Your complimentary articles You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please The Art of Living Massimo Pigliucci considers persona development. The ancient Romans already knew what Shakespeare would later proclaim: all the world’s a stage. But the Stoics took this metaphor seriously in a way that might surprise us. When the philosopher Panaetius (185-110 BCE) spoke of us having four personae – literally the masks worn by actors in Greek and Roman theater – he wasn’t suggesting we’re all putting on a false face. Instead, he was proposing something more profound: that each of us plays four distinct roles in the drama of life, and that learning to perform them skillfully, without contradiction or confusion, is the key to living well. The catch? Some of these roles we choose freely, while others are thrust upon us by nature, chance, or circumstance.…