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Lives of the Stoics (Episode 69)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, we review Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s Lives of the Stoics, focusing on their accounts of the big three Roman Stoics: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. This is a great episode for getting a sense of the lives of key figures we talk about.
(02:54) Introduction
(08:39) Seneca the Striver
(24:00) Epictetus the Free Man
(37:16) Marcus Aurelius the Philosopher King
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Key Figures
00:00:00
Speaker
So yeah, as a book, it helps with the contemplation of the sage because it gives you a lot of stoic examples, people to aspire to anecdotes of people acting stoically or displaying stoic virtues. And then it gives you these philosophical case studies, I would say. And if you're somebody who likes philosophy more, if you understand the culture, the history, the biography of the person you're reading from, this is a great supplement to that.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
00:00:40
Speaker
And in this conversation, Michael and I talk about Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman's book, Lives of the Stoics, The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.
The Big Three Roman Stoics: Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius
00:00:53
Speaker
We focus on their accounts of the big three Roman Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. This is a great episode for getting a better sense of who these people were, who wrote about many of the ideas we discuss.
00:01:08
Speaker
Before we completely jump into it, I've got a quick announcement. Michael and I are putting together a live course, a cohort-based course, called Stoicism Applied. It's going to be three weeks long later this year, and it's going to be grounded in Epictetus's Topoi, his three topics, the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action.
00:01:31
Speaker
We're really excited about it. You'll get to interact with Michael and I live, of course. More importantly, perhaps you'll also be joined by other Stoics who are serious about walking the Stoic path. Without any guidance or community, it can be difficult to apply the Stoic lessons. And I think that
00:01:53
Speaker
This three-week course, this three-week intensive, will be an excellent way to get that social support and get that motivation.
Announcing 'Stoicism Applied' Course
00:02:02
Speaker
To learn more, go to maven.com slash stoa slash stoicism dash applied, bit of a cumbersome URL. You can also find it in the description of this podcast, as well as a variety of other websites we have for stoa, stoabeditation.com.
00:02:23
Speaker
www.stoeletter.com. We have too many websites. I hope you join Michael and I. If you're interested, please get on our waiting list. We're going to be opening up enrollments soon, and we have a limited amount of seats. So get on the waiting list. We'll send you out an email when we open enrollments, which will be soon. All right, with that, let's get into the conversation. Welcome to Stowe Conversations. My name's Kegel Bontiveros.
00:02:53
Speaker
And today we are going to be talking about Ryan Holliday's and Steven Hanselman's lives of the Stoics. We'll be doing a
00:03:06
Speaker
book review, a coverage of sorts. In this book, Ryan and Stephen go through many Stoics, the big names, some of the small names, a few you may never have heard of before, but for purposes of our conversation, we're just going to focus on the themes they pull out from the big three Roman Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, another book review. We've heard from people that they've enjoyed this, this format of looking at books and discussing our thoughts on, on some Stoic literature. So let us know what you think of this one as well. And, you know, I should say from the start, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I think it's really, really fun getting the kind of biographical background.
00:03:48
Speaker
especially of those big three who I'm so familiar with their philosophy was a really, really nice compliment. And I think Ryan and Steven did a good job in presenting it in an accessible way that was, I would say accurate, but also providing their own commentary at the same time or some, some perspective on it.
Seneca's Life and Philosophical Case Studies
00:04:06
Speaker
So overall really enjoyed this, really enjoyed this book. So excited to talk about it.
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, I would say this book is probably one of my favorites, if not my favorite book from Ryan Holiday. It came out 2020 and it's sort of in the tradition of
00:04:27
Speaker
some of these ancient moralists, ancient biographers, people like Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, who cover the lives of, you know, famous men, famous philosophers, and do so not with the aim to sort of come up with some objective scientific account of their life, but with the explicit goal of
00:04:53
Speaker
thinking about these people as models or anti-models, you know, what sorts of lessons can we learn from their lives. So that's, I think that's the same approach that's taken in this book to a variety of different stories. You know, of course you get
00:05:11
Speaker
the big three, but you also get some nice chapters about many other characters from Greek and Roman history from Cato the Younger, Helvetius Priscus, of course the early Greek Stoics, and a few who, you know, Diogenes the diplomat, who's that might not be so clear to you if you're coming into this green, so it's neat to get a range of different characters.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I should also praise it as a, you know, it's just a, just a historical source. Like it seemed to me well researched and.
00:05:48
Speaker
Even though I've been studying a lot of still hooks for a long time, I'm not trained as a classicist, I'm trained as a philosopher. So sometimes I don't always know my history. And, you know, I've been reading about these guys for years. And I was like, Oh, I didn't know that. Or, oh, that's an interesting story. Or I hadn't, I hadn't heard that before. And I had that a couple, couple times in Seneca. Well, Seneca in particular, so well worth it. It's just an all collected in one place too, right? If you get any Seneca book,
00:06:13
Speaker
you're going to have a little bit about his life at the start, but to have these all collected in one spot really I think makes a good resource. We'll get into this as we talk about it a bit more, but I was struck by how valuable, I think that there is a real tendency to look at people's biographical information as a way to either glorify their ideas or dismiss their ideas. As a philosopher, I'm not really a fan of either of those approaches.
