Day 28 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
The Stoic corpus is small.
That’s one of its advantages.
You can read everything that survives from the major Roman Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, in a year of modest daily reading.
Ten pages a day is three thousand six hundred and fifty pages a year.
The complete works of all three, plus the secondary sources worth reading, fit comfortably inside that.
You could know the primary texts thoroughly in the time most people spend watching television in a month.
The case for reading the primary sources rather than summaries is simple.
Summaries tell you what someone thought the Stoics said.
The primary sources let you find what they actually said, which is often more interesting, more complicated, and more useful than the summary.
Marcus’s Meditations hits differently at forty than it did at twenty-five.
Seneca’s letters change meaning as your circumstances change.
The text is the same; you’re not.
Re-reading the same short body of work over years is more valuable than endlessly expanding into new summaries of it.
Here’s the reading sequence that makes most sense for where you are now:
Start with the Enchiridion if you haven’t read it in full.
It’s the most concise statement of Stoic practice that exists, Arrian’s condensation of Epictetus’s lectures into a handbook.
Forty or fifty short paragraphs.
You can read the whole thing in an afternoon.
Then read it again in six months and notice which paragraphs land differently.
Then the Meditations, properly, not the excerpts that circulate online, the whole thing.
Book by book.
Marcus wrote it over years, and the books aren’t uniform.
Some are tight and precise.
Some are repetitive in ways that reveal which ideas he was still wrestling with.
The repetition is the record of someone doing the work, not a flaw.
Read it like that.
Then Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, all of them, in order.
This is the longest commitment and the most rewarding, because the letters develop over time and you can watch Seneca’s thinking evolve.
Start with Letters 1 through 20 and then keep going.
The later letters are less read and frequently more interesting.
Then Epictetus’s Discourses, the full lectures that the Enchiridion condenses.
Harder to read than the handbook, more rewarding.
Epictetus is sharper and less forgiving in the Discourses, and the extended arguments repay attention.
For secondary sources: Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic and Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor are both useful, though neither is a substitute for the primary texts.
John Sellars’s academic work on Stoicism is the most philosophically rigorous secondary source available in English.
For the historical context, Anthony Long’s Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life is excellent.
For vegans specifically: there is, at present, no serious book-length treatment of Stoic ethics and animal welfare.
That’s a gap.
The scholarly work on Stoic ethics and animals is mostly in academic journals, and the existing animal ethics literature doesn’t engage seriously with Stoicism.
Which means the reading has to be assembled, the Stoic primary texts on one side, the best animal ethics writing on the other, and the synthesis is yours to make.
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics are the utilitarian case.
Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is the rights-based case.
Neither is Stoic in framework.
Both engage seriously with the philosophical questions that Stoicism would need to address.
Reading them alongside the Stoic texts is productive precisely because the frameworks are different, the points of tension are where the interesting thinking happens.
Ten pages a day.
The texts are mostly free online or inexpensive in print.
The reading plan doesn’t require a large library.
It requires consistency and the willingness to return to the same small body of work over years, finding more in it each time.
That’s exactly what the Stoics would have recommended.
Practice for today
Map your reading plan for the next six months, specific texts, in order, with a rough page-per-day target.
Write it down.
Then start it today: read something from the list, even just ten pages.
The plan that begins today is more valuable than the perfect plan that begins next week.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.