Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Encourage Yourself Like This | Are Women MORE Stoic Than Men? About this episode It was a dark world…and Marcus Aurelius desperately needed some light.🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th! Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations today. 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan 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, 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.
0:56 Ryan Holiday? Encourage yourself like this. Why did Marcus Aurelius write his Meditations? It wasn't for an audience or to practice his Greek. After all, he was already pretty accomplished in those areas. Instead, we should think about what was going on around Marcus while he was writing it. Conflicts threatened just beyond the border. Economic troubles shook Rome's foundations. A plague had ravaged the nation's populace. And that's not even mentioning all the political corruption and the backstabbing and the chaos within palace walls. And yet, Marcus doesn't seem to mention any of these events or his reactions to them.
1:36 Ryan Holiday? Instead, Marcus Aurelius explores himself in the pages of Meditations. He spends all of Book One reflecting on what he's learned from various influential individuals in his life. "Debt and Lessons," as it's titled, is 17 entries spanning nine pages in more than 2,000 words, nearly 10% of the book.
1:57 Ryan Holiday? And there's the fact that almost every page after it contains a quote, a story, or a reference to some bit of ancient philosophy. This seems a little odd, doesn't it, that the Emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, was staying up at night, exploring the idea of virtue and wisdom, primarily when and how he saw it embodied in others. But then, when we come across a passage in Book Six, it begins to make more sense. "When you need encouragement," he writes, "think of all the qualities of the people around you. This one's energy, this one's modesty, and others generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when the virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them.
2:40 Ryan Holiday? It is good," he says, "to keep this in mind." Marcus Aurelius was writing to encourage himself during trying times. He was doing so by thinking about the people he admired and who had inspired him. He was showering himself in their virtues so that he might be improved by their association. And as far as we can tell, it worked, because he was a good man, despite facing incredible temptations and pressures. And this example is, of course, rather timely. We should not just be reading Meditations, but engaging in it, reflecting on it, journaling on it, using it to become a better person. We've been doing Meditations Month here in April as part of Daily Stoic, because it's the 1905th anniversary of Marcus's birth on April 26.
3:25 Ryan Holiday? And we've been doing a deep dive on how to read Meditations. We built out this annotated guide, book club, exploration, explanation of Meditations. It's a bunch of modules, videos, podcasts, discussions with me on how to get the most out of this book, how to use it in this moment. We're going to be doing a Q and A on April 26, Marcus's birthday, as part of it. We'd love to have you join us. If you grab the guide before tomorrow, April 26, you'll get access to this live Q and A with me. We're going to be doing this deep dive into Meditations and reflecting on what it means to be a Stoic today. And then, of course, there's the new foreword that I wrote to the Translation of Meditations, which you can grab, I'll link to that.
4:09 Ryan Holiday? And we have our leather bound edition of it as well. You can bundle those all together at dailystoic.com/meditations. This leather edition is the one you've seen me, the one I reach behind me and grab when I'm doing Daily Stoic videos or Daily Stoic podcasts. It's the one that sits on my bedside and you can get it now at 20% off for this Meditations month we're doing. Just head over to dailystoic.com/meditations and I will see you in the Q and A tomorrow. It's going to be awesome.
4:43 Ryan Holiday? So my wife likes to joke that one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism. And she's probably right. I think I write about stoicism because I'm not supernaturally good at it. And so it's funny that there's this, you know, the stereotype that women are emotional and men are stoic. And this is wrong for a bunch of reasons because there are so many stoic women and many of the best virtues in women embody the kinds of things that the ancient Stoics were aspiring to be. I think a lot of people today assume that fans of the Daily Stoic are all men. I've been lucky enough to sell millions of books. And at this point, that means millions of women have read my books, women from all over the world, all over the socioeconomic spectrum.
5:27 Ryan Holiday? And these women not just aspire to be stoic, but they embody the stoic ideas better than the ancient Romans and in some cases, better than I could ever hope to. There's really nothing gendered about excellence in a human being, that virtue and courage and temperance and justice and wisdom are genderless. Now, what those virtues might look like could manifest themselves differently depending on what era you live in, what your circumstances are, what your profession is. But the virtue itself, excellence itself, remains the same. Well, in today's video, I want to talk about not just what stoicism has taught women throughout history and some stoic women, but also what women can teach us about stoicism, whatever gender we happen to be.
