Author
Stephen Hanselman
The publisher-turned-translator who helped make Stoicism a daily practice, one ancient passage per day.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Stephen Hanselman came to Stoicism through books and the business of making them. He spent years in publishing, including at HarperCollins. He later became a literary agent and founded the agency LevelFiveMedia. In that role he worked with Ryan Holiday, and the two men eventually became co-authors.
Their first book together, The Daily Stoic (2016), gives one passage for each day of the year. The passages come from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and other Stoics. Each one is paired with a short reflection. The year is organised around three disciplines: perception, action and will. The book gives readers a structured way back into the primary sources, rather than another summary of them.
The partnership continued with The Daily Stoic Journal (2017), a companion that asks readers to write their own answers to daily prompts. It also produced Lives of the Stoics (2020), which turns from the ideas to the people who held them and tells the lives of the philosophers behind the quotations.
Together these books helped bring Stoicism to a broad modern audience. Many readers first met Seneca and Epictetus in Hanselman's renderings of their words.
The signature
Hanselman works as a careful intermediary between ancient texts and modern readers. His contribution is the translation and selection of the source passages. He renders Greek and Latin philosophy into plain, current English while keeping its meaning intact. The goal is a sentence a reader can carry through the day, not a museum piece.
His method reflects a publisher's sense of form. He treats philosophy as something practised in small, regular doses rather than read once and shelved. A single passage, a short reflection and a question to sit with make up each day. Over a year, the repetition does the teaching that one long reading could not.