Who Will You Emulate?

Cicero vs. Cato: Who is the greater example?📚 Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ 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

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

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Who will you emulate? No one did it better, no one did more for the historical record. Without Cicero, much of the Stoic canon would have been lost. We are lucky that this great and articulate mind of antiquity spent so much time with the Stoic texts. It is through him that some of the best Stoic wisdom was preserved. Cato, on the other hand, hardly wrote anything down. He didn't provide us with any dialogues or essays. He hardly talked about Stoicism at all. Yet we are far luckier for his contributions to the philosophy, because he showed us what a Stoic was supposed to do.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  In Lives of the Stoics, I am fascinated by this contrast, the two biggest contemporary Stoic philosophers. They were friends and rivals, colleagues and opponents, but their biggest divergence came not in terms of policy, but in how they lived. Cicero was a fantastic writer, but he was also preposterously ambitious and vain. He was enormously wealthy through rather dubious means. And during the vexing political dilemmas of his time, he often chose self-preservation over principle. Cato, on the other hand, was not a particularly good writer, and few, if any, of his speeches survive. But his character, it spoke loud enough to make up for it.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  He was brave, he was unbending, he was unwavering in his commitment to justice and virtue. And so which, in the end, is the greater contribution? Which is the greater example? Neither man was perfect, but they do present us with distinct paths. Which will we choose? Words or deeds? Preserving this philosophy on the page or embodying it in practice? The world needs both, of course. But if we had to choose, we'd take the latter over the former, any day.