Your Body Is Not a Character Test
Diet, fitness and ageing have quietly become moral categories, as though a smoothie were a virtue. The Stoics would recognise the instinct, because they had it badly.
7 min read
Somewhere in the last few decades, health stopped being a matter of luck and biology and became a report card. Weight reads as discipline. A gym habit reads as seriousness. What you eat has acquired the moral weight that used to attach to what you believed, so that a smoothie can be offered as evidence of character and a second helping as evidence against it.
The obvious move here would be to hold up Stoicism as the antidote. The honest move is to admit that the Stoics invented a good deal of this machinery, and that one of them will tell you what to eat and how to cut your hair.
Musonius, who has opinions about your dinner
Musonius Rufus taught that self-control at the table is not a minor matter but the entry point to everything else:
"he believed that the beginning and foundation of temperance lay in self-control in eating and drinking"
What follows is a full dietary programme - fruit, vegetables, cheese, honey, preferably uncooked; meat rejected as fit for wild animals and bad for thinking. He has a separate lecture on clothing, one on furnishings, and one on cutting your hair, in which the governing image is horticultural:
"a man should cut the hair from the head for the same reason that we prune a vine, that is merely to remove what is useless"
And the charge against anyone who does more than that is not vanity in the abstract. It is that the grooming is aimed at an audience:
"So men who cut their hair are obviously doing it out of a desire to appear handsome to those whom they wish to please"
There is a real argument buried in there, and it is the same one that makes the modern version so sticky: appetite is trainable, and a lot of what we do with our bodies is done for other people while we tell ourselves it is done for ourselves. But look at what the argument licenses. Once eating is the foundation of temperance, every meal is a small examination, and a person who eats meat is not merely eating meat. That is the smoothie problem, arriving two thousand years early.
Seneca is funnier and less sure
Seneca goes the other way, and Letter 15 is the most useful thing in the corpus on fitness culture, mostly because he finds it ridiculous:
"It is indeed foolish, my dear Lucilius, and very unsuitable for a cultivated man, to work hard over developing the muscles and broadening the shoulders and strengthening the lungs."
His argument is partly that the project has no ceiling and a losing benchmark:
"you can never be a match, either in strength or in weight, for a first-class bull"
And partly that it consumes attention on a scale out of proportion to what it returns. The letter goes on to complain about hiring specialists for things that require none - and produces, in passing, a description of the lifestyle coach that has not needed updating:
"you will have someone to regulate your steps, watch every mouthful as you eat"
He is not against exercise. He recommends short, plain, quick sessions - running, weights, jumping - specifically because they are over fast and save time. His rule for the whole business is one line:
"But whatever you do, come back soon from body to mind."
Ageing, without the pep talk
The best passage on getting older is Letter 26, written when Seneca suspected he had gone past old age into whatever comes after it. What is striking is that he neither denies the decline nor performs serenity about it. He separates the two accounts:
"I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution"
The mind, he says, is arguing with him about the whole subject and insisting that old age is its time of bloom. And then he sets it a piece of homework that is more use than any amount of positive framing:
"it bids me distinguish carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do"
Anyone over forty knows how quickly those two categories merge, and in which direction. It applies well before old age, and it is a question rather than a consolation, which is why it works.
A body that is actually failing
None of the above is written by someone in good health. Seneca had severe asthma, and Letter 54 is an account of an attack while it was still recent enough to frighten him. He calls it a continued last gasp, notes that physicians describe the condition as practice for dying, and then reports what he did with the time:
"Yet in the midst of my difficult breathing I never ceased to rest secure in cheerful and brave thoughts."
The argument he ran on himself is that he had already been dead once, for the whole of time before he was born, and had not minded:
"would you not say that one was the greatest of fools who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished than before it was lighted?"
You do not have to find that persuasive. It is worth noticing what it is, though. This is not someone who has mastered a body. It is someone who kept thinking while his was failing, which is the only version of the skill that has ever been available to anyone.
What to keep
The usable part is a separation the Stoics were better at than we are. The state of your body is substantially not up to you - genes, age, illness, an accident on a Tuesday - while what you do about it is. Treat the first as a moral score and you have signed up for an unwinnable examination rated by strangers, which is where a great deal of modern misery about weight and fitness actually lives.
And the failure mode is visible in their own writing. Musonius takes an insight about appetite and turns it into a rule about lunch. That is the move to watch for, in them and in the version of this that arrives in your feed.