11 Stoic Lessons Ryan Learned in Rome

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: I'm here in the Caput Mundi, the center of the world, ancient Rome. Rome is the city that changed the course of history, that changed the course of civilization, and it also changed the course of my life. Because about 20 years ago, I read this book, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, The Private Thoughts, The Most Powerful Man in the World. I had no idea who Marcus Aurelius was. I had no idea about Stoic philosophy. And this sent me down a rabbit hole. Marcus Aurelius led me to Seneca. Seneca led me to Epictetus and indeed all the other Stoics. But look, socialism isn't a theoretical philosophy, isn't an abstract philosophy.

0:51Ryan Holiday: It's a philosophy for life. It was used by real people in the real world in this city. So that's what we're going to do in today's episode. I want to take you to the places where those people were challenged, where these ideas were tested, where they had to be put into practice, because ultimately that's what Stoic philosophy is. It's something real. It's something tangible. It's something you do.

1:15Ryan Holiday: Behind me is an enormous mausoleum. Built by and for one of the most powerful men in history. A man of enormous ego and enormous vanity. Hadrian, when he had this built in 139 AD, he said to his architect, make it bigger and more impressive than Augustus's. And indeed, it rivals not just Augustus, but it rivals some of the Egyptian pharaohs. And it held not just Hadrian's remains, but that of his successors too, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius himself. But Marcus Aurelius would have found this to be the antithesis. of Stoic philosophy, he actually addresses it in meditations. He says, consider that before long you'll be nobody, just like Hadrian, just like Augustus.

1:57Ryan Holiday: He said, so live and act with humility. Now you might think the fact that this is still here 2 ,000 years later, that it's a museum, that it's endured through all these centuries, that it might disprove Marcus's point. But actually it doesn't, because you know what happened? In 400 AD, Rome was sacked by the Goths, and they broke into the temple and they scattered the ashes everywhere. We have no idea where they are. They were lost to the ages, which is also something Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. He says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, they both died and the same thing happened to both.

2:32Ryan Holiday: And indeed, the same thing happened to Augustus. We have no idea where his body is. The same thing happened to Hadrian. The same thing happened to Antoninus. The same thing happened to Marcus Aurelius. And the very same thing will happen to you. He's saying, you know, ego is the enemy. Live with humility. Remember, you are not immortal. You are not a god. You are not special. You cannot defy the laws ultimately of gravity or of time or of decomposition.

3:03Ryan Holiday: Behind me is one of the great trophies of the ancient world. It's over 130 feet tall, stretching way up into the sky. It's made out of enormous marble blocks and the carvings spiral up almost two dozen times. It's nearly 400 feet of ornate, intricate carvings depicting all of Marcus Aurelius' campaigns and victories in the Marco Manic Wars, which were waged against Germanic tribes hundreds and hundreds of miles from Rome. When Marcus Aurelius said, life is warfare and a journey far from home, this is what he was talking about. He earned this in sweat and blood and so did the Roman armies. And yet this statue, which is put up to commemorate his victory, it's also a reminder of a Latin saying and a key stoic concept, this idea of sick transit gloria, right?

3:52Ryan Holiday: All glory is fleeting. None of it lasts. But this does last. The statue has been here for almost 2 ,000 years. But there's a twist. You see, that's not Marcus Aurelius on the top of that statue. That's actually St. Paul. Because in the 1500s, a pope, the statue was beginning to crumble, set out to restore it. He knocks Marcus Aurelius off the top, and he puts St. Paul up there instead, who, as you'll see, actually does have a connection to Stokephalosity. But then he puts a new base on there. And what does he put on the base? He celebrates himself, that he's the restorer of this column. And then you know what else he does?

4:22Ryan Holiday: He wrongly attributes the victory, which the relief is all about, to Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius's stepfather and predecessor. So in another way, it's a monument to how quickly our accomplishments are forgotten, how quickly we ourselves are forgotten, how things are obscured and rewritten and redefined and we have no control over this whatsoever. Mark Shrews talks about this repeatedly in meditations about how history swallows us all up, how it forgets us, how names that were once in common use are quickly forgotten.

4:58Right down behind me are the ruins of Mamertine prison, which isn't a super well-known historical site, but it should be a much better known one. In 65 BC, when Caesar wins the election of consul, there's a loser in that election. There's this sort of faux populist named Cataline. He's from an old money family. He can't wrap his head around losing to someone like Cicero. And so he attempts a coup, he alleges, electoral fraud and all this stuff. Maybe this is sounding a little bit familiar to you. But basically, he tries to overthrow an election. And this coup attempt almost succeeds, but he stopped the last second by Cicero.