00:06:42
Speaker
I don't really think, I think an asshole could have a good idea and I think, you know, a good person could have a lot of bad ideas. And so I don't think somebody's stoicism is wrong because they acted in an unstoic way. But I do think when you look at the biographies of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, you get a bunch of good philosophical case studies, kind of applied questions, you know, like is Seneca a hypocrite to have collected all of this wealth is
00:07:10
Speaker
is Marcus Aurelius' actions as a father, what do those say about his stoicism or his relationship to it? And I think those are really interesting questions. I would never... I don't think I could read anything biographically that could cause me to dismiss something that I already enjoyed as a piece of philosophy, but I think that it can draw out these really interesting questions when you see someone who's written that philosophy interacting with the world.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting question how biography relates to how you should evaluate someone's ideas. And in some sense, of course, it's irrelevant for some mathematical ideas are going to be true independent of the character of the person developing them.
00:07:52
Speaker
at the same time, you know, if you look at something like life advice or practical advice, should you pay attention to the life advice that someone who can't, you know, run their own life well, manage their own life well is giving you? Maybe not. And the stomachs sort of fall in between and between those two cases. Sometimes it's very clearly philosophers are like the mathematical
00:08:16
Speaker
type where, you know, they're just making an argument, you should evaluate the argument on its own merits. But other times, you know, it is an interesting question that when does the psychology matter for evaluating someone's ideas? And I do think it matters sometimes, certainly. But yeah, maybe that's another another good conversation we can have. But before we go down that rabbit hole too far,
00:08:38
Speaker
Let's hop into Seneca. So we're going to be covering the big three. Big three Roman Stoics, the first one, Seneca. Born 4 BC, died 65 AD. Seneca is well known for being the tutor to Nero, later the advisor, along with Nero's mother and another fellow.
00:09:00
Speaker
Burris, it was a surmise that Seneca essentially ran the empire when Nero was much younger, but of course as Nero got older, Seneca becomes someone who either
00:09:16
Speaker
becomes a complete, you know, hypocrite. They don't apply their stoic, you know, Seneca forgets his stoic principles to become exceptionally wealthy, to justify some of Nero's misdeeds. That's one reading of Seneca, of course. The other reading is that to some extent he got over his head. He made a judgment that in order to improve the empire, you'd have to get his hands dirty.
00:09:44
Speaker
And I wasn't able to adequately manage what happened when Nero grew in his political power and paranoia. So he ends his life retiring from the court and is famously ordered to kill himself. Nero orders Seneca, his previous tutor, to kill himself.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess to summarize that for people who aren't familiar or haven't read the book yet, the idea is Seneca receives some notoriety at a young age, but leaves the public life is basically called back into Tudor Nero, this young boy, either already emperor or at least set to be emperor very shortly.
00:10:32
Speaker
I suppose he was set to be emperor, but there's also the question of Claudius's son, younger son, Britannicus. So there was some complication there. So high probability. Alive, yeah, but high probability he'd end up in either as emperor or co-emperor.
Seneca's Ambition and Ethical Reflections
00:10:49
Speaker
And then you have this philosophical case study where one of the greatest minds in all of stoicism, one of the greatest writers, both in terms of philosophical texts and in literary texts, you wrote a number of very famous plays as well, is involved in political life, but it involves in a way that at worst he's an enabler.
00:11:07
Speaker
or a hypocrite, you know, he doesn't really stand up to Nero. He doesn't really put his foot down and he amasses this incredible wealth and becomes very successful politically without really taking the responsibility on himself because Nero becomes this kind of face of the, of the empire in a bad way. And then I guess at the best, he's somebody who's attempting a philosophical mentor who's attempting to moderate Nero over time, fails.
00:11:34
Speaker
to do so but still attempts to kind of course correct is unsuccessful in this and then ends up suffering the same fate of many other people at the hands of Miro. So it's this kind of interesting question I think of
00:11:51
Speaker
For me to take two questions from this life, interested in what you think, Caleb. One is this question of kind of moderation versus extremism. Should Seneca have attempted to assassinate Nero? Should Seneca have actually partnered more proactively with people who were attempting to assassinate Nero?
00:12:09
Speaker
should he have put his foot down harder at an earlier age when you realize there were some kind of malevolent tendencies. You know, was Seneca too moderate if we want to give him the moderate reading? And then the other reading is, well, what
00:12:24
Speaker
Is this kind of life appropriate for a stoic at all, one where you're next to evil and you're constantly in the relationship of evil? And then does stoic become, does stoicism become kind of an excuse for actually what a lack of bravery, a lack of courage, a lack of action or something along these lines, a lack of moderation. I think it's a really interesting philosophical case study. What did you think about his life?