6:16 Ryan Holiday? If you've read Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson, one of the great epic historical biographies, he has this fascinating passage that I think about all the time. He says, he was talking about the sort of frontier days of Texas, which Lyndon Johnson comes from. He says, "You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns. You don't hear much about hauling up water after a perennial tear." Basically, he was saying that many of the things that men did in this historical period, and he's talking of the 19th century, are sort of glamorous, exciting, sort of cinematic. But he's just trying to imagine what it must have been like to be a woman living in the hill country without electricity. Your husband is gone all day. You're worried about being attacked by Indians. You're worried about being robbed. You're worried about disease.
7:01 Ryan Holiday? You're giving childbirth without anesthesia, and then you're getting back to work the next day. In this series that he writes, largely with the help of his wife, Edna, he just realizes that there's this whole other facet of history that is never explored and never celebrated. It strikes me that there's something kind of stoic in this also, that the male Stoics throughout history needed to be celebrated for their Stoicism, needed to be recognized for their Stoicism. Their ambition was to be powerful and important and well-known, in many cases, anti-Stoic ideas. Meanwhile, as Agrippinus, or Musonius Rufus, or Seneca is sent into exile, as they're talking about how this affects them
7:46 Ryan Holiday? and how they're trying to be Stoic, what we don't hear about are their children or their wives, how this affects the people that they love. And so there's this kind of bias, this blind spot in history that skips over a lot of quiet uppercase and lowercase Stoicism that in fact is the truest representation of these very virtues that we're talking about. And so ultimately, I open the Porsha Cato chapter in Lives of the Stoics with this. I say, "It could be that the conspicuous lack of credit given to women in the history of Stoicism is actually proof of their philosophical bona fides." Who better illustrates these virtues of Endurance and courage, selflessness and duty than the generations of anonymous wives
8:28 Ryan Holiday? and mothers and daughters of Greece and Rome who suffered, who resisted tyranny, who lived through wars, who raised families, and who were born and died without ever even being recognized for their quiet heroism. I said, think of what they put up with, think of the indignities they tolerated, and think of the sacrifices they were willing to make. But that's sort of the problem. We don't think about it, right? We don't think about it. Probably the most famous Stoic woman in history is Portia Cato. She's the daughter of Cato the Younger. Actually, we tell her story in Lives of the Stoics. Portia Cato
9:11 Ryan Holiday? is born probably around 70 B.C. and her father is the mortal enemy of Julius Caesar. Portia Cato is well-known in the ancient world. She's well-known even in Shakespeare's plays, known not just for her beauty and her marriage to Brutus, the killer of Caesar, but known for her wisdom, her grace, and most of all, her courage. Before I get into Portia Cato for a second, I want to talk about something. Because as wonderful and amazing as Portia Cato is, if women were taught Stoic philosophy in the ancient world, and if, in many cases, they embody Stoicism in such a beautiful way, why don't we know
9:53 Ryan Holiday? about them? First off, it's because history is written by the victors. History is written by men. And until very, very recently, men ruled the world. And so what we can imagine is that not only do conventions and laws and expectations prevent many women from becoming the kinds of great historical epic figures that we might read about in the history books, but then the men writing the history had this double bias where they did not talk about women who did embody these things. And this brings us back to Portia. So people know about the assassination of Julius Caesar, and they know famously that Brutus doesn't. But what they don't think-
10:34 Ryan Holiday? Think about what was Portia Cato's famous contribution to history is that it was his wife who I wouldn't say put him up to it, but when he wavered, when he feared that he could not do it, it was it was Portia Cato who was his backbone. Most of what we know about Portia Cato is only documented in her relation to Cato and Brutus. But within these accounts, what we see is this daring and brave and interesting woman whose example continues to fascinate historians and playwrights and writers to this day. So Cato the Younger, besides being a prominent Stoic philosopher, is basically the most important Roman politician of his day.
