Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Are You Spending This Wisely | LIFE-CHANGING Stoic Lessons From Gladiator About this episode As winter fades and spring emerges, as we adjust our clocks for daylight savings here in the next few days, it's a good time to pause and reflect. Where did the time go?💡 Go to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 at checkout to get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge! Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2025. 🎙️ 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? Are you spending this wisely? As winter fades and spring emerges, as we adjust our clocks for daylight savings, it's a good time to pause and reflect. Where did all the time go? It seems like just yesterday, we were bundled up against the cold, watching the last leaves fall from the trees. We quoted recently from Philip Larkin's beautiful poem about the changing of the seasons and how "hidden within the greenness of the trees is a kind of grief." As the poem reads, "Is it that they are born again and we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain.
1:40 Ryan Holiday? Last year is dead, they seem to say. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." Seneca observed that our greatest mistake is looking at death as something that awaits us in the distant future. "We do not suddenly get ready to die," he writes. "We have been dying every day." Like those rings in a tree trunk, each one marking another year past, we too are slowly completing our journey.
2:08 Ryan Holiday? And this thought isn't meant to bring down the mood, but to remind us that each moment we do have is precious. It tells us to wake up and truly live, not just watch time go by, to not just enjoy these longer days, but to embrace making the most of them. And that's the idea in this challenge we do here at Daily Stoic each spring called the Spring Forward Challenge, which is to ensure that as another season, another year is written into the trees, we'll have something to show for it, that we were really here for it, that we did something with it. And as we start to, you know, engage in our spring cleaning, maybe we want to declutter our life a little bit too.
2:52 Ryan Holiday? Clean out some of that detritus and debris, get rid of some of those old bad habits and just some of that stuff. You know, think about how you spent the last week. How productive was it? How'd you spend these last couple of months? Do you have enough to show for it? Well, in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, we will push you to examine those parts of your life and make habits and changes that will help you spring forward in your life. Going to have 10 days of Stoic-inspired challenges, awesome stuff that will make you better. I'm going to be doing it along with thousands of Stoics all over the world. Starts on March 20th, so let's sign up now. Hey, just to thank you for being an awesome listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast, which I very much appreciate.
3:36 Ryan Holiday? We are offering a discount to anyone who wants to sign up for the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. We're going to kick spring of 2025 off with 10 days of Stoic-inspired challenges. And if you go to dailystoic.com/spring right now and enter code DSPOD20, you'll get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge. It's going to be awesome. It starts on March 20th, so don't wait. I'll see you in there, dailystoic.com/spring with code DSPOD20 for the 2025 Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Let's start off spring with a bang. I'll see you in there.
4:17 Speaker 01 Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. This is not it.
4:21 Speaker 02 I had the privilege of reading his meditations.
4:23 Speaker 01 Will I be known as the philosopher? The warrior? The tyrant?
4:29 Speaker 03 Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus!
4:40 Ryan Holiday? They are iconic films. They've won all the awards you can win. Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Score, Best Sound. They've made hundreds of millions of dollars. They've been seen by millions of people. And they've also introduced millions of people to Stoic philosophy, including indirectly myself. Like, when someone first recommended Marcus Aurelius's Meditations to me, I was like, "Oh, that's that old guy from the movie Gladiator that Joaquin Phoenix's character kills." And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Stoic lessons from Gladiator 1 and 2, and the real-life Stoic teachings that they're connected to from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations Epictetus and Seneca. Let's get into it.
5:25 Ryan Holiday? So, obviously Gladiator is a work of fiction, but it's based on some stuff that is real. Marcus Aurelius, of course, exists. He does have a son named Commodus. The Ark of Maximus, the general who wants to return to his farm, that's based on the myth of Cincinnatus. But the dichotomy between a great man, Marcus Aurelius, and a screwed-up son, Commodus, that's Richard Harris and Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Commodus, that is also very real. Marcus Aurelius does have a terrible son. The scene in the movie is Marcus calls Maximus to his tent. Marcus says, "I want you to be Rome's protector." And Maximus says, "But what about Commodus?" And Marcus says, "Look, this is the problem, that Commodus is not a moral man.
