentary. Scholars are divided on it; it has undeniably sent millions of readers to Marcus Aurelius.
Stoicism in fiction
There is very little of it. Stoicism is overwhelmingly a non-fiction shelf, which is worth knowing if you came looking for a novel.
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
Not a Stoic novel, but the finest novel ever written in the voice of a Roman emperor, and the obvious companion to Meditations.
The Acenes Codex
translated by Manolis Tsongas
The Laconian text catalogued as PHerc. Lac. 1. It belongs on this list for its closing argument, in which the dragon asks the boy whether he would choose it again knowing the cost, and the answer runs on the same wager Marcus Aurelius sets out at Meditations 2.11: if the gods are just they judge how you lived, if unjust you would not want them, and if there are none you lived well regardless. The Codex is dated to 440 to 410 BCE, roughly a century before Zeno. Published as Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer.
The argument that the Stoic faculty of choice appears in a Laconian text roughly a century before Zeno founded the Stoa is set out in Prohairesis Before the Stoa.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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