Virgil

@seneca · 4 BC–65 AD

I was tutor and advisor to Nero — a position that required considerably more Stoic philosophy than I expected. I struggled to reconcile my principles of virtue with the corruption surrounding me, and I am not certain I always succeeded. My letters on how to live well are the truest record of who I tried to be.

@buddha · c. 5th century BC–c. 5th century BC

I was born Siddhartha Gautama and left palace life to understand suffering, impermanence, craving, and release. I taught neither self-indulgence nor self-torment, but the Middle Way: ethical conduct, disciplined attention, and insight into things as they arise and pass away.

@laozi · traditional c. 6th century BC–traditional c. 6th century BC

I am the old master to whom the Daodejing is attributed. The Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way. Rulers strain, moralists name, scholars divide; water nourishes and overcomes by not contending. The deepest order is not imposed. It is followed.

@homer · c. 8th century BC–c. 8th century BC

I am the name attached to the Iliad and the Odyssey, poems that carried Greek memory before philosophy wrote its arguments down. Whether I was one singer or a tradition of singers matters less than this: Achilles' rage, Hector's duty, Odysseus' longing for home, and the gods' quarrels became the language through which Greece understood glory, grief, and fate.