6:10 Ryan Holiday? He can see that his son is not well." Now, in real life, Marcus almost certainly didn't intend for Commodus to take over right away. In fact, there's just an unending series of tragedies that put this into motion. Marcus Aurelius buries 11 children.
6:28 Ryan Holiday? Commodus is in some ways the last man standing, like literally the last son standing. And there's some belief that Marcus wanted him to rule the way he had ruled with a co-emperor. Marcus ruled with his stepbrother Lucius Verus. Marcus had tried multiple times in real life to try to shield Commodus from himself. But in the end, he didn't have the courage to do what fictional Marcus had the courage to at least try to do. But it does make you think, how could such an incredible man have such an awful son? And unfortunately, this is more the rule than the exception in history. Churchill has a flawed and tragic son.
7:10 Ryan Holiday? FDR, his four children have like 12 or 15 marriages. Even Cyrus the Great, the great Eastern king, does not have a great son. Why in real life does Marcus Aurelius pass power on to Commodus? Marcus's four predecessors had chosen their successor. And Marcus having a male son perhaps felt like he didn't have that choice. And the result tragically was disaster. And it's this tension, the impossible choice that Marcus Aurelius faced that they try to capture at the beginning of the movie.
7:47 Ryan Holiday? So after Marcus talks to Maximus, he calls his son Commodus in. And they have an interesting discussion that brings up, I think, an important Stoic theme. Commodus says, Dad, you wrote to me once talking about the four virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. With a remarkable amount of self-awareness, Commodus admits that he does not have these virtues.
8:09 Speaker 04 But none of my virtues won your list.
8:14 Speaker 04 Even then, it was as if you didn't want me for your son.
8:17 Ryan Holiday? And again, we can imagine what it must have been like to have a father who is so admired and so impressive. How he must have felt like he could never measure up. And so what Commodus in the movie does is he tries to say, well, I have these other virtues. I have these other things. He's saying, Dad, can you be proud of me for these things? He says ambition.
8:38 Speaker 04 That can be a virtue when it drives us to accept.
8:40 Ryan Holiday? But i- it's an interesting point. Is ambition a virtue? What would the Stoics say? What would the real Marcus have said if Commodus had in fact come to him and said, you know, I might not be courageous or self-disciplined or particularly honest or wise, but I am really ambitious. Well, one of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marx realist writes specifically on ambition. He says, "The problem with ambition is that it's about tying our sanity to other people's opinions, to other people's approval." He says sanity has to be rooted in our own actions. The problem with ambition is that, you know, ambition wants to be emperor. Commodus desperately wants power. And what does that make him do in the movie? It makes him kill his own father.
9:25 Ryan Holiday? It makes him betray and lie and cheat and do awful horrible things. Marcus Aurelius, in real life and in the movie, doesn't have this kind of ambition. Marcus Aurelius is into self-actualization, not achievement. He's into doing good as opposed to being seen as good. And throughout Meditations, Marx returns to this theme of ambition. In fact, in book seven of Meditations, he says, "To really think about ambitious people, to put yourself in your mind and see the screwed up things that they prize." He would have known people like Joaquin Phoenix portrays in the movie. Marx Aurelius in real life would have known people like that. In book eight, Marx talks about conquering his ambition, getting over it, realizing that it doesn't matter. So i- in a way Gladiator does a really good job
10:10 Ryan Holiday? of showing us that this thing that Commodus thinks is a virtue is in fact a fatal flaw. Wanting something outside of our control, wanting something beyond our capacities. In this case, Commodus wants to be emperor, but he is woefully unqualified and ill-suited for this job. But he wants it and he thinks it says something about him to get it or to not get it. And this is what drives him to commit the most heinous sin you could commit. He kills his own father. He kills the great man because that great man, in the movie at least, has the sense that he isn't qualified. And perhaps it was in real life, Marcus Aurelius's own desire for legacy, for wanting to be seen or perceived a certain way that prevented him from doing what he actually needed to do,
10:55 Ryan Holiday? which is get his son as far away from the seat of power as possible.