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, those are two very important questions. Well, I would say that, as you say, you've sort of got these two readings of Seneca, the sage who's tutoring Nero, the model of Aristotle tutoring Alexander, Alexander the Great, and doing his best to once he essentially learns
00:13:09
Speaker
that Nero, either of his own, perhaps through a mix of his family inheritance and personal vice, is not going to be very receptive to his lessons. Seneca learns that, well, maybe he'll do damage control to the best that he can, and he's just
00:13:29
Speaker
If he wasn't there, probably there would be someone else there doing worse by the Empire, by the Roman people and their subjects. So there's that sort of line and then of course you also have the other line where Seneca is merely an opportunist.
00:13:45
Speaker
who just does not have the conviction, except perhaps towards the very end of his life, to stand up for what he believes. Unlike other Stoics, there was the Stoic opposition. Epiketus talks about a number of figures from this time, and their lives, like the lives of Thorsia, Agrippinus, are also covered in this book. But Seneca does not join the Stoic opposition, certainly not explicitly.
00:14:14
Speaker
during his life. I should shout out there's an excellent book by a fellow classicist named James Rahm called Dying Every Day and he really gets into the debate over Seneca's character, what was driving him to the extent that we can. One way to come up this question that
00:14:34
Speaker
this question around moderation versus extremism or you could think of it as you know to what extent should you go along with the status quo versus
00:14:46
Speaker
aim for something much better but pay both personal and social risks perhaps of seeking to overthrow an emperor. This issue of moderation versus extremism. The chapter on Seneca is titled Seneca the Striver and I think that does get at
00:15:05
Speaker
This striving, a real feature of Seneca and a feature that, if you want to take the Aristotelian spin on it, has both positive and negative aspects. And if you have this sense of striving, this sense of ambition, it's very important to always aim that ambition at the right thing. Otherwise, too much ambition is going to cause serious problems for yourself and for others.
00:15:33
Speaker
just perhaps as too little ambition will do the same. So I like that framing a lot on Seneca's life. That's this idea that he is a striver. He's seeking to rise in the Senate. Then when he's exiled by Claudius, he does all he can to get back. And then once he is back, he's put in a powerful position where he can do a lot of
00:15:55
Speaker
good, get a lot of personal gain, and then he basically plays that out to where it needs to go. So I suppose that's not, if there's a theme there, it's a theme about the
00:16:11
Speaker
dangers of striving in addition to some of its benefits. Seneca's ambition is a sort of thing that enables him to be both an excellent statesman, but also an excellent orator in general, excellent philosopher at right plays that survive till this day. I mean, he certainly is plausibly one of the
00:16:35
Speaker
most talented stoics that have existed in Rome. What do you think? Yeah, could Epictetus do this? And then he writes a play. He's like, Epictetus could never. I'm way more talented. Yeah, no, he's a very historically important person and excellent. I think of polymaths often in terms of
00:17:02
Speaker
wow this person can do kind of disparate things like they can they're really excellent at math and they're excellent at writing or something and this is almost like a polymath but all within I don't know these different spheres of kind of the intellect the oratory the fiction or the plays and the philosophical writing I don't know I don't know the lesson here or I don't know if I know enough to take a position
00:17:28
Speaker
I do think we want to be cautious to not have stoicism.
00:17:36
Speaker
I guess the question that I would have for Seneca is say, okay, well, you know, he wrote all these amazing things. So where did he act well? When did he act justly? Where was his forgiveness of somebody who wouldn't have been forgiven? Like, I guess where was, we get that, we get that in Marcus Aurelius' life. We get those examples. Maybe we lost them in Seneca's life. We don't have them in these chapters.
00:17:59
Speaker
I think, I think his writing gets it so right. I would just, I don't know if I have enough to say I have a comment about the person unless you have some evidence. One thing that's interesting though, is that what I got from this book is that he wrote, he wrote his ethical letters, you know, the letters from a stoic, some people call them towards the end of his life. So there's also something to be said here through the transformation of a person. I think it's very,
00:18:23
Speaker
patronizing or trivializing to think that Seneca would be the same person at 30 that he was at 65. So there's perhaps this view of him reflecting on his life at 60, writing these letters, these letters on ethics and saying, OK, well, you know, my opinion on this has changed a bit since I was first in the court. Right. And maybe there's this transformation from kind of intellectual exercise, the stoicism to actual practice. But I would love to see some evidence of kind of acting on these principles.
00:19:04
Speaker
Unlike some of these other characters chronicled, unlike some of the other Stoics, it's much harder to say, you know, Seneca is someone who ultimately was approaching Sage Hood or in some senses, he serves both as a positive role model, but also an anti-model. And I think that's the sort of thing that attracts so many people to him. Whereas, you know, at both Epictetus,
00:19:11
Speaker
before I give the thumbs up.