11:15 Ryan Holiday? And he has this rivalry and antagonism with Julius Caesar. Caesar has overthrown the Republic and is now ruling Rome essentially as its dictator. And Portia Cato is married to Brutus, one of the Republicans, an aspiring philosopher also, who adores her, his father-in-law, Cato. And he decides to do something about this. And while we don't know how much Portia knew initially about the plot to assassinate Caesar, it is clear that she senses that her husband has a secret, that he is up to something. And when she deduces what that is, instead of getting angry at her, her first question is, well, why didn't he trust me with this information?
12:00 Ryan Holiday? And what she suspects is that he doesn't tell her because he's worried that if he is caught, she would be tortured and she would give up the plot. This is how the Roman police investigate crimes. They immediately put slaves and women to torture to get them to reveal their secrets. And Portia is enraged that her husband would doubt her toughness and resilience under pressure. And so to prove to herself and to him, she stabs herself in the thigh and then binds up the wound, leaving it untreated. And as she suffers from fever and chills and pain, without her husband noticing for several days, she goes to him.
12:44 Ryan Holiday? And shows him the wound. It is to her an embodiment of her toughness. She said, look, you, you trust my spirit, but you are distrustful of my body. I understand that, she basically says. But now, she says, I have proof that my body can also keep silence. And she says, therefore, you've got to tell me your secrets. Cause fire or lashes or pain is not going to force me to divulge a word. Like, she's just showing like how incredibly tough she is. And, and Brutus sort of seeing this realizes that he should bring her in to the conspiracy that he has hatched.
13:23 Ryan Holiday? And he famously says that he hopes now to do something deserving of so strong and impressive a wife. And this is what gives the conspirators the sort of the energy and the dedication they need to go on and do this thing. And, and in fact, actually Shakespeare was so moved by this scene that he, he puts it in the play Julius Caesar. Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose them, he has her say. I have made strong proof of my constancy, giving myself a voluntary wound here in the thigh. Can I bear that with patience and not my husband's secrets? And in fact, we're told by Plutarch that when she confronts her husband about this,
14:06 Ryan Holiday? she says, like, I wasn't brought here just to share your bed and, and make your home, but I'm a partner in your joys as well as your troubles. And, and she's hurt that he won't bring her in on this conspiracy. What I've always taken from this scene is it, she has a remarkably modern view of their marriage, that they're true and equal partners in this thing. And she's hurt that he doesn't think to treat her that way. And so after she does her ordeal, she comes through it, I think with a very stoic understanding of what she's capable of. She says, before I put less confidence in my advantages, but now I know I am superior even to pain.
14:48 Ryan Holiday? And look, anyone who knows a thing or two about childbirth knows that women are way tougher. Than men and always have been. There's clearly something absurd about this idea that both Shakespeare and Plutarch are propagating, which is just this idea that women aren't tough. Of course, women are incredibly tough and Portia Cato is clearly an incredibly tough lady. And then we're told that on the day of the conspiracy, that Portia has this anxiety attack. She's so worried about her husband's safety that she doesn't know what to do and that she faints. And it requires all of Brutus's strength not to abandon the conspiracy and rush to her side. Shakespeare has her say, "I have a man's mind, but a woman's might."
15:31 Ryan Holiday? How hard it is for a woman to keep counsel, like that she was so overwhelmed with pride and fear that she almost spilled the beans. I have a hard time believing that someone who just a few days before stabbed herself in the leg and bore that stoically would freak out the day of the conspiracy. And in fact, it's actually Cicero that the conspirators never tell about it because they're worried he's going to say something. So when Brutus is weighing like, who do I tell, who do I not tell? Cicero, supposedly the embodiment of a Stoic philosopher, can't be told about it because his ego makes everything about him. He actually does brag about it after the fact to far too many people, exaggerating his own role in it. And then it's Portia Cato, his wife, who he does tell, who, by the way, doesn't tell
16:15 Ryan Holiday? anyone about it, who I think is more clearly a better embodiment of this sort of Stoic idea of discipline. Doing scary, risky, dangerous things demands both Stoic toughness physically, but also the sort of discipline to keep your mouth shut about it. And then if you know the story, obviously, they do succeed in assassinating Julius Caesar, but it sort of at the moment of maximum danger, when they needed to dispatch most of Caesar's allies, they fail. And again, it's Brutus who fails to sort of do what needs to be done. He has to flee. And as Caesar's allies rally, Rome is descended into civil war. Brutus and Portia are separated.
