The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness by Epictetus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This thin volume is packed with the wisdom of Epictetus. Epictetus was a freed slave who made a name for himself as a philosopher in Rome about a century after the birth of Christ. While small-s "stoic" conjures an image of a dour automaton, the Stoics were philosophers who believed [he oversimplified] that there's nothing worth getting broken up about. If you can do something to influence the outcome of an event, you just need to pick the virtuous course. And if you can't do anything about it, getting mopey is futile. In many ways, Stoicism is the Western philosophy that is most in-line with Eastern philosophies in that it emphasizes that your internal mental state is independent of what is happening outside you; so, if you can rule your mind you can find your bliss. Lebell, the editor of this volume, heavily accentuates that similarity.
When I called this thin, I didn't mean "thin" as a derogatory comment. That said, this book is even thinner than it's 113-page count would suggest because (as with most poetry collections) there's a lot of white space left under a few lines of text. I actually think it's kind of nice that the publisher didn't do what is usually done with such short books, which is to pad them out with various unnecessary ancillary material. That said, if you can get the e-book, you'll save some trees from dying for blank space. If they would have placed more than one maxim per page, it would probably have been cut to about 60pp.
I found this book to be well-written and nicely presented, and would recommend it for someone who wants a simple and concise overview of Stoicism.
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