‘Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest. ‘It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’”

Is that Gal Gadot, roused from lockdown to offer another snippet of comfort to her followers? No, it’s Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on his life in the second century AD in what came to be known as his Meditations. It’s just one Stoic text that has seen a “noticeable uplift” in sales during the coronavirus pandemic, alongside Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.

According to Penguin Random House, print sales of Meditations are up 28% for the first quarter of 2020 vs 2019, while print sales of Letters from a Stoic are up 42% for the same period. In the last four weeks, its ebook sales rose by 356% .

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realise how unnecessary many things are Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

In fact, sales of Meditations have been quietly on the up for the last eight years, says the publisher – around 16,000 copies were sold in 2012, but this increased to more than 100,000 copies in 2019. “We have noticed a natural (slightly mysterious) year-on-year increase in our sales of the Stoic philosophers,” said Penguin’s Isabel Blake , adding: “And the events of 2020, especially lockdown, seem to have accelerated this trend.”

Stoicism seems tailor-made for our times. As Alain de Botton’s School of Life puts it, Stoicism “had one overwhelming and highly practical ambition: to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain.”

“Stoicism is nothing less than an elegant, intelligent dress rehearsal for catastrophe,” says the School of Life’s Book of Life, adding that it can help with anxiety, paranoia, fear and loss of perspective: perhaps it makes sense that we’re reaching today for the words of two of its key proponents. As Seneca writes in his Letters: “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realise how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”

John Sellars, one of the founders of Modern Stoicism and Stoic Week, said that it was not surprising that people were turning to the Stoics for guidance or consolation. Modern Stoicism is about to run a new four-week course online, and has had more than 2,000 people sign up in a matter of days.

“A key Stoic idea, made famous by the Roman Epictetus, is that we need to pay attention to what we can and cannot control. We don’t control things, he said, but we do control how we think about things,” said Sellars. “Right now everyone is being forced to confront the fact that the situation is simply out of their control. So all we are left with is how we think about it.”

Calm down … Seneca. Photograph: Alamy

Sellars said that another argument from the Stoics is that “our happiness or wellbeing is shaped by how we think about things, so it’s up to us whether we find the situation difficult or not, or at least how difficult we find it”.

“In Seneca in particular there’s a strong focus on how to cope with adversity, in part because he went through quite a lot himself, and he wrote letters of consolation and how to deal with bereavement,” he said. “With Marcus, we get a strong sense that we are just parts of Nature and have to accept its processes, over which we have no control. He also reflected a fair bit on his mortality and how to cope with thoughts of his own death.”

Marcus also lived through a plague, he added: “So, as you can see, it’s very timely and applicable. People really do find Stoicism helpful.”