11:04 Speaker 05 There's a man walking through a field. The stalks of grain are bending low under their weight. The wind is blowing softly on, seems like a cold day. He sees a small bird land on a branch. And the bird takes flight and he follows it with his eyes, smiling at the beauty of what the Stoics would call nature's inadvertence. And then the man turns and you see that actually this isn't such a beautiful and pretty scene, that he's surrounded not just by mud, but by all the signs of war. Cavalry is getting ready. Men are marching behind, sharp palisades, checking their shields and their swords. They're about to do terrible damage to each other.
11:47 Speaker 05 There will be ceaseless, ferocious violence and death. This is, as you know, the opening scene of the movie Gladiator. Russell Crowe is preparing for a fictionalized version of the macro manic wars, the wars that Marcus Rilis does in fact wage on the far-flung borders of the Roman Empire. Actually, this is Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. And they've talked about this scene before. This is kind of an unscripted improvised moment between the director and the actor in the earliest days of shooting, when they realize that they have this incredible connection and they're gonna do something magical together.
12:30 Speaker 06 I'm pretty sure I did every single thing he asked. And I put little strokes of color on certain things. And then I brought the attention back to the battlefield. And he just came up to me and go, "You and me are gonna be fucking great together."
12:43 Speaker 05 But it's also, through Maximus, an embodiment of a really key, but easy to miss Stoic lesson. In the midst of darkness and death. And the worst things that human beings can do to each other. Humans also have the ability to see light and beauty and feel wonder and majesty. Epictetus would say that every situation has two handles. We choose which one we're going to grab. We also get to choose the angle, not unlike a director, that we look at a specific scene at. Right? Maximus's gaze, how he's thinking, how he's looking. By framing it one way, he sees all the good. And then he zooms out slightly and he's able to see all the not so good. Which is an exercise that we humans can do.
13:25 Speaker 05 Whatever is happening in the world, whether it's the middle of a pandemic or political polarization, or your own impending divorce, or bankruptcy, or health crisis. You choose how you're going to look at this. The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. How we choose to look, the perception, the lens with which we look at the world shapes how we're going to see it and how we're going to feel as a result of it. The perspective that we take on life is everything. It's the most important thing. And we miss this power all the time, just as many of you have probably seen this scene in Gladiator and not noticed the subtext of what's happening, the Stoic message that's underneath it. We have to really look. We have to hone our senses. And Marcus Aurelius's life is the quintessential example of this.
14:10 Speaker 05 Again, this is a life with a plague. This is a life where he buried multiple children, where he was betrayed, where there were natural disasters. There was one thing after another. And yet, what you find in meditations, is there a certain amount of world weirdness? Is this a certain amount of darkness? Is there a certain amount of depressiveness? Yeah, sure. And people have noted that for a long time. But you also can't read meditations and not see Marcus Aurelius's zest for life, his poet's eye, his gratitude, his perception about how lucky he is, about how wonderful life can be. And this is the power that we all have, an edge that the Stoic is trying to hone always. We should remember that in almost every way, Marcus Aurelius's times were worse than ours are now,
14:56 Speaker 05 more stressful than ours are now, darker than ours are now. We should choose to see all the positivity and beauty and change and progress and take solace and inspiration in the fact that if he was able to find good and things to be excited about and things to get out of bed for in the morning, then certainly we can too.
15:17 Ryan Holiday? So one of the coolest scenes in Meditations is Maximus is in the bowels of the Colosseum. He's on one of the ramps about to run up onto the floor of the Colosseum to fight. He says, "Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo, and this is not it. This is not it." And Proximo has to remind him that Marcus Aurelius is dead. He says, "We mortals are but shadows and dust." "Shadows and dust," Maximus, as he runs out onto the Colosseum. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius writes something like this in Meditations, in real life. He says, "Soon you'll be ashes or bones." He says, "A mere name at most." Says, "And even that name is just a sound, an echo."