00:19:32
Speaker
and Marcus Aurelius for many many I think many people are you know they're a level up where Seneca he's someone who if you want to think use a martial arts analogy he's someone who you know he's his analogy might not work so well but he might have he's a notch above you or something like this but Epictetus Marcus Aurelius there they're going to be a another belt or two ahead of him still
00:20:02
Speaker
So he's certainly more approachable. Maybe perhaps one reason why the analogy doesn't work so well though is that Seneca is high variance, right? He does some truly excellent things whose excellent works. He did manage the empire well, most likely, when he was with Burris and Nero's mother.
00:20:20
Speaker
when Nero was sort of out of the scene and that's you know that's always a good thing but he also did things like write a letter to the Senate justifying the assassination of Nero's mother and certainly got his hands dirty and
00:20:39
Speaker
wasn't as principled as many other Stoics who he held out as models. People like Cato the Younger is a model for Seneca, but I don't think anyone could say that Seneca came close to Cato the Younger's approach, where Cato's famously principled an enemy of Julius Caesar, and I think as the sort of character who stood up against our mobs and risked his life,
00:21:08
Speaker
to stand up for what he believed in where, you know, that's something that Seneca does at the very end. But Seneca tries to play it careful. He's very strategic. Maybe he thinks that's a better long term strategy, but maybe he's also just rationalizing. Yeah, we need a HBO series on Seneca. That's what I need. I need to see this play out. Game of Thrones style to get the nuance here. But I got idea of the high variance, high points, low points.
00:21:37
Speaker
I don't think he was lying in his philosophy. And in that case, it makes somebody who's flawed, but striving. And there's something kind of admirable about that as well. You know, we can't all the same way said Epictetus says we can't all be Socrates make a lot of us often feel we can't be Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, but maybe we can be Seneca's at least. Ethically, maybe not in terms of our talent or my talent at least, but in terms of that kind of trying to do right in some ways that sometimes turn out for the worst.
00:22:05
Speaker
Right, right. Is there anything else you want to say on Seneca before we move on? Well, the other thing I wanted to comment on actually was just like, I was just surprised by the amount of variation in his life. Like the amount of extreme vacillation. We talked about that in terms of.
00:22:19
Speaker
ethics, but it was like, you know, he's either the richest man possibly in the world or like in exile, you know, incredibly powerful politically, but also sickly. And so this kind of this, this, these, this movement between extremes. And I, I got a real kick. I mean, I've heard this line so many times, but after reading his biography, I got a real kick out of this line of like, we suffer more imagination than in reality. That's a Seneca line.
00:22:45
Speaker
And that I think of when I'm like sitting out lying on the couch looking at social media and getting anxious. And then I'm like, this isn't, this is more an imagination than reality. But I think it's funny that someone like Seneca, you know, in the court where people are killing each other, assassinating each other, poisoning, like he's trying, Nero tries to kill him with poison and he survives. Like, and this person's like, yeah, I'm more anxious than I should be. And it's like, wow.
00:23:10
Speaker
That's surprising to me that that's that person is someone like Chanukah is having the same reflection because it seems like there's plenty to have anxiety about. Right, right. Absolutely. I mean, he does face.
00:23:21
Speaker
an exceptional amount of adversity that he needs to overcome. I think for some evidence of that, just reading a passage, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. In a span of less than two years, Seneca would lose his father when he was 29 years, get married, and then lose his firstborn son, and then 20 days after burying his son, he would be banished from Rome by Claudius.
00:23:49
Speaker
And that guy's like, I should stop stressing so much. That's impressive. So that's a, yeah, that is something that is certainly an admirable thing about him. Well, let's move on to Epictetus then.
Epictetus: Philosophy of Freedom and Internal Enslavement
00:24:00
Speaker
So Epictetus, he's born in, yeah, no one else can see it, but Michael's doing a fist pump.
00:24:07
Speaker
That's kind of what we're here for. He died in 135 AD. He was born to a slave woman. His name literally means acquired. And he is eventually owned by a man who is a part of Nero's.
00:24:28
Speaker
court, a man who was a former slave himself, a paphroditis. So a paphroditis goes on to actually serve alongside Seneca. Seneca would have known a paphroditis, but we can't really say whether Seneca and Abictetus bumped into each other, though it's possible as far as we know it did not occur, at least it was not remarked on by either philosopher and their works or the notes others took of their lectures.
00:24:58
Speaker
I was thinking, we need that HBO show, we need that scene where Seneca and Epictetus bump into each other and lock eyes. So to follow along that, for those, probably most people know, but for those that don't know, he gained, he was studying philosophy as a slave under Masonicius Rufus, another famous stoic, gained his freedom, gained enough notoriety as a philosopher that when philosophers were banished from Rome, he was included in that.