16:58 Ryan Holiday? We're told that Brutus, as he's separating from his wife, thought of what Hector had told his Wife as he went to fight Achilles to ply her loom and give orders to thy maid. He says that that advice makes no sense to him here, that he has no mind to address his wife the same way, for although her body may not be strong enough to perform such heroic tasks as men do, he says, still in spirit, she is valiant in defense of her country, just as we are. And we're told ultimately, if you know the story of Cato, Cato famously commits suicide in protest of Julius Caesar's tyranny. And ultimately, it comes to Portia Cato to go out the same way. Although her attendants realized that after the death of her husband, that she was a
17:43 Ryan Holiday? suicide risk, she was desperate not to become some sort of propaganda or political prisoner. And when they're not looking, she rushes to the fire and swallows hot coals. Again, this is a tough lady. Put aside the context of suicide, which is obviously loaded, it meant something different in the ancient world. Portia Cato dies by eating fiery coals, putting her on par with her father, to say the least. And in Julius Caesar's play, he portrays Brutus sort of bereft at the loss of his wife and trying to bear the loss of it as stoically as possible. I guess what I just want to say is that Portia Cato taught philosophy by her father,
18:24 Ryan Holiday? comes to embody it in ways that I think even some of the greatest Stoics would have failed to embody. She does it under pressure. She does it in a moment of great political significance. And then here we also see her sort of demanding her equal say and role in her relationship with her husband. And I actually think in his essay on Stoic women, Musonius Rufus says something quite similar to what Brutus was thinking as he departed from his wife. Musonius Rufus, he says, women as well as men have received from the gods, the gift of reason, which we use in our dealings with one another and by which we, he says, we judge whether a thing is good or bad or right or wrong.
19:05 Ryan Holiday? And he says that it's not men alone who possess an eagerness and an inclination towards virtue, but of course, women do also. He says that- Women are pleased no less than men by noble and just deeds, and they reject the opposite of such things. And so he says, why is it appropriate for men to seek out and train in how to live well, how to be courageous and disciplined and just and wise, but not women? And so in all these ways, Portia is embodying everything that the Stoics strove to be. And I think that's important. In the same way that almost none of the writings from Cato survive, none of the writings from Portia herself survive because she, like her father,
19:49 Ryan Holiday? embodied the ideas of Stoicism in practice, rather than, as Cicero did beautifully on the page, all the while falling short of them in life.
20:06 Ryan Holiday? And so, speaking of Stoic women who embodied the idea rather than write about it, I think it's fascinating. Obviously, we know about Marcus Aurelius, and we know that Marcus Aurelius both lived and wrote a lot about Stoic philosophy. This survives to us in the form of meditations. And then in more modern times, we're familiar with Marcus Aurelius's abomination of a son, Commodus, who really was as bad as Joaquin Phoenix portrays him in the movie Gladiator. Now, that movie also shows one of Marcus Aurelius's daughters, played beautifully by Connie Nielsen. But in real life, one of his daughters, Cornephasia, actually lives up to Marcus Aurelius's example almost as impressively as Portia Cato does.
20:49 Ryan Holiday? So she's the younger sister of Commodus. After Commodus's failed reign, he takes over. It's a mistake of Marcus Aurelius to have passed the throne to him. He would have been much better to put his daughter in charge. Because as she survives these political machinations, this sort of turmoil in Rome, by the time she's in her 50s, there's this tyrannical emperor named Caracalla in charge. He orders her executed by forced suicide as part of one of his endless purges. And her last words seem like something that could be in meditations. She says- Go free my soul, you've been trapped in an unworthy body. And then, as she opens her veins, she says, let them see that I am, in fact,
21:33 Ryan Holiday? the daughter of Marcus Aurelius. She's basically saying in her last moments that she wanted to make her father proud, that she wanted to live like a Stoic, that she was courageous and unafraid, that she'd mastered herself, that she didn't fear death, that instead she feared not living up to her philosophical principles, that she wanted to demonstrate the virtues as Portia Cato had, as Cato had, as Seneca was forced to do, as Marcus Aurelius did in their final moments.
