Don’t Ignore the Smell

"From 165 to 180 AD, Rome was hit by a plague. The “Antonine Plague,” also known as the Plague of Galen, would kill literally millions of people during Marcus Aurelius’s reign. It was horrible and terrifying. No one knew what caused this awful disease, or what had brought it on. Had the gods cursed the empire? Was it punishment for their sins? How could they stop the contagion, which could kill a person in two miserable weeks?"Find out how Marcus dealt with his plague—and how we can do the same—on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Don't Ignore the Smell. From 165 to 180 AD, Rome was hit by a plague, the Antonine Plague, also known as the Plague of Galen, would literally kill millions of people during Marcus Aurelius's reign. It was horrible and terrifying. No one knew what caused

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  this awful disease, or what had brought it on. Had the gods cursed the empire? Was it punishment for their sins? How could they stop the contagion, which could kill a person in two miserable weeks? In his book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Donald Robertson tells us that the Romans believed that the burning of incense would protect a family from falling ill. Marcus Aurelius, who bravely refused to flee Rome as other leaders had, would wake up each day to a surreal smelling city, a mixture of the putrid smell of dead bodies and the sweet aroma of incense. As Donald writes, "For over a decade, the scent of smoke of incense was a reminder to Marcus that he was living under the shadow of death, and that survival from one day to the next

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  could never be taken for granted." Until very recently, most of us in the first world had no sense of what that horrible smell that hung over Rome was like. Almost no one alive remembered the Spanish Flu, which killed something like 50 million people between 1918 and 1920. The AIDS epidemic, which was a horrifying, terrible medical crisis, had receded into the distance. Ebola, and SARS, and swine flu, and Zika were mercifully less awful than predicted. And then suddenly, COVID-19 changed everything. Suddenly, we were reminded that we remain beneath the same shadow of death, and that life should never be taken for granted. Life is short, nature is brutal, and epidemics

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  are unsparing. We are still, for all our medical advancements, just pagans, hoping, praying with our silly devices that we may be skipped. And maybe we will, but maybe we won't, which is why we have to live now, which is why we must seize the day while we can. Hey, just wanted to remind you, if you want to take your practice of Stoicism to the next level, if you want some physical reminders of the ideas we talk about here, check out the Daily Stoic store. You can go to dailystoic.com/store. These products are what help us keep the lights on here at Daily Stoic. They help grow the business, let us spread the message to more and more people. So if you want to support us, check that out. Go to dailystoic.com/store.