A New Season of Reason

It has been nearly 2,000 years since the sober men in togas came together in Rome, coaching one another to put aside worldly wants and walk a straight and moral path.

But now--in a time of presidential hanky-panky, 24-hour entertainment and murky social values--their ancient creed is being resurrected.

Stoicism is back for a small but growing group of adherents, thanks to the unlikely convergence of America’s most biting chronicler of pop culture, one of its most celebrated Vietnam War prisoners and, even, a San Diego County probation investigator.

The renaissance of the classical philosophy began in earnest last year, when novelist Tom Wolfe made the ancient philosopher Epictetus and his teachings a leitmotif in his best-selling novel, “A Man in Full.” From the discourses of the former slave, at least two of Wolfe’s characters learned to value personal integrity over material gain.

And that philosophy has blossomed in scores of small ways--from the bookstores that now sell Stoic philosophy to businessmen, to the increasing correspondence on the World Wide Web, to reportage by the BBC and a host of American newspapers.

“It has been astonishing,” said Sharon Lebell, a Marin County writer whose book on the Stoics has been revived of late. “Suddenly, interest in Stoicism has been galvanized.”

Stoicism was born three centuries before the birth of Jesus, when Zeno of Citium started his own school around a covered colonnade, or stoa, at the central market in Athens.

What began as a radical counterpoint to the loose moral temper of the times evolved into a complex doctrine that thrived for at least five centuries and influenced the early Christian patriarchs.

Despite apparent chaos, the Stoics believed that the universe is rational, its events predetermined. They did not believe in an afterlife, but thought men could exercise their internal divinity by behaving rationally and controlling their passions. Men could free themselves from preoccupations such as wealth and status, the Stoics said, by following an inner creed.

Epictetus (pronounced Eh-pick-tee-tuss) personified the Stoic ideal. Born in the first century as a slave in the eastern reaches of the Roman empire, he nonetheless flourished as one of the philosophy’s latest and greatest teachers.

“Things themselves don’t hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people,” Epictetus said. “It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble. . . . We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them.”

It has been argued that the Stoics were ahead of their time. An early tract asserted the equality of women. One of Rome’s most humane and accomplished emperors, Marcus Aurelius, was guided by the teachings of the Stoics.

‘A Bolt Out of the Blue’

In an interview, Wolfe said he is tickled by the revival of the Stoics, something he personally credited to a quirk of the creative process.

The author was well into a near decade of work on his 742-page novel when he realized that one of his central characters--a young man who lands in jail after many unfair setbacks--lacked a certain gravity.

Like “a bolt out of the blue” came the idea of Stoicism, Wolfe said.

The young inmate, Conrad Hensley, inadvertently discovers the philosophy when he requests a spy novel called “The Stoics’ Game” in jail and is delivered, instead, a collection of teachings by Epictetus. The book helps Hensley survive the tribal brutality of jail life.

Wolfe said he had only a passing knowledge of the philosophy from a time, two decades earlier, when he was researching his epic on early U.S. astronauts, “The Right Stuff.” Poring over stories about military pilots, Wolfe had read accounts of how James Stockdale, a Navy Air Wing commander, survived a 7 1/2-year ordeal in a North Vietnamese prison by adhering to the teachings of Epictetus (born about AD 55).

Wolfe called his recent rediscovery of the Stoics “electrifying.”

“I think the Stoics are such a wonderful draft of cool air in this hothouse existence we have,” he said. “People have begun to feel everything is too materialistic and they’re looking for a countervailing weight.”

While “stoic” has come to connote personal calm in the face of adversity, the Stoics’ theories about human relationships and emotion were complex.

They encouraged one another to play their social roles--as parents, teachers, military officers--to the hilt. But they expected emotions to remain level, even under extreme circumstances.

The good Stoic should focus on events within his control and separate his emotions from things he cannot change.

“If your child were to die and you were crying and pulling your hair out, the Stoics would say your reaction was based on a mistake,” said Tad Brennan, an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University, “and once you saw clearly and rationally, that the emotion would evaporate.”

Stockdale, who went on to a moment of fame as Ross Perot’s 1992 vice presidential running mate, made it clear that the Stoic path is not an easy one. Describing his imprisonment in North Vietnam, he quoted Epictetus:

“The lecture room of the philosopher is a hospital. Students ought not to walk out of it in pleasure, but in pain.”

Brennan and others suggest that such an austere stance is likely to keep the Stoics from becoming anything close to a true pop phenomenon. Indeed, reissues of books on the Stoics have sold in the low thousands, nowhere near the 1.2 million copies of “A Man in Full” that are in print.

But modern audiences are warming to the Stoics, said Lebell, the Marin County writer, who specializes in psychology and spirituality.

When her publishers conceived a series of small handbooks on the wisdom of the ages, they discovered Epictetus as a sort of hidden gem. Although he had been a tutor to perhaps the most famous Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus had received little attention outside academia.