00:25:26
Speaker
And then I think this happened and he returned, it was reversed, he returned, it happened again, he left again, went to Greece, opened up a school of Stoic philosophy. And that's where we have Epictetus's discourses. There are notes that a student of Epictetus wrote when Epictetus was teaching at his school of philosophy in Greece.
00:25:45
Speaker
Another thing is that Epictetus was disabled, at least in one reading, like he had quite a bad limp. At least in one story it was because of a beating from his master, although we don't know that for sure. I think Epictetus, the key theme that Ryan Holiday pulls on here and Steven pull on is this idea of freedom.
00:26:08
Speaker
So this idea of wrestling with the concept of freedom, that's something that we haven't talked about a lot, but is a central part of Epictetus's philosophy, is this idea of what it means to be free. He often calls his students a slave.
00:26:22
Speaker
So this contrast between, well, there's kind of political slavery, but then there's physical slavery, not a non-trivial thing. But then there is this more important kind of philosophical slavery to your desires or your fears or your false beliefs or your anxieties. And somebody thinks just because Epictetus remarks, just because
00:26:42
Speaker
you're fairly well to do and you're not a political slave or a social slave, doesn't mean you're not a slave in another sense, in a more concerning sense. And I think that's quite an admirable part of Epictetus's story. It's something that I admire about him is that perspective. There's something to be said for kind of a firsthand account and that kind of, when we talk about being a notch above, that capacity to go through those things and not have resentment
00:27:12
Speaker
rather turn the lessons you learned in slavery into a stoic mastery and then be kind of fuel to the fire to train others in stoicism is something I really really admire about Epictetus and I think is really cool about him but
00:27:29
Speaker
Other than that, there's so little about Epictetus's life. I add this as a negative point, but I don't think the authors did a bad job here. I just think we know so little about Epictetus's life that it's hard to really pull out the same kind of political intrigue we got from Seneca.
00:27:44
Speaker
Instead, we're left with these beats of, he used to be a slave, became a philosopher, that slavery informed his approach to philosophy. And I think that's true and insightful. I always wish we had a bit more, but we just don't. So the book ends up, the chapter on Epictetus ends up, I think, focusing a lot on his philosophy in the later half, understandably.
00:28:05
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. I think it's always worth remembering that we have Epictetus's works because of Arian. Arian was a student of Epictetus who wrote down and summarized Epictetus's lectures. And we don't even have all of those. So we have, I think we have four books from the discourses, but there's supposed to be eight, right?
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's supposed to be eight, and this is a really fun one. We know what is the oldest version of Epictetus. You might ask this question, so what would happen is you'd have this book Arian wrote, and then it would get copied a bunch of times.
00:28:48
Speaker
where the oldest existing copy is, which is from like now 900 AD or something, it's not from Epictetus's time. And we know it's the oldest existing copy because every copy since this one is missing the same portion of text and the portion of text that's missing from this original one or the oldest one in Oxford has wine spilt over it.
00:29:10
Speaker
so some monk spilled their wine on the Epictetus they were copying and then that copy was the one that got copied and so we don't have that portion because nobody was able to copy and it was blank ever since and i think it just like it shows how exciting it is
00:29:27
Speaker
Or I guess lucky it is that we have anything at all. We think, oh, we have four of eight. But the four we have, you know, somebody spilled something on part of that four and we don't have that anymore. So we're so, so lucky to have preserved it because it comes back to one single copy in the Middle Ages.
00:29:42
Speaker
And that was the same thing I was thinking about Seneca, which is, man, what a resource his writing is and how lucky we are that he decided to, you know, in retirement to write this. He could have just not written it. He could have just gone hunting or swimming or done something else. And you know how blessed we are to have that. Or that Aryan was like, this is some good stuff. I'm going to write this down. That's one thing I feel reading this book is like how lucky we are to have that.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, yeah, that's a great point. And I think a lot of these historical works that Holladay and Hanselman rely on, there really aren't that many of those.
00:30:24
Speaker
It's the sort of thing where if you're a serious classicist, you literally could read everything we have on ancient Rome, the primary text, within a lifetime. Which, you know, if you think about some other country, you think about doing that for the states, that's probably not feasible. It's not as feasible. I think, and I don't know much about this, so I could be wrong. I think maybe we could read all the primary texts that we've considered important.
00:30:54
Speaker
I could be wrong on this, but I did know someone in university and their thing was they were translating stuff that nobody ever translated before. But I think mostly because it was really boring stuff. I think we might have grocery lists and I don't know, correspondence between two normal people or something like this. So maybe there's a lot of old stuff, a lot of uninteresting stuff.
