For Nearly 2,000 Years, This Is Who People Have Turned To When Life Gets Hard

The right book at the right time is a powerful thing. In fact, it can change the whole course of your life. Some time around the year 141 CE, the philosopher Junius Rusticus gave a young Marcus Aurelius a book from his own library: the lectures of a former slave named Epictetus. Marcus would remember the gift gratefully decades later, thanking Rusticus in Meditations “for introducing me to…