Cicero On The Paradox Of The Rich Man

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1:30Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:06Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Bringing you today one of the most interesting paradoxes in Stoic philosophy, if it really is the paradox. It comes to us from Cicero and actually ties into what we're talking about in the new challenge, The Wealthy Stoic, a stoic guide to being rich, free, and happy. Basically, the paradox from Cicero is that only a wise person is rich. What does that mean? Well, we're going to get into it in the challenge, which you should check out. It's a whole bunch of stoic advice on being better with money, being better with wants and desires, being better at investing in yourself, investing for the future, saving, also knowing what to let go of.

2:57Awesome Stoic strategies on that. How Stoicism has guided me as an entrepreneur and as a successful writer. Anyways, you can check that out at dailystoic.com slash wealth. But without further ado, I will get you into this excerpt from Cicero. Cicero was what they would then a new man. He came from a wealthy family of merchants, not sort of one of Rome's established aristocratic families. And then he makes a fortune for himself as a lawyer. He's sort of seen as having new money. So people look down on him. He's sort of wrestling with that. He's ambitious. He's too ambitious. Lots of really interesting things that he digs into in this little excerpt from his work on the Stoic paradoxes.

3:44This excerpt was read, was created here at Daily Stoic, is read by Michael Reed. And I think you'll really like it. So check it out. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better.

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5:30Paradox 6. That the wise man alone is rich. Translators note, this paradox is addressed to Marcus Crassus. What means this unbecoming ostentation in making mention of your memory? You are the only rich man. Immortal gods, ought I not rejoice that I have heard and learned something? You, the only rich man. What if you are not rich at all? What if you even are a beggar? For whom are we to understand to be a rich man? To what kind of a man do we apply the term? To the man, as I suppose, whose possessions are such that he may be well contented to live liberally, who has no desire, no hankering after, no wish for more.

6:28It is your own mind, and not the talk of others, nor your possessions, that must pronounce you to be rich, for it ought to think that nothing is wanting to it, and care for nothing beyond. Is it satiated or even contented with your money? I admit that you are rich, but if you are the greed of money you think no source of profit disgraceful, though your order cannot make any honest profits. If you every day are cheating, deceiving, craving, jobbing, poaching, and pilfering, if you rob the allies and plunder the treasury, if you are forever longing for the bequests of friends, or not even waiting for them, but foraging them yourself, are such practices the indications of a rich or a needy man?

7:27It is the mind and not the coffers of a man that is to be accounted rich. For though the latter be full, when I see yourself empty, I shall not think you rich, because men measure the amount of riches by that which is sufficient for each individual. Has a man a daughter? Then he has need of money. But he has two, then he ought to have a greater fortune. He has more, then he ought to have more fortunes still. And if, as we are told of Denous, he has fifty daughters, so many fortunes require a great estate. For as I said before, The degree of wealth is dependent on how much each individual has need of.

8:20He, therefore, who has not a great many daughters, but innumerable passions, which are enough to consume a very great estate in a very short time, how can I call such a man rich when he himself is conscious that he is poor? Many have heard you say that no man is rich who cannot with his income maintain an army, a thing which people of Rome some time ago, with their so great revenues, could scarcely do. Therefore, according to your maxim, you never can be rich until so much is brought into you from your estates, that out of it you can maintain six legions and large auxiliaries of home and foot.

9:10You therefore, in fact, confess yourself not to be rich, who are so far short of fulfilling what you desire. You, therefore, have never concealed your poverty, your neediness, and your beggary. For as we see that they who make an honest livelihood by commerce, by industry, by forming the public revenue, have occasion for their earnings, so whoever sees at your house the crowds of accusers and judges together, whoever sees rich and guilty criminals plotting the corruption of trials with you as their advisor, and your bargainings for pay for the distribution of patronage, your pecuniary interventions in the contests of candidates, your dispatching your freedom to fleece and plunder the provinces, whoever calls to mind your dispossessing your neighbors, your depopulating the country by your oppressions, your confederacies with slaves, with freedmen, and with clients, the vacating of estates the prescriptions of the wealthy the corporations massacred and the harvest of the times of Scylla the wills you have forged and the many men you have made away with in short that all things were venal with you and your levies your decrees your own votes and the votes of others the forum your house your speaking and your silence.

10:53Who must not think that such a man confesses he has occasion for all he has acquired? But who can truly designate him as a rich man who needs all his earnings? For the advantage of riches consists in plenty, and this plenty declares the overflow and abundance of the means of life, which, as you can never attain, You can never be rich.

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13:01I shall say nothing of myself because as you and that with reason despise my fortune. for it is in the opinion of the generality middling in yours next to nothing and in mine sufficient I shall speak to the subject now if facts are to be weighed and estimated by us whether are we more to esteem the money of Pyrrhus which he sent to Fabricius or the continency of Fabricius for refusing that money the gold of the Samnites or the answer of Manius Curius, the inheritance of Lucius Paulus, or the generosity of Africanus, who gave to his brother Quintus his own part of that inheritance? Surely the latter, evidences of consummate virtue, are more to be esteemed than the former, which are the evidences of wealth.

14:00If, therefore, we are to rate every man rich only in proportion to the valuable things he possesses, who can doubt that riches consist in virtue, since no possession, no amount of gold and silver, is more to be valued than virtue? Immortal gods, Men are not aware how great a revenue is parsimony. For I now proceed to speak of extravagant men. I take my leave of the money hunter. The revenue one man receives from his estate is six hundred sestertia. I receive one hundred from mine. To that man who has gilded roofs and marble pavements in his villas, and who unboundedly covets statues, pictures, vestments, and furniture.

14:54His income is insufficient, not only for his expenditure, but even for the payment of his interest, while there will be some surplus even from my slender income through cutting off the expenses of voluptuousness. Which then is the richer, he who has a deficit or he who has a surplus he who is in need or he who abounds the man whose estate the greater it is requires the more to sustain it or whose estate maintains itself by its own resources but why do I talk of myself who through the contagion of fashion and of the times am perhaps a little infected with the fault of the age In the memory of our fathers, Manius Manilius, not to mention continually the Curie and the Lucinia, at length became poor, for he had only a little house at Carini and a farm near Labicum.

16:01Now are we, because we have greater possessions, richer men. I wish we were. But the amount of wealth is not defined by the valuation of the census, but by habit and mode of life. Not to be greedy is wealth, not to be extravagant is revenue. Above all things, to be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of riches. If, therefore, they are the most skillful, valuers of property highly estimate fields in certain sites, because such estates are the least liable to injury, how much more valuable is virtue, which never can be wrested, never can be filched from us, which cannot be lost by fire or by shipwreck, and which is not alienated by the convulsions of tempest or of time, with which those who are endowed alone are rich.

17:05For they alone possess resources which are profitable and eternal, and they are the only men who, being contented with what they possess, think it sufficient, which is the criterion of riches. They hanker after nothing, they are in need of nothing, they feel the want of nothing, and they require nothing. As to the insatiable and avaricious part of mankind, as they have possessions liable to uncertainty and at the mercy of chance, they who are forever thirsting after more, and of whom there never was a man for whom what he had sufficed, they are so far from being wealthy and rich that they are to be regarded as necessitous and beggared.

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