00:31:16
Speaker
But in terms of reading, and again, I could be wrong here, but certainly when you think of these big names like Cicero, Seneca, and Julius Caesar in their writings, certainly you could do that pretty easily. But I think there is a lot of boring Latin stuff. I don't know if that counts. No, yeah, that's right. I think in terms of the histories, the letters from major figures, you could read all of those, but in terms of
00:31:43
Speaker
the accounting or Some of these other things. I'm not so sure if you'd be able to if you really love to counting. Yeah
00:31:52
Speaker
So just coming back to one theme here that you mentioned is the chapters entitled Epictetus the Free, and you could sort of contrast that with Seneca's story. I'll just read a passage here. It must have also been revealing for Epictetus to watch Epaphroditus
00:32:17
Speaker
this man who had incredible power over him contorting himself to remain on Nero's good side, down to flattering even the man's cobbler in hope of winning favor. So here there's this reality that paphroditus
00:32:33
Speaker
legally owns these other human beings, holds these other human beings as property, but must, because of his ambition, appease this more powerful person and act obsequious before them. And, you know, as Alade and Hanselman note, that must have brought out some insights, Epictetus, where
00:33:02
Speaker
he questioned whether Epaphroditus was really free given the fact that his desires would lead him to act in such a really, you know, if you look at it objectively demeaning way.
00:33:17
Speaker
Yeah, there's this point here about how like the desired treadmill just like really never ends, right? This is a personal story, but I remember spending time with a friend of mine and we met some of their family friends and they were, they were quite wealthy. The wealthiest people I had met or spent time with up until that point in my life, we met them traveling.
00:33:37
Speaker
and you know they were traveling they have both really good jobs both two wealthy people and they spent a significant portion of the dinner talking about their friends who had a couple full-time staff at their estate like full-time full-time
00:33:54
Speaker
made, housekeeper, groundskeeper, and talking about how nice this other person's house was. And I remember just sitting there being like, you're the wealthiest people I've ever had dinner with, and you're spending this dinner talking about your friend who has more money than you and how kind of jealous you are of their capacity to have a groundskeeper and a maid and things like this. And it was just this like, man, it just never ends. The desire cannot be satiated.
00:34:21
Speaker
presumably the desire would be satiated when you're emperor, then you look at someone like Nero and it's like, well, clearly not, right? It just doesn't end. And so I think that would be, yeah, must have been a very humbling experience for Epictetus or a very insightful experience in Epictetus to say, well, I'm lacking something here. I'm lacking a certain kind of freedom, but you certainly don't get it that way. That's certainly not the way it is achieved. And I think that's really insightful.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, there's a connection here where stoicism in general is an egalitarian philosophy. It's a philosophy that fundamentally says anyone, any rational person, can be happy. And a lot of these advantages people have over others are preferred indifference, right? There are things that are preferable. In general, it's better to be
00:35:11
Speaker
wealthy, better to be healthy, better to have a good reputation than not, but sits not what ultimately matters. And perhaps, you know, one insight from Epictetus, but Seneca also has a number of lines about this as well, is that these preferred indifference are not always all that, and they often come with costs, serious costs, not just in terms of, you know, desire inflation or the desire treadmill.
00:35:38
Speaker
But it's also the fact that Marcus Aurelius didn't initially want to become emperor, even though it has all these powers associated with it. It, of course, has serious costs too. And there's a reading of Nero's life where he may have preferred to be a aristocratic artist rather than
00:36:01
Speaker
serve as emperor. And perhaps he would have been much happier with that option if he had not been pushed into the political track.
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of sad to think, but everyone would have been much happier if you just let Nero do what he wanted. I was thinking of a Bruce Springsteen song, bear with me every listening, but this is Badlands, which is the poor man wants to be rich, rich man wants to be king, and the king's not satisfied until he rules everything. But I guess not even satisfied then would be the other point, but it's just that adaptation of desire stands true here.
00:36:38
Speaker
Yeah, so the point, but to summarize your point Caleb, it's that, you know, we're not sitting here saying, well, everybody that has money is bad, Seneca is bad for having money, Epictetus is good because he was a slave or anything like this. We're saying that when you contort your life,
00:36:54
Speaker
in pursuit of a preferred indifferent when you have extreme anxiety around staying in Nero's good favor. Which probably means even doing some pretty bad things to stay in that good favor. I mean, you've got something twisted, right? That's the stoic point. All right. You want to move on to Marcus, Marcus Aurelius?
Marcus Aurelius: Stoic Principles in Leadership
00:37:16
Speaker
Alright, so Marcus Aurelius, born 121 AD, died 180 AD. The philosopher came. So at a relatively early age, Marcus Aurelius was adopted by Hadrian and set in line to become emperor. Unlike
00:37:35
Speaker
Nero was also given the fast track into political power, but unlike Nero, Marcus Aurelius had more time before he took the throne. I think he officially took the throne when he was 40 or so. And he also had the ability to watch a number of models and see how they interact with the power. So first there was Hadrian and then his adopted father, Antoninus Pius, I should say.