15:59 Ryan Holiday? Says, "The things we want in life are stale, empty, and trivial." So the Stoics were very aware of the ephemerality, the fleeting nature of existence. Marcus Aurelius, in another passage in Meditation, lists all the emperors that came before him, and he talks about how unfamiliar their names sound now. Where are they? What happened to their accomplishments? How many people even remember them? It's Alexander the Great and his mule driver. They're both buried in the same thing. Happened to both. Basically saying they're all worm food. They're all ashes and dust. There are two, I think, key Stoic lessons here. The first is momentum worry. Life is short, life is fragile, we will be forgotten. And that ties into the second, which is humility. None of us last forever. Nothing we do lasts forever.
16:44 Ryan Holiday? We are not immortal. We are not gods. We're not that important. We are shadows and dust. From dust we came, from dust we will return. That is the humbling nature of existence, and it's a beautiful reminder that we can't forget.
17:03 Ryan Holiday? In the final scene of Gladiator, Maximus is mortally wounded, and Commodus, who he's just disarmed, is trying to kill him. And so Commodus shouts, he says, "Sword, sword." He's shouting to his Praetorian guards, but the soldiers refuse to help him. Now, obviously, this is sort of the penultimate scene of the movie, but there's also a really key Stoic lesson in it. Actually, something that Marcus Aurelius talks about in real life in Meditations. He says in Meditations that it's far better to be a boxer than a fencer, that you want to be able to fight with your hands and not a sword. For precisely this very reason, right? He says, "A fencer has to pick up their weapon." The Praetorian guards have to give you your sword to be able to fight with it. But he says, "A boxer..." clenches their fists and then they are armed.
17:47 Ryan Holiday? The metaphor here is if you are dependent on external things, if you need approval, if you need access, if you need funding, if you need stuff from other people, you are as vulnerable as Commodus. If you are self-sufficient, if you have what you need, if you are trained to fight even without weapons, you're good even in the worst of situations. And yeah, this is a fictional scene. It's a moving one, to be sure. But it's also an illustration of that idea in Meditations, that to be a boxer and not a fencer. You want your weapon to be a part of you, rather than an external you're dependent on. And think about this, right? Commodus is dependent on the sword. He's dependent on his Praetorian guards.
18:30 Ryan Holiday? He's dependent on the power of his office. He's dependent on fears, dependent on momentum. Strong men often appear very strong, but in fact, they're incredibly vulnerable. They're at the mercy of someone or something else. But Maximus, Maximus is his own man. There's nothing you can take from him because he's already lost everything. But he's also empowered. He moves under his own power. He would have, as a Stoic, say, command of the greatest empire, not the throne, but himself. He's ruled by dignity, he's ruled by strength, by his own principles, by his own weapons, by his own mastery. He doesn't need anyone or anything to be great. And even when he is bleeding out, when he has been cheated, when he is encircled, he is still stronger.
19:15 Ryan Holiday? He is still the better man. All he has to do, as Marx really says, is clench his fist. All he has to do is do what he does. And I think that's an interesting question. What are you? Are you Commodus or Maximus? Are you self-reliant or an impostor? Are you dependent or are you independent? Are you a tyrant or a gladiator? A boxer or a fencer?
