Where does one start with stoicism?

Marcus
Epictetus
Seneca

in that order.

Epictetus => Seneca or Cicero => Musonius Rufus

If you can understand where Musonius came from in his advice, you can say you understood Stoicism.

>Cicero

Cicero isn't a stoic. He studied all the scholes, and is sympathetic to stoicism, but his system is a syncretic greek system.

He tend to take stoic ideas, and put his own spin on them without accepting their metaphysics. The stoics say live by nature, which they mean live by logos and the universal rationality. cicero means live by nature to mean accept the natural world and its consequences around us, and accept changes as natural. ie growing old and dying.

It starts with not constantly asking other people for advice, and standing on your own two feet, silently watching the motion of the stars and the clouds knowing that you have the answers you seek, silently hidden the the places you have always been too terrified to look.

You want Stoicism? Dont seek to do as they did. Seek what they sought.

Cicero did write about Stoicism. And in Ethics he basically followed Stoicism, at least in his writings.

Does that also mean that you can't be sad when it still happens? Or do you have to shut down all feelings as a stoic? I mean you could still be sad when a loved one dies but you also know life goes on

Yeah, but crucially he's not a stoic. He's someone who's taken some stoic teachings, but not others, and incorporated it into his life philosophy. He also criticizes stoic concepts like Diviniation.

The idea is not so much to shut down your feelings or forbid yourself to be sad, but rather to have an understanding of life which is advanced enough that you won't feel sad.

In some of his books, he does explain Stoic ethics.

>He also criticizes stoic concepts like Diviniation.
I don't remember Stoics saying much about divination, except for Epictetus saying something like "you can go to divination, but don't let it affect you".

>inb4 retarded Croats post meme kebap remover calling him stoic socrates for killing himself

serve spotted

Not my fault you've been shitting up every single board with your nigger

Stoics believed in an interconnected deterministic world, which is why they believed they could use divination (augury, oracles, etc) to figure out fate. They had the right idea, but figuring out the world part was superstition. Now, they weren't alone in supporting divination of course.

Ah, you are talking about Stoic physics/metaphysics.

I mean on Stoic ethics, which is the part of Stoicism which most modern people are interested in (and the part that survived, Epictetus, Rufus and Seneca didn't care about physics and didn't write about logics and their ethics are pretty much independent of Stoic physics and compatible with other systems of logic).

>Ah, you are talking about Stoic physics/metaphysics.

Which is key to their ethics. It's all tied together. It's a mistake to study their life philosophy divorced from their physics.

They believed everyone had a spark of the divine, ergo you should treat everyone equally.

I don't know about the early Stoics, but the ethics of Epictetus/Musonius don't depend on Stoic physics.

>Epictetus

He would have believed in this metaphysics as well. They all would have. And keep in mind that Epictetus left no writings himself. He just taught classes that would have consisted of readings from Zeno's writings, and his student Arrian wrote down all the discussions that they had. Effectively Discourses is just a long series of verbatim student notes that have been cleaned up a bit.

Oh yeah, and Arrian seems to have intentionally focused on ethics since it's the most useful. so you're getting a slice of Epictetus' teachings, not all of it. The Handbook specifically is a short version that just focuses on ethics.

just read it. as far as philosophy goes, its pretty easy to understand

The Epictetus of the Discourses mentioned more than once he didn't care too much about physics. And the ethics of that Epictetus is not reliant on Stoic physics.

Xenophon might've been described as stoic.