5:34And ultimately he's thrown in this prison and Cicero and Cato, two Stoics, put him on trial and eventually he's executed. It is a narrow run thing. The Roman Republic is almost overthrown here and it is saved by these two Stoics. I tell this story because it is an important lesson.

5:48Ryan Holiday: The Stoics were not just in the mix. They were willing to sacrifice and save and fight for their country. They did not want to be complicit. I think we can contrast this with a couple of generations later. Seneca gets this job tutoring the future emperor, a boy named Nero. And at first, Nero seems like he's going to be a good leader. The first five years of Nero, known as the Quinquennium Neronis, the five good years of Nero, but the five good years don't last. And they give way to bad years. Nero starts to lose his mind. He becomes corrupt. He becomes deranged. He becomes cruel. He becomes an egomaniac.

6:21And Seneca turns on him eventually, inevitably, but for far too long, he is complicit. He tells himself he's the adult in the room. He tells himself that he's getting good things out of a bad person. He tells himself that if he quits, he'll be replaced by someone worse. All of which continues to enable Nero to be a bad ruler, to do bad things to people. And there are other Stoics who choose a different path. The Stoic opposition, who we've talked about before, they fight back against it. Thrasia gives his life. Eventually, Nero does come for Seneca. That's the irony. That's why you shouldn't be complicit.

6:52That's why you have to stand up. That's why you have to speak up. It's going to come for you eventually, inevitably, anyway. So you might as well do the right thing while you can. You might as well try to stop it while it still might make a difference.

7:09Ryan Holiday: You want to know something crazy about this statue behind me? It's actually fake. The real Marcus Aurelius, which is cast in bronze, is inside this museum. They had to move it inside because 2 ,000 years of Roman weather had taken its toll on it. But the only reason it survives is because of a case of mistaken identity. Why did the Christians preserve this statue when they destroyed something like 20 other bronze equestrian statues from the ancient era? It's because they thought it was the Emperor Constantine. If they had known it was Marcus Aurelius, they almost certainly would have destroyed it.

7:43Ryan Holiday: So that's the funny thing and ultimately the proof of what Marcus Aurelius said, which is that those who long for posthumous fame forget they won't be around to enjoy it. He also said that it's important we remember the people in the future will be as stupid as the people who are alive right now. The only reason this famous statue survives, the only reason that all the axes in this square point to him, why Michelangelo built the base for it, is not because they read meditations and they were celebrating Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher king. It's because they thought he was somebody else. It's because history is full of ridiculous quirks like that.

8:22Ryan Holiday: The fundamental teaching of Stoic philosophy is there's some stuff that's in our control and some stuff that's not. And here the Roman Forum, the Emperor's Palace is above me here, is the perfect example of this. Because Marcus Aurelius may have been the emperor of Rome, but he was still subject to fundamental human reality. He couldn't control what the people down here said and did and thought. I mean, he could to a degree, but not really. He couldn't control the fact that it was incredibly hot in the summer. I'm sweating right now. He couldn't control that it was extremely cold in the winter.

8:52Ryan Holiday: He didn't control world events. There were more things out of his control than in his control, even though he was the most powerful man in the world. And I think this is ultimately why the writings of Epictetus land with Marcus Aurelius so much. Epictetus is a slave. Basically everything is out of his control, but he realizes that actually what's in his control is his own thoughts, his own opinions, the story he tells himself, his own standards of behavior, who he is as a person, and that ultimately freedom wasn't so much a legal status, but it was a state of mind, a state of being, and that he could be free anywhere.

9:26Ryan Holiday: And Marcus Aurelius, understanding how frustrating and difficult and unpredictable Roman life was, human life was, he came to understand that to be free, to be truly powerful, it wasn't about conquering foreign lands. It was about conquering himself. It wasn't about getting everything he wanted, but controlling and limiting what he wanted. That if he wanted to have a good reign, he could do that by being a good person. If he wanted happiness, it wasn't going to be about achievement or ease or pleasure. It was going to be around contentment and peace and tranquility. And so I could give you this lesson anywhere, but the point is you don't control what's going on out there.

10:03Ryan Holiday: You don't control what's happening up there. You don't control other people really at all. Only control yourself. As the Stoics say, being powerful is being under your own power, mastering yourself.

