Don’t Be a Broken Parable

0:00Ryan Holiday: Shopping at Whole Foods is one of the things I do in our family. Like the grocery shopping is my job. So I was glad to be able to do that even on vacation. And then, you know, being here in Hawaii, it was the same Whole Foods experience we're thinking about. But then also a bunch of regional stuff, too, that they only have at this Whole Foods. We love shopping at Whole Foods because there's always new flavors and foods to choose from whichever Whole Foods you are like, whichever Whole Foods you happen to be at. So save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market, and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime.

0:40Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:30Ryan Holiday: Don't be a broken parable. Even though it was one of the most creative periods of his life, even though he was finally free of the affairs of state, Seneca must have been nagged by a profound disappointment. He had failed. Failed not only to corral Nero, but he had failed himself in his philosophy, staying so long in the service of so bad a man. Sure, he still had his estates, he had his family, he had his friends, he had his considerable intellectual powers and interests. But he was in exile, literally and figuratively. As he took his walks in the countryside, filling his days with nature and writing, he was nonetheless a tragic figure.

2:13Ryan Holiday: Seneca, in this period, calls to mind a certain song lyric by the band Bearsden. Now I'm just a broken parable. The values I used to hold How had he protected Nero for so long? How had he gotten so rich in the process? It was unseemly. He was a cautionary tale to his fellow Romans and certainly to his philosophical peers. Like that line from Sophocles, he had gone to a tyrant's court of his own free will and come out a slave. And this is ultimately the main philosophical lesson that Seneca has to teach us. Be wary whom you go to work for. Be suspicious of your own ambition. Don't ignore your own soul's warning.

2:58Ryan Holiday: Moral compromises add up and eventually destroy you. That is the broken parable of Seneca. And by the way, there's a great book that I've recommended many times on Seneca's trials in the service of Nero. It's James Rahm's Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero. We have it, The Painted Porch. I'll link to that. And Professor Rahm has been on the Daily Stoic podcast many times talking about this exact thing. He was here actually not too long ago. I'll link to that episode. I think it's really worth listening. Here, let me bring you a little piece of it, actually.

3:38Ryan Holiday: Philosophers shouldn't be just writers. They should be doers. And maybe this is what leads Seneca astray too, is he wants to be in the room where it happens and loses his bearings as to when one should leave the room where it's happening. And it's a fine line, I guess, between wanting to be a doer and not just a talker. And then when is your ego leading you into a bad place? That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself? Seneca tried to extricate himself, but failed. Yes. And Plato succeeded, but then had to answer all kinds of questions about what went wrong, why did he bail, and the disaster that he left behind became much worse after his departure.

4:26So, yeah, things got very sticky.

4:28Ryan Holiday: Well, I have this quote that I think it strikes me as maybe the sort of through line of both your books, but I had this on my desk. I don't know when or why I wrote it down. But Pompey's last words, where he quotes Sophocles, he says, whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man. And so you think you're going to do good work for a flawed person or that you're going to be above the industry that you're working in, right? Because most of us aren't going to go work for actual emperors or kings, but you think you can go into that place and not get your hands dirty, But you can't.

5:07Right. Exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as the republic. I mean, the republic enshrines those ideals in the highest way. And then when you hit the ground, hit the ground splattering, as it were, things don't work out so neatly.

5:29Ryan Holiday: For Seneca, it's fascinating to me because obviously Nero doesn't start out as a tyrant. Right. His mother is obviously flawed and maybe you could have said he could have seen it coming. But with Seneca, it seems much more like a frog in a pot. The heat is slowly being turned up. And then he is in that space where they say it's very hard to see something that your salary depends on you not seeing. And he can't get out. Yeah. Nero started off a relatively good path. The first five years of his reign were later referred to as the Quinquennium Neronis, the best time of the Roman Empire. It wasn't until he became a 20 or he approached his 20s and had the—actually, no, he was well into his 20s after five years and more gumption, more autonomy, and took the reins into his own hands more.

6:29And then things started to really crash.

6:31Ryan Holiday: Is it mental illness or is it what power, is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness? In his case, very much so. The freedom to do anything, to have whatever pleasures he wanted, to kill his mother or whoever else he wanted, have the Praetorian Guard at his beck and call, those would drive many human beings into delusions and insanity. and in his case he was already a little shaky to begin with so it just sort of exaggerated his natural flaws i think there's an interesting contrast right because so both marcus aurelius and nero are not born to be emperor through an odd series of machinations get chosen for it both get introduced to philosophy and philosophers pretty early there is this sense that the job will be hard and that they need to be philosophical.

7:30Ryan Holiday: So they're both trained in Stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius by Junius Rusticus, Nero by Seneca himself, and it goes in very different directions. Yes, Marcus Aurelius is the anti-Nero in many ways. What's ironic is that his teachers had all learned from Epictetus, who had been present at the court of Nero and had probably seen the disaster with Seneca. So there is a direct line of transmission, really, from Seneca to Marcus. But the two of them are very distinct. And of course, Nero and Marcus are just antithetical. The one man who clung to his moral principles, even in spite of immense duress, immense pressure, and the other who collapsed, really, as soon as the opportunity for wrongdoing came around.

8:31Ryan Holiday: So anyways, check out Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, and listen to Professor Rahm's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast.

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