4 articles
"You cannot step into the same river twice." This is perhaps Heraclitus’s best-known saying, but the form we know is not exactly his. Its history teaches us something about change and about quotations.
About 2,400 years ago Plato described a scene that almost every philosophy student knows: people chained in a cave, who take the shadows on the wall for reality.
At the start of the sixth century, one of the most powerful men in Italy lost everything in a short time. In prison, awaiting death, he wrote one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages.
We know Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius well. But Stoicism began centuries earlier, with a man who lost his cargo at sea and found philosophy in a bookshop.
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