Stoic Role Models
Cultivating mental images of virtuous exemplars helps align one's behavior with the ideal of wisdom.
Seneca recommended asking oneself, in difficult situations, 'What would Cato do?' Epictetus proposed imagining a wise person watching and judging one's actions. Mental models of virtue act as practical guides when one's own judgment is uncertain or weakened by passion.
Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character, have won your approval.
The use of moral exemplars is cross-culturally universal — from Confucian junzi to Christian saints — as a practical tool for virtue development.
Epistulae Morales
Written about in
- What Stoicism says about starting again after a fall
When your own judgment is the thing that just failed, Seneca says borrow someone else's: choose a person whose life and bearing you approve of, and ask what they would do. Epictetus's version is to imagine a wise person watching — a deliberate crutch for exactly the state you are in after a fall.