Stoic affirmations for inner peace, in the Stoics’ own words

Chapter 3 of book IV of the Meditations, in George Long’s 1862 translation, opens on the retreats people look for: houses in the country, sea-shores, mountains. Marcus Aurelius answers that it is in a man’s power to retire into himself whenever he chooses, and that nowhere does he find more quiet than in his own soul. He then defines the word: tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. The rest of the chapter lists the brief principles to return to: that men do wrong involuntarily, that things do not touch the soul, that everything changes. The chapter has its own page: Meditations, IV, 3.

Book VII, chapter 28, compresses the same idea into three lines: retire into thyself; the ruling principle is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquillity (Hegemonikon). Peace, in this sentence, is a consequence of acting justly, not a mood produced directly (Meditations, VII, 28).

Seneca’s twenty-eighth letter to Lucilius, in Gummere’s 1917 translation, answers a friend who has travelled far and still cannot shake off the gloom and heaviness of his mind. Seneca quotes Socrates: why wonder that travel does not help, when you always take yourself with you? His own answer, quoted above, puts the person before the destination. Later in the same letter he says that the wise man will endure a stormy life but will not choose it, and prefers peace to war (Letter 28).

Epictetus states the cost in chapter XII of the Enchiridion, in Elizabeth Carter’s 1758 translation, in the sentence quoted above, which weighs hunger against a troubled mind and prefers hunger. A few lines further he calls the small losses of the household the purchase paid for tranquillity. The calm the Stoics name Ataraxia is not handed over by circumstances; in the Enchiridion it is bought by ceasing to want what is not in one’s power.