22:08 Ryan Holiday? And so, again, to go back to this idea that we only have sort of snippets and fragments about these Stoic women, because not only were their perspectives and their point of view not captured at the time in the ancient world, but then generations of historians were just utterly uninterested in unearthing these sort of hidden voices and hidden figures, who were right there in the thick of things as they happened. So, in the time of Nero, his great Stoic rival is this Stoic philosopher named Thrasya. And he has this daughter named Fannia, who is married to another Stoic philosopher named Helvidius, who was equally opposed and obstinate in his opposition
22:50 Ryan Holiday? to Nero's not just tyranny, but utter and complete incompetence. And his daughter is regarded as part of the Stoic opposition. Most of what we know about her comes from the Letters of Pliny the Younger. She twice follows her husband into exile. She's once exiled herself for working on a biographical book in praise of her husband, who'd become this sort of blacklisted figure for his resistance. She hires another Stoic writer to do this biography, and he's ultimately executed for the crime of daring to celebrate someone who'd opposed an emperor. And in his trial, he tries to throw Fannia
23:34 Ryan Holiday? Under the bus for involving him in this, again, not bearing his fate stoically. And she's threatened with death if she doesn't confirm that it's true. We're told by Pliny that she doesn't shrink from the perils which threatened her. Even though the Senate had passed a decree that all, you know, volumes in question should be destroyed, she in fact defied them and attempted to preserve them. She carries them with her into exile. So even under the threat of losing everything she owns, or potentially her life, she continues to do what she thinks is right. She's continuing to fight for this sort of legacy of the Stoic opposition. And, and we're also told by, by Pliny later, when he is sick,
24:16 Ryan Holiday? that the person he was thinking of was how Fania had herself responded to some of her illnesses. He, he talked about how even though she had this fever and this cough, even though she was emaciated and, and utterly exhausted, even within this, her mind and her body and her spirit was strong, worthy of, of Helvidius and, and Thrassia, her father. And, and even as she was losing ground, he found that, that her example was an inspiration to him. And that he, he grieved at the thought of so excellent a woman being torn from us. And that he thought we, they would never see the likes of her again
24:57 Ryan Holiday? because she'd led such a pure and upright life and that she was dignified and loyal and delightful and charming. I guess, I guess what he's saying is, again, here we have just a glimpse, a few snippets of an incredibly brave and Stoic woman, who, as Epictetus said, we had to embody the ideas of Stoic philosophy rather than simply talked about them.
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26:32 Ryan Holiday? We have a lot of stories from and about brave Stoic men. We have Cato defying Caesar. We have Rutilius Rufus going into exile. We have Thrasse defying Nero. Musonius Rufus is exiled like four times. We have Marcus Rilius on the battlefield. We know their names. We know their exploits. We know their stories. And these deeds are told and retold and retold about how tough they were, how much they endured, how they stood up for the right thing at the right time, even against incredible odds or real danger. This part of Stoicism is sort of history writ large, right? Like, we have all these stories of Stoic men as if there weren't Stoic women
27:17 Ryan Holiday? who were equally brave, equally impressive, and whose stories would equally inspire and connect and demonstrate these Stoic ideas. And so, yeah, there are fewer stories of female Stoics, which might lead people to assume that men are the Stoic sex. But that's- It's not remotely true, and it wasn't true even in the ancient world. What we're dealing with is what they call the publication bias. Because men were writing the history and society was ruled by men, the women were overlooked. And what this costs us is so many great examples of women who lived and practiced the Stoic virtues.
27:56 Ryan Holiday? Sometimes, yeah, in quieter, less public ways, but in other cases, in even more impressive ways than the Stoic stories we do know. This doesn't tell us anything about women. It just tells us about how history has been made.