00:38:04
Speaker
who gets a number of mentions in Marcus Aurelius's meditations. In the very first book of the meditations, Marcus Aurelius lists out who he's grateful for, what he's learned from others, and
00:38:19
Speaker
has several really thoughtful things to say about Antoninus Pius, who you sort of get the sense that this is a fellow who is exceptionally competent, humble, good at interacting with a number of different people, and it's almost boring for an emperor, which is he's pretty good at his job and doesn't risk the empire for his own personal gain or anything of that sort.
00:38:51
Speaker
and manages to die in his bed, which is unusual for many emperors. So I think that sets him apart. He has these models, some good ones, some anti-models. There's some good things about Hadrian, but Hadrian also ends his life.
00:39:06
Speaker
I was somewhat paranoid. He is interested in philosophy, perhaps more in the sense of a dilettante, may not be that serious in his studies, interested in philosophy in the sense that some people aren't interested in fashion. But Marcus Aurelius finds himself the emperor of Rome, and that is not an easy task by any means. You have several historians.
00:39:32
Speaker
mentioned that he, given his character, he ought to have better luck, but he faces a pandemic, a plague that kills off an exceptionally high number of Romans, invasions at the front of the empire from different Germanic tribes,
00:39:53
Speaker
a coup from one of his best generals. It's the sort of thing where, you know, if you are emperor, the things never end and they're all high stakes things that evolve the lives of, you know, millions of people. So, you know, one can get a sense about why perhaps Marcus would have referred to be the philosopher rather than the philosopher king. Yeah, and the other part of this is
00:40:19
Speaker
Just that he does a good job of it. I think that was the, that was kind of my general takeaway is that, you know, despite having these hard things, you know, he's not just a person who liked stoic philosophy and also happened to be emperor and that's cool. He's, was an emperor very stoically and he acted very well. So you mentioned the coup attempt by the friend who, his friend who was a general, Marx Aurelius forgave them instead of, you know, making an example of them and whatever way you might do at that time, which I'm sure would be quite
00:40:48
Speaker
painful and gory and public and took that as an opportunity to display forgiveness. There was another anecdote about how they required some money for an invasion to fund the army and to fund the state. And they actually brought it out into the market.
00:41:03
Speaker
a lot of the the pieces of I guess the political estate whether these are like banners and flags and furniture or something along these lines and they sold them at fair prices and then at the end of the war they bought them back at fair prices and even said look if you don't want to give them back you don't have to we can't we can't take them from you which you know
00:41:24
Speaker
It's something I'm pretty sure many governments today might would not like even be up to that standard, right? In a time of war. So that's really, really impressive all the while, you know, and he's a person unlike Seneca or even Epictetus whose meditations were written for himself. There's like a private journal. So.
00:41:46
Speaker
It's not for an audience. You know, Seneca's letters are for someone else, but they're meant to be publicly consumed. It's just like kind of a plot device. This was for himself. So, you know, there's no.
00:41:59
Speaker
there is no debate about his internal feelings. Like somebody having your literal journal, right? It's very private, perhaps even more private in terms of the concerns than you would talk with other people. And I think in that you get this really conception of a really great person. And I think for me, the biography of Marcus Aurelius was the most valuable for me because he writes so
00:42:23
Speaker
opaquely, his journal is so vague and it's so personal. I guess that's, it's very personal and it's very vague. And so when you learn about the person, it has actually made, it's made me much more interested to go back and reread the meditations again with a better understanding of kind of the, the person that he was historically, because it provides some insights into these, you know, what might be going through his mind in these vague comments or these, these vague references, right?
00:42:52
Speaker
So I thought that was pretty cool. I thought that a biography of Marcus Aurelius was more valuable for understanding his philosophy than in the other two cases.
00:43:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting because Seneca has so much stuff written. Knowing his biography is interesting when it comes to pieces on anger, on clemency. You learned that on clemency is for Nero. That's written for Nero. At the end of his life, he has the letters, the moral letters to Lucilius. Some of those, they don't exactly touch on
00:43:24
Speaker
Seneca's life. They approach, perhaps, reflections at Seneca's time at Nero's courts, but they never dive into it in the way you want to. And then with the meditations,
00:43:40
Speaker
It's always Marcus Aurelius focused on how can he be more stoic, how can he remind himself of these stoic principles, and doing so while he's at some headquarters, you know, in between the next strategic session, perhaps, for how to manage these invading tribes or some other matter of state. Yeah, what did you think? What were the kind of philosophical themes you pulled from Marcus's biography?
00:44:07
Speaker
Well, like so many other figures at this time, Marcus Aurelius faced so much adversity, so much tragedy. He loses eight children. Only five of his children make it into adulthood.
00:44:26
Speaker
The other thing that really sticks out to me when reading about Marcus Aurelius' life is that he was, it seems like he came into the world with a good character, at least the potential to be a good character in the way that other people did not. You know, you have these anecdotes about him being a serious child, a studious.
00:44:43
Speaker
child, but at the same time he was observant, he took the time to learn about what was going around him, look at how the people who surrounded him were living, and adapted his own life philosophy accordingly.