19:42 Ryan Holiday? Sometimes people ask me about the movie Gladiator and I tell them, if anything, Joaquin Phoenix underplays how horrendous Commodus actually was. He was bloodthirsty. We don't know if he was incestuous, but you know what he was? He was obsessed with fame and attention. He slaughters thousands of animals in the Colosseum. Given in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tells us like, it makes your stomach turn. How many animals Commodus kills in real life in the Colosseum? It made the stomachs turn of the spectators in the Colosseum who went to see Bloodsport. The sheer psychopathy of this man. And as it happens, in real life, Commodus is killed by a gladiator, not in the arena, but outside
20:26 Ryan Holiday? it. I think that's another interesting thing about this. Where does he get this from? Why is Commodus obsessed with this? We know that Marcus Aurelius, in real life, detests the carnage that happens in the Colosseum. In fact, we're told that's where he may have written chunks of Meditations. The emperor was expected to be at the Colosseum, was expected to make an appearance as a sort of head of the ceremony. But Marcus would read philosophy books there. And he may have written parts of Meditations while he was there. So is it kind of a son being interested in what his father was not interested in? Is it kind of a rebellion? Is it that he thought his father was weak or, you know,
21:06 Ryan Holiday? obsessed with books? And he, you know, is it like that kind of thing? I don't exactly know, but there's something there. And there's a dark, twisted element in Commodus that Marcus Aurelius doesn't have in real life. And in fact, a bunch of the metaphors in Meditations showed us how little Marcus thought of the gladiatorial games and Bloodsport. So so many of us are like these animals at the games that are torn up and bleeding and dying, but whether they're the gladiators or the beasts, they want to come back and fight the next day. And to Marcus, this is analogous to us being unchanging, even though life is beating the shit out of us and tearing us up. All we want to do is come back tomorrow. Instead of fixing, instead of changing, instead of accommodating.
21:50 Ryan Holiday? And adjusting, we just go back to get mauled and gored again. And he, he thought that this was insane. And then a funny thing about Marcus sort of being so different than his son. We only know of a few laws that Marcus Aurelius passes in real life as emperor. But one of them was that he wanted the gladiators to train and to fight with wooden swords so that they wouldn't get hurt. He, he was squeamish. He didn't like people getting hurt. And so there's some tension there. There's, there's something tragic about that lesson skipping a generation or that lesson not fully landing. Commodus missed the point. He thought it was manly and cool to be violent, to hurt people, to inflict pain on, on other people and other things.
22:33 Ryan Holiday? I mean, we know now that people who inflict pain on animals, it's a, it's a sign they're a dangerous person, probably inflict harm on you too. And that's what lends me to believe that perhaps Commodus was just screwed up. Like it wasn't Marcus Aurelius's fault as a parent so much as it was just a, you know, a freak of nature. But he was a flawed and tragic man and the apple did fall very far from the tree there.
22:59 Ryan Holiday? It's actually funny. A, a couple of years ago, Russell Crowe, star of the movie, tweeted in response to an account that sort of says like dates from history. Yeah, Russell Crowe tweeted, "I'm sure in Marcus Aurelius's dogged stoicism, he looks back on that shit decision with regret." He quotes Marcus Aurelius. He says that Marcus Aurelius is, it remains an inspiration. Nothing is sent to man that he is not fitted to nature to bear. And I think his implication was that Commodus was in fact not fitted for what Marcus had intended him for, and that was the tragic mistake. But apparently from what I've read, Russell Crowe has a long time relationship with that quote and, and he used it for inspiration when he was shooting the movie.
23:43 Ryan Holiday? And he said, "Every piece of shit that was thrown at me on that set, every challenge on that set," he was like, "I thought of that quote." Cause it's an amazing quote. And, and the idea is that in our own lives, we're supposed to say, "This is what I'm suited for." I'm fitted by nature to bear this. And we can think about Marcus Aurelius's own life as an illustration of this. We have plagues, we have wars, we have his troublesome son, we have his troubled marriage, we have health issues, we have a plague. You know, it's, it's just one thing after another. He's trying to remind himself that he's got this. He's meant for this, he's made for this. And I just love the idea that the guy playing the protege of Marcus Aurelius in the movie,
24:27 Ryan Holiday? as Russell Crowe is doing, is he reminding himself, hey, I'm made for this. I've got this. My nature has suited me for precisely this kind of adversity and difficulty. And to me, that's the kind of confidence and endurance that Stoicism is designed to equip us with.
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