Eger and the joy and energy of this woman, this 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, was incredible. I had the incredible honor of interviewing Dr. She went on to become a psychologist and survives to this day, still seeing patients and helping people overcome trauma. Eger to not only endure unimaginable suffering, but to find meaning in it. Viktor Frankl, who she later studied under: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It was this idea that allowed Dr. Eger’s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: Even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we’re going to be inside of them, what we’re going to hold onto inside of them.

And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. We study the lives of these men and women for the same reason Plutarch (who wrote about many of the Stoics as well) did: so that they might inspire us to follow in their footsteps.

“For neither is it histories we are writing, but lives,” Plutarch explained, “nor is there by any means display of merit or vice in the most outstanding actions, but often a trivial matter as well as a remark and some joke have offered a better illustration of character than clashes with countless casualties and the biggest battalions and sieges of cities.” It’s on this model that my book, Lives of the Stoics, is written. Rather than publish big, thick books filled with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch was obsessed by what we could learn from the figures he wrote about.

Plutarch, the great moral biographer of history, took this idea to heart. Focus on what the characters can teach you about life, he said. Seneca said that, when learning from history and literature, ignore the specific facts and figures and instead focus on the moral lessons.

Biography of plutarch