28:14 Ryan Holiday? And then, of course, we should probably talk here briefly about one of the ultimate Stoic women, Marcus Aurelius's mother. Right? In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius opens with his influences. And who does he choose to thank first? It's not his philosophy teacher. It's not Antoninus, his adopted stepfather. It's not Bronto, his rhetoric teacher. He thanks, after thanking his grandfather and his father, who died when he was very young. He says that from his mother, he learns reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability to not only do wrong, he says, but to even conceive of doing it.
28:54 Ryan Holiday? And he says, "the simple way that she lived, not in the least like the rich." But it is illustrative, right? He doesn't, he doesn't put her name, and neither does Gregory Hayes. So for most people, Marcus Aurelius's mother is faceless and nameless. To most readers of Meditations and certainly pop culture consumers of Stoicism, she remains nameless and faceless. I had to just look it up again because I forgot. But, but his mother, Domitia, is, is not just this sort of quiet, graceful, dignified figure. When I interviewed Donald Robertson on the Daily Stoic Podcast, he, he sort of waxed rhapsodically
29:35 Ryan Holiday? about what like a pioneering businesswoman she was, what an impressive sort of embodiment of Stoicism she was here. I'll play a chunk of that for a second.
29:45 Speaker 01 She's this sort of quiet model of Stoicism.
29:50 Ryan Holiday? That that historians and subsequent philosophers don't give enough credit to. But what does Marcus Rilius learn from his mother?
29:59 Speaker 01 Well, you could, you know, at a stretch, you could view her as his first tutor. And, you know, he she's the only woman. He mentions his sister fleetingly, but other than that, his mother is the only woman that he acknowledges in in book one of the Meditations. I think the most revealing thing about her is that Fronto writes to Marcus at one point and says, I'm going to write a letter to your mum in Greek, right? Fronto is an expert on Latin. And Marcus's mother was not just fluent in Greek, like most Roman, most educated Romans would be bilingual in Latin and Greek, but she seems to be completely fluent in it.
30:41 Speaker 01 And Fronto, who's the most acclaimed Latin rhetorician in the world, writes this kind of slightly pathetic letter to Marcus, saying, could you just check it for mistakes before I send it to your mum? Because I'd be embarrassed, you know, to for her to read it and think I've, you know, like, got the the grammar slightly wrong or something.
31:00 Ryan Holiday? Right.
31:00 Speaker 01 So, and in Roman society, to look to a woman like that as a as your superior intellectually is unusual. Like, Fronto, and also Fronto mentions that his wife is like a student to Marcus's mother. He actually refers to her as Marcus's mother's client, meaning her kind of subordinate, like her student. So, it a bit of a stretch, but the picture kind of emerges of a woman who is like a multimillionaire, billionaire, a construction industry magnet.
31:43 Speaker 01 We have bricks with her name stamped on them that survive today, right? She owned clay fields and brick and tile factories that she inherited from her family. She never remarried after Marcus's father died. She would have been in her early twenties or Late teens when her husband died, she remained single. She, Marcus and her went to stay with Marcus's paternal grandfather for a while, but then they leave and they go back into her house, which again shows unusual independence in Roman society. And she seems to have surrounded herself with a kind of intellectual circle, a kind of salon, of which she is the center.
32:29 Ryan Holiday? So Portia Cato wasn't the only Stoic at the center of a conspiracy. People know Seneca is indicted or implicated in what becomes known as the Pisonian conspiracy or the Piso conspiracy. This is a group of Romans who are plotting against Nero. But there's another figure in that conspiracy who embodies Stoicism in a much more genuine way. Epicharus was this former slave turned freedwoman. She's a leading figure in the conspiracy. The conspiracy ultimately fails and she's arrested and in prison and she's brutally tortured as Nero's goons try to figure out who was involved. They're trying to stop the conspiracy.