When Lebell got the assignment to interpret Epictetus’ “Discourses” for a modern audience, she responded: “Epic-who?”

But as she began to research and write, Lebell found that there was much about the Stoics that she and her neighbors could admire, even in notoriously laid-back, follow-your-bliss Marin County.

“I think there has been a maturing in people’s collective spiritual search,” said Lebell, a mother of four. “People are shifting from just trying to feel good to trying to be good.”

Lebell said she sees the message of Epictetus--whom she has taken to calling “my 2,000-year-old dead white boyfriend”--as really one of fundamental decency.

“You don’t necessarily have to sell your Lexus and live in a hut. But your life should be led, first and foremost, by the development of your character,” she said, “and by being faithful to promises to yourself and to people close to you.”

Since the release of Wolfe’s novel, publisher HarperSanFrancisco has printed 6,000 more copies of Lebell’s 113-page digest of Epictetus’s teachings, “The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness.” Sales in the last three months have topped those for the previous two years.

Finding an Audience

Other publishers have had similar post-Wolfe success.

In the past, Harvard University Press sometimes had more copies of Epictetus’ “Discourses” returned by bookstores than it sold. But the publisher said it might move 2,000 copies of the tome this year.

When Lebell spoke recently at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, she was greeted by an enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd.

Likewise, San Diego County probation investigator Erik Wiegardt, who founded a Stoic Web site three years ago, said interest has surged in recent months. Wiegardt, whose online persona is “the Cyberstoic,” said there are about 50 registered participants in the “international forum,” about double the number previously. An unknown number of unregistered participants have also bolstered online discussions, he said. Members of the “Stoic Registry” message one another exhaustively about such issues as how their philosophy might help them overcome millennium computer problems; whether the Stoic belief in endurance can be reconciled with the concept of “honorable” suicide, and, especially, their joy at finding like-minded souls.

It was nearly a quarter-century ago that Wiegardt, then a 19-year-old Army private, spent $1 on a Book of the Month Club selection, Epictetus’ “Discourses.”

Soon, the philosophy hooked the young soldier with its “very practical applications for everyday life.” But it was not until he founded the Web site three years ago that he found kindred spirits. “I was just amazed and thrilled when people responded,” he said.

Wiegardt, 53, has been joined on the Stoic Registry by, among others, a Maltese medical student, an aerospace engineer, a Presbyterian minister from Texas, a teenager from Vancouver, an Air Force staff sergeant and a pathologist from New Zealand.

One of the world’s foremost classical scholars, Anthony A. Long of UC Berkeley, said certain intellectual snobs tend to dismiss pop accounts of the Stoics.

Long calls that “ a pity.” At Cambridge University, he recently delivered a lecture that included examples of how Wolfe’s characters demonstrate Epictetus’ legacy as a molder of young men.

“I found the [Wolfe] book very authentic in showing Epictetus’ idea of this absolute freedom we have; of how we can organize our mind-set and choose what to do or what not to do,” said Long. “In theory, at least, nothing can stop us from our purpose in life.”

Both the intelligentsia and common folk view Stockdale--now 75 and living in retirement in Coronado--as Stoicism’s greatest modern incarnation.

The vice admiral was caught like a deer in the media headlights seven years ago, when Perot plucked him from relative obscurity and created a vice presidential candidate.

Largely overshadowed at the time was Stockdale’s keen and inquisitive mind and his exemplary war record. He not only survived captivity but rallied his fellow prisoners, among whom he was the senior naval officer.

Stockdale had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and was earning a master’s degree at Stanford when a professor introduced him to Epictetus. The teacher noted that the great Prussian military leader, Frederick the Great, never went into battle without his copy of the “Discourses.”

When Stockdale reported for duty on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, he kept the same volume on his night stand.

Stockdale said that as he was shot down and parachuted into the arms of his Vietnamese captors in 1965, he whispered to himself: “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

Actually, it would be more than seven years. Stockdale spent much of that time in solitary confinement.

Profile in Courage

He believed it was critical to the survival of his men that they maintain a certain integrity. So, despite torture and isolation, there were some things the prisoners tried never to do--for instance, bow in public, admit to crimes, or negotiate only for their own personal well-being. The experience made Stockdale realize that “the thing that brings down a man is not pain, but shame.”

Stockdale was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

Wolfe said that if he were to write another volume of “The Right Stuff,” Stockdale would be at the pinnacle of the pyramid of flying men. Even the super-confident astronauts felt it necessary to judge themselves against a “great, great figure” like Stockdale, Wolfe said.

“It would be wonderful to be strong enough to live by that code,” Wolfe said, “and to feel as if you are always free as long as you are aware there are certain powers that are beyond your control.”

But the author concluded: “I don’t think I could be a Stoic. I think I would have to do a lot more workouts with my soul.

“But [Stockdale] did it. He proved you could live the Stoic life.”