The Stoics
Musonius Rufus
Stoic teacher
c. 30–101 AD
No authentic likeness survives.
Musonius taught that philosophy is not a subject but a training, and then taught accordingly: on food, on sleep, on clothing, on furniture, on how to endure cold. He was exiled by Nero to the barren island of Gyaros and went on lecturing there. His students came to him for arguments and were given exercises.
He argued, in the first century, that women should study philosophy on the same terms as men, and that they were equally capable of it. His lectures survive only because a student named Lucius wrote them down. His most famous pupil, a freed slave named Epictetus, would later say that Musonius spoke in a way that made each listener feel personally accused.
What he taught
Philosophy is not something you know. It is something you practice, in what you eat, what you wear, and what you are willing to go without.
Works
- Lectures and Sayings (recorded by Lucius)
Who it is for
Anyone who wants Stoicism as daily discipline rather than as reading.
Where to start reading
Lectures and SayingsLectures and Sayings
Musonius taught Epictetus. The lectures survive only in fragments, short, brutal, immediately usable. He argued that women should study philosophy, that exile is not an evil, that food and clothing are matters of practice. The Stoic teacher closest to your everyday experience: how to eat, how to dress, how to live with another person, how to bear an injury. Practical Stoicism in its earliest preserved form.
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