33:13 Ryan Holiday? They're trying to get her to implicate all of her co-conspirators. And we're told that no amount of torture would force her to reveal the names of those co-conspirators. People at that time believed that women would fail under torture. But Epicharus is another example that sort of totally obliterates that notion. It's Tacitus who tells us about Seneca's deaths also. He says, "All the nobler was the example set by a freedwoman in such a crisis in screening strangers. Many of these people, he says, she hardly knew. Meanwhile, freeborn men and Romans and knights and senators who weren't subjected to any kind of torture in this conspiracy and many others folded in an instant."
33:55 Ryan Holiday? He said, "Everyone betraying his dearest kinfolk." And his point was again, this silly notion that women are somehow not to be trusted under duress or stress or pain because they are the weaker sex. We just have so many examples, and Epicharus being a great example, of who's actually Stoic under pressure.
34:20 Ryan Holiday? So we have another woman who's famously involved in the Piso conspiracy. Tragically, Rome was a dark place. I believe she watches her mother and her mother's husband die by execution under the Emperor Claudius. She marries a guy named Thrasse. Now, whereas the Seneca's of the world accommodated themselves to Nero and tried to be the adults in the room, Thrasse was part of the opposition from day one. He refused to go along with Nero. He refused to rubber stamp. He was defiant. He was constantly a thorn in the emperor's side. And eventually, he is sentenced to death. He probably knew that's where his opposition would bring him. He knew that it was a losing cause,
35:05 Ryan Holiday? but he insisted on doing it anyway. And eventually, he is sentenced to death by Nero. Now, his wife, Aria, attempts to join him in this, and he stops her. He says, "Look, would you want our daughter to do what you're about to do if she was in your position?" And it's this thought that stops her cold, and she decides to live. So this is one of the few stories of these brave Stoic women that does not end in suicide, thankfully. She lives for her daughter. She focuses on what she can do with what's left of her life and not focusing on what had been taken from her, what she had lost. And this is something Seneca talks about. He says, "If you achieved or derived pleasure from something, your duty is not to complain about what's been
35:49 Ryan Holiday? taken from you, but to be thankful for what's been given." And I think she sort of embodies this idea, even in the face of this imperial persecution, even though she loses so much, she holds on to her philosophical principles. She's brave enough to carry on. She keeps going. She has to live through a parade of terrible emperors after Nero, but she does her best.
36:15 Ryan Holiday? Obviously, Seneca is a well-known philosophical writer. Lesser known in Seneca's writings are his famous consolations. He writes these essays that are consoling someone bereft with grief. He writes one to his mother. He writes one to a woman named Marcia, who is the daughter of a prominent historian that Seneca knew well. Her father was tried under Tiberius for being a Republican, for celebrating Brutus and Cassius, and that this was a violation of the laws at that time. So he's called to appear before the Senate. And after ruthless interrogation, Cordis starves himself so he could escape punishment and effectively in protest of the illegitimacy of the regime.
36:58 Ryan Holiday? Anyways, the trial continues after his death. And one of the punishments is that they demand all copies of his work be burned. But it's his daughter devastated by the loss of his father, who Seneca would write his consolation to. She bravely defies this order. She loves philosophy, she loves books. And so she takes a copy of her father's book and hides it. And every time her house is searched, she lies, she covers it up. She takes this great risk to smuggle out this work of literature and history to protect her father's legacy. And then later, when Caligula lifts the prohibition, Marcia gets a pardon and she gets her father's work back into celebration. And because of this disobedience, this defiance, right?
37:43 Ryan Holiday? Which I think the Stoics would say, we always owe tyrants in tyranny. That is the proper response. Like, when they tell you to do this, do the opposite. Because of her brave act, we still have fragments of this part of history to today survive.
38:02 Ryan Holiday? We actually hear about another brave woman through Seneca's writings, particularly his consolations. Seneca writes this essay to his mother, Helvia. In that essay, he writes about his aunt. Unfortunately, we don't know her name, but she was a surrogate mother to him at critical age. Moments of his life. Seneca was sick as a young boy and doctor's orders, he has to travel to a warmer client. So he's actually taken in by his aunt and uncle. And in this essay, Seneca talks about what a powerful and strong and inspiring woman she was. Raising him far from home, living in a place far from Rome.