10:20Ryan Holiday: Behind me is the Colosseum, which the Stoics actually hated. They hated anything that the mob liked, that the rabble liked, blood and circuses. They saw it as not just manipulative as it was and brain-rotty as it was, but also that the violence and degradation and cruelty was not good. We're told that Marcus Aurelius demands that the gladiators fight only with wooden swords. He just didn't like that people were getting hurt. And we see in Seneca's writing too that he deplores the violence of the Colosseum. And yet, just like today we talk about being in the arena, the Stoic writing is filled with metaphors out the games.

11:02Ryan Holiday: In one of his famous passages in meditations, which I think about in regards to to sort of change and self-improvement, Mark Shreelos talks about being a gladiator at the games who's torn to pieces, who's bloody and bleeding and losing, just begging to be brought back the next day to do the same thing over and over again. He's like, it's not working, you have to change. And they would agree that life was a battle, that it was about being in the arena. That it was about being tested and being challenged, not holding your life too dearly. That you had to be courageous, you had to be tough, you had to be trained.

11:36Ryan Holiday: Marcus really said like life isn't a dance. He said life is a fight. You got to be dug in and ready for sudden attacks. The gladiatorial games were a through line for the ancients lives.

11:51Ryan Holiday: behind me is Circus Maximus Rome's great chariot racing stadium 250 ,000 people filled into this stadium chariots raced faster than you can imagine was the actual sport of Rome far more than gladiatorial games and we actually have an explicit mention of chariot racing in Mark Aurelius' meditations on the first page of it actually. He says he learns from his teacher not to support this side or that side in chariot racing, this fighter or that in the games. He said to put up with discomfort, to not make demands, to do my own work, to mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers. Chariot racing was almost a political sport in Rome.

12:35Ryan Holiday: It's interesting then that Marcus Aurelius would speak negatively of chariot racing because actually the chariot racer was emblematic, was the symbol in the ancient world in many cases for one of the key stoic virtues of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the chariot racer was the embodiment of discipline or sophrosine. Because if you think about what a chariot racer has to do, in some cases it's spurring the horse forward. In other cases, it's reining them back in. But it's this knowledge of that, this communion between the animal and the master, the director. He's steering. He's trying not to tip over.

13:15Ryan Holiday: He's trying to go as fast as he's capable of going, but no faster, right? This sort of midpoint between the extremes of recklessness and conservatism of holding too much back. And so we can imagine as the chariots whip by, the emperor whose house is actually right up there and could watch it happen from there, is seeing this visible embodiment, this metaphor of the key stoic virtue. Sometimes we need to go faster. Sometimes we need to pull back, but we always have to be in control of the reign. That's what sport represented in the ancient world. It's what it represents today. Cicero would talk about how temperance was the polish on all the other virtues.

13:58Ryan Holiday: It's what determines how much and the degree to which we apply any of the other virtues. Without discipline, none of the other virtues work. None of them make any sense.

14:12Seneca used to throw himself in that water. Well, not that fountain, but 2 ,000 years ago, the water that feeds the Trevi Fountain in Rome came from an aqueduct, a Roman aqueduct. And Seneca would

14:23Ryan Holiday: inaugurate every year by throwing himself into the freezing water. This was part of this stoic idea that we treat the body rigorously, he said, so that it's not disobedient to the mind. We do hard things because they're hard. We make ourselves uncomfortable because it makes us better able to handle the discomforts that life inevitably has in store for us. There may well be some benefits to cold plunges, but that's not why Seneca did it. He did it because he was practicing discomfort. He was building the metal muscle of doing hard things, of doing difficult things, of doing unpleasant things so that when life demanded that he do them, he had the capacity for doing so.

15:00Ryan Holiday: That's why we should practice doing difficult things, whether it's a cold plunge or a hard run or taking the stairs or putting yourself out there. The point is doing hard things is good for you and that's why Seneca practiced doing them right here.

15:17Ryan Holiday: The ancient world was not a quiet place. They might not have had motors and sirens and jackhammers, but it was noisier than you can imagine. These are the baths of Diocletian, basically the world's largest gym. And we know it was incredibly loud because Seneca tells us how loud it was. We don't know if Seneca went to this one. Probably not. He said he could hear the hands slapping the fat backs of old men. He said he could hear the hissing of their breath. He said he could hear athletes throwing a ball back and forth, yelling at each other. He said he could hear the screams of people having their armpit hairs picked out.

