The Grueling Class

“The one class is born to obey, the other to command.”
—Seneca

STOICISM BEGINS with a wayward merchant. Legend has it that in 312 B.C. a dye salesman named Zeno was shipwrecked in the Aegean Sea. He washed ashore in Athens, read a book of Socratic dialogues, and found philosophical purpose. His brush with misfortune guided him to the idea of self-control in an uncontrollable world. “Man conquers the world by conquering himself,” Zeno is said to have said. He developed a following.

Soon he and his acolytes were convening in the Athenian marketplace on a porch that would become their namesake, the Stoa Poikile, where they were surrounded by others who wished to draw a crowd—fire eaters, sword swallowers, and the like. Zeno’s doctrines of personal mastery would trickle down to Seneca, a sort of philosopher laureate of the Roman imperial period, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor—and eventually, two millennia later, to an opportunistic writer named Ryan Holiday, himself a kind of wayward merchant.

It was only a matter of time before someone found a way to rebrand the oligarchs’ retreat from their social obligations as timeless virtue.

“At the core of it,” Holiday, a former marketer for American Apparel, is telling me, “I think