Don’t Be a Broken Parable

Be wary whom you go to work for. Moral compromises add up and eventually destroy you. 👉 Check out to James Romm's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-good-people-lose-themselves-to-tyrants-james-romm-pt-1/id1430315931?i=1000721772928, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0OwAF7hkhE7eg8FyuFZg15, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLuSmSK7M8 📚 Book Mentioned: Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero by James Romm https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/dying-every-day-seneca-at-the-court-of-nero at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/dying-every-day-seneca-at-the-court-of-nero 🎙️ Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

• 0:55Ryan 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 and 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.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca, in this period, calls to mind a certain song lyric by the band Bear's Den.

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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 at the Painted Porch. I'll link to that. And Professor Rahm has

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  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 to. Here, let me bring you a little piece of it, actually.

• 3:02Ryan 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?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself? Seneca tried to extricate himself but failed.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  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. So yeah, things got very sticky.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I have this quote that I think it's sort of, it strikes me as maybe the sort of through line of both your books. But I have 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.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as a 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.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  For Seneca, it's fascinating to me because obviously Nero doesn't start out as a tyrant.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  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, he can't get out.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  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. And then things started to really crash.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Is it mental illness or is it what power? Is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  I think there's an interesting contrast, right? Because so both Marcus Aurelius and Nero are.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  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. So they're both trained in Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius by Junius Rusticus, Nero by Seneca himself. And it goes in very different directions.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. 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.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Even in spite of the immense duress, immense pressure. And the other who collapsed really as soon as the opportunity for wrongdoing came around.

• 7:57Ryan 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.