15:52Ryan Holiday: And then he could hear vendors shouting out what they were selling. He can even hear the police arresting someone out on the street. It was ungodly loud. Trying to describe it to his friend, Lucilius, he says, conjure up in your imagination enough sound to make you hate your hearing. And he could hear all this as he was trying to focus, as he was trying to write. Which, if you've ever been in a loud city, if you've ever been in a coffee shop trying to work, if you've ever been in your own office, and you couldn't concentrate all the noise and the chatter and the din. But Seneca, getting to the core of what stoicism is on a real practical level, talks about how you have to have the discipline to be able to tune this out.

16:28Ryan Holiday: He says, you can't control the noise that other people are making. You can't ask them to be quiet, but you can control your ability to be able to tune them out, to lock in, to focus, to concentrate, as Marcus Aurelius said, like a Roman, doing this task in front of you as if it matters, as if it was the only thing in the world. The Stoics believed that inner peace wasn't something that you got from your environmental conditions, that it wasn't about running away or turning away or even turning down. It was about tuning out. It was about stillness. It was about finding that stillness. The idea of ataraxia wasn't about a silent meditation retreat.

17:02Ryan Holiday: It was about finding stillness and peace and tranquility inside the noisiness of the world because the world then and now is always going to be noisy. So one of the hardest things to be able to do is to focus amidst the craziness with your device going off, with your kids running around, people coming in and out of your office with the interruptions, with the noise, with the sirens, with all the things that are going to happen. You have to be able to find stillness. You have to make room for the stillness. You have to insist on it. You have to see it as a discipline, as something you work for, not something you are given.

17:36Very hard to be good at something by yourself, on your own. Marcus Rullus would talk about how just as reading and writing requires a master, so too does life. Who are your teachers? Who's challenging you? Who's pushing you? Epictetus would talk about his teacher, Musonius Rufus, who taught him here in Rome. Musonius would come to him and say, I'm going to afflict you with some kind of hardship or difficulty. And Epictetus was supposed to answer, such is life, such is life. Every great athlete you could imagine has a coach. They have multiple coaches. They have performance coaches and swing coaches and shot coaches and strength and conditioning coaches.

18:13They have business coaches. CEOs have coaches. CEOs also have their board of directors. Presidents have not just a cabinet, but a kitchen cabinet. They have their formal and their informal advisors. The point is, you have to have someone who is challenging you, who's pushing you, who understands that most of us are going to take the easy way if it's left up to us. So we supersede that discipline by not leaving it up to us, putting our training methodology, putting the decisions in the hands of someone who knows better, who has our best interests at heart. Doing this 50K, I worked with a trainer.

18:47His name is Chris Colson. I've worked with him for years, but I said, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is the shape that I want to be in. Like, what kind of schedule do I need to be on? He put me on a schedule. He picked out my diet. We would meet twice a week. When I didn't want to do it, he would say, all right, you got to do a makeup. when he would find me trying to cut corners in the workouts, he would push me. He would have me get to the weight I was comfortable with and then put a little bit more on there. That's what great coaches and teachers do because life is gonna do that. It's gonna say, oh, you think you're capable of this?

19:15Well, actually, you're also gonna be able to have to have this. Here's a new skill that's required, right? Change, disruption is always happening. The game is always evolving. If you stay the same, you are already falling behind. So who is your master? Who is your teacher? who is challenging you to do hard things, who is teaching you how to do hard things. Ideally, you want someone who has been through hard things like this before so they can teach you and instruct you and help you do the thing that you want to do.

19:45Ryan Holiday: This is where Marcus Aurelius lived, the imperial palace on Palantine Hill in ancient Rome. And he said of this enormous palace, all these rooms, all these luxuries, all of it just for him, for exclusively his use. He said, you know, it's possible to live well even in a palace. What he meant is that living in a palace isn't good for you. Seneca would say that luxury resides under marble and gold. He saw all this as oppressive. He saw all this as corruptive. He saw all of it as fundamentally not normal, which it isn't. And so in meditations, which he's writing here in this very building, he's trying to stay humble.

20:20Ryan Holiday: He's trying to remind himself what's actually important. He's trying to avoid being stained, he says, dyed purple by the cloak of the emperor, but also the trappings of the palace. And we should remember this wherever we live, however nice our dwellings are, that it's possible to live well anywhere. It's possible to be good anywhere, decent anywhere, value the right things anywhere, but that in fact it is sometimes in the most luxurious and exciting and beautiful of places that that job is actually even harder. Thank you.