38:43 Ryan Holiday? And then he relates this story where on his aunt and uncle's journey to return home, there was a terrible shipwreck. He says, while on this sea voyage, she lost her beloved husband, who she'd married as a young woman. And he says that she bore simultaneously the burdens of grief and fear. And though shipwreck, she rode out the storms and brought his body safely ashore. He says, and this is him admitting this very thing we're talking about. He says, oh, how many noble deeds of women are lost in obscurity. And so again, despite some of Seneca's casual sexism, you know, he refers to women in his writings as simple minded and lacking self-control and weak.
39:25 Ryan Holiday? In truth, the women in his life were marvels of virtue and strength and perseverance and Stoic ideas. And he also, of course, celebrates her compassion and love and patience with him. And so again, there are just so many Stoic women who not just lived interesting and full lives, but lived interesting lives full of virtue. And their reward for this is that we don't even know their names. As we were trying to fact check this, Wikipedia just refers to her as Helvia's sister. We know the name of her husband, but we don't know her name, which is a tragedy.
40:04 Ryan Holiday? So one of the things that sexism and prejudice does, because it is so irrational, is it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Even when we see direct proof that our prejudice or our beliefs are unfounded, we prefer to continue in that belief rather than see that this exception actually disproves the prejudice that we have. For instance, there was this black female poet in revolutionary colonial America named Phyllis Wheatley. And there's all these fascinating letters from the founders, including- Thomas Jefferson, who's sort of like contorting themselves. He can't believe that a slave would be capable of thinking or literature. He's trying to rationalize this institution that his lifestyle is dependent on.
40:48 Ryan Holiday? And we see this in the ancient Rome too. So for instance, in Rome, there was this female poet named Solpicia. And she was a great writer, a wealthy, successful, brilliant young woman. And her poems were just widely believed to be written by men. Like, people just couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that a woman wrote these great poems. And in fact, it was only relatively recently that we began to understand who she was and that she was the author of these actually autobiographical poems that were kind of bold and rebellious, even provocative. The only reason they survived to us is because people believed they were written by men. They probably would have been tossed aside had people in the ancient world known
41:30 Ryan Holiday? they were written by a woman, or maybe they wouldn't have been preserved in the Middle Ages because they would have been seen to be lesser than.
41:41 Ryan Holiday? And in more modern times, where women are in the workplace, are in the public eye, do have access to things, there are plenty of women you may have heard of, but you maybe didn't know actually practiced Stoicism. I interviewed Arianna Huffington a couple of years ago. She's obviously a well-known author, political power broker. She's the founder of the Huffington Post, which she sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. She's a board member of a bunch of huge, important companies. She told me she has a little laminated note card of a quote from Marcus Aurelius that she carries with her in her purse at all times. I interviewed the musician Camila Cabello, who told me that Stoicism has been something that helped keep her sane in the midst of pop stardom. It's actually not the only Stoic female pop star.
42:26 Ryan Holiday? Katy Perry likes and shares daily Stoic stuff on social media all the time, which is pretty surreal. The actress Anna Kendrick talked about how the book that would surprise people the most on her bookshelf would be Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And then, of course, there are great, modern Stoic things. And writers Martha Nussbaum, who I've had on the podcast is one of the best translators of Seneca, and she's written a number of fantastic essays on the Stoics. She's a professor at the University of Chicago. Actually, even one of the best biographies of Seneca was written by Emily Wilson, the translator who's done The Odyssey and the Iliad. The social activist Beatrice Webb, who I talked about in the Justice book, she would talk about meditations being her manual of devotion that she would read and reread throughout
43:11 Ryan Holiday? her life. Chief Master Sergeant Joanne Bass, who was at one point, I think, the highest ranking a woman in the US Armed Forces. She's not only come out to the Daily Stoic bookstore, but I hear from so many male officers and female officers who have been given the Daily Stoic by her. She's sort of single-handedly pushed Stoicism throughout the US Air Force. And I've heard from fighter pilots. I've heard from authors, entrepreneurs, creators, elected leaders, just so many women who are applying these Stoic ideas as they are meant to be applied, which is in the midst of busy, personal and professional lives.
43:53 Ryan Holiday? When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.
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