00:45:05
Speaker
So I think both Hanselman and Holiday have this line about, you know, in studying Marcus's life, there's this impression that he was somehow different made of a special stock that made his many difficult decisions easier. The common perception of stoicism only compounds this, that somehow the stoics were beyond pain.
00:45:26
Speaker
beyond material desire, beyond bodily desires. But they go on to say that this take is too fast and it underrates how much work, how much effort Marcus Aurelius put into shaping himself. And I would also add how much
00:45:42
Speaker
of his environment mattered and how he was able to reflect on the good and bad examples that surrounded him, but also how he was shaped by his mother, his tutor, his adoptive father in a positive way. I think it is something, so I thought, that he came into the world with some
00:46:04
Speaker
dispositions that were likely advantageous to him being a virtuous person, a good emperor. He and Nero almost certainly have a different biological makeup or perhaps certainly different early childhood experiences, whatever it is. But nonetheless, there is always this picture of self-improvement and others improving him as well.
00:46:26
Speaker
that's apparent when you read the meditations. He's exceptionally strict with himself, always focused on how he can be more stoic and not on how the people surrounding him can be more stoic. Yeah, that kind of self-focus is great. I mean, interesting question there about nature versus nurture, right? And connecting back to Seneca's role, like if it is nature, would Seneca's nurture attempt futile or what?
00:46:56
Speaker
Did Seneca make Miro better than he would have been without Seneca present? That's another one. The thing that I liked about Marcus's biography too was his emphasis on doing good things instead of just abstaining from bad things.
00:47:11
Speaker
there can be this view where everybody seems really great in relation to Nero and it's like well you just weren't a Nero and you're already like a pretty good you know you just weren't a terrible person you're already pretty good but you know those examples like about forgiving the general of the coup and then you know treating citizens well during wartime I think those were good examples another two things that come out well one I just thought this nature versus nurture debate with then Marcus Aurelius's son Commodus
00:47:40
Speaker
who was famously not a very good emperor. This is gladiator Joaquin Phoenix and that. So there's something interesting there.
00:47:50
Speaker
What role did Marcus Aurelius play as a father? And how important was that role? That's always an interesting question. And then the other thing that Ryan and Steven are smart to point out is that you can be as stoked as you want. You're still to a certain degree a result of your cultural environment. And Marcus had no attempt to abolish slavery as one example, which to us stands out as such a
00:48:18
Speaker
probably one of the worst things you could do along with maybe something like torture or, you know, murder. And there was no kind of, there was not a kind of philosophical discourse around this. So there's this interesting thing too, of even good people, obviously a great person. I think if Marcus was born today, it would still be a great person, but kind of a cultural blind spot too is always interesting to see.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah, right. Well, we should do an episode on Gladiator.
Cultural Blind Spots in Stoicism
00:48:46
Speaker
That would be really fun. But yeah, I think thinking about the case of how your environment shapes you, even excellent people are going to
00:48:56
Speaker
take advantage of the positive aspects of their social world. They're going to be morally lucky in many senses, but also they will have many blind spots. And that's true for the ancients, and it's almost certainly true for us as well. But, you know, I think we should wrap up. So just some final thoughts on
00:49:21
Speaker
this book. There are so many different lives covered in it. Maybe we'll do another episode on some of the other figures mentioned. As I said earlier, I think it is probably my favorite book from Holiday from Ryan and Steven.
00:49:39
Speaker
very focused. You get to cover a lot of different figures. It's even enjoyable if you've read some of these ancient histories or ancient biographies. So yeah, I enjoy it. If you want to get more figures to sort of train on as models, anti-models, it's a good place to go.
00:50:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, this as a book, it helps with the contemplation of the sage cause it gives you a lot of stoic examples, people to aspire to anecdotes of people acting stoically or displaying stoic virtues. And then it gives you these philosophical case studies, I would say. And if you're somebody who.
00:50:17
Speaker
likes philosophy more if you understand the culture, the history, the biography of the person you're reading from, if you enjoy not just the ideas but the cultural context of which those ideas came from and the history that developed them. This is a great supplement to that.
00:50:34
Speaker
And one thing that is in all of Ryan's books that I've read so far is this tendency to divide things into kind of short, digestible chapters. And I find sometimes that works for me with philosophy. Sometimes it doesn't. Obviously, the Stoics did that as well. Sometimes in the philosophy, it's like, I'll just keep going. I want to really dig into this. But with the lives, it works so well because it is the kind of thing we go, I just want to learn about this person or I want to jump ahead to this person.
00:51:01
Speaker
So definitely gets a recommendation from me. I would agree with my favorite Ryan holiday book that I've read so far and a fun spot to have a useful tool for your practice and theory as we talked about, but also just a good kind of resource to have on the bookshelf. Awesome. Thanks, Michael. Great. Thanks, Kevin.
00:51:20
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:51:50
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us, send a message to
00:52:17
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations.