Give It Your All | Ask DS

Cato fought a losing battle. He was trying to preserve a Republic that was old and creaky in a rapidly changing world. He was trying to be honest and good in a political world in which corruption was the norm–clinging to idealism, as Cicero said, and refusing to accept that reality was the ‘dregs of Romulus.’ Cato was going up against the most insatiable of foes, the ambition, the ego of a future tyrant. Yet throughout it, he was implacable–when they tried to shout him down, when they threatened him, when they tried to kill him. Still, he kept trying.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about lesser known Stoics who we should pay attention to, the relationship between the Stoics and Christianity, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Give it your all. Cato fought a losing battle. He was trying to preserve a republic that was old and creaky in a rapidly changing world. He was trying to be honest and good in a political world in which corruption was the norm. Clinging to idealism, as Cicero said, and refusing to accept that reality was the dregs of Romulus. Cato was going up against the most insatiable of foes, the ambition, the ego of a future tyrant. And yet, throughout it all, he was implacable. When they tried to shout him down, when they threatened him, when they tried to kill him, nothing could stop him. Was Cato perfect? Far from it. He was an aristocrat. He was impractical. He did not compromise or play well with others. As we talked about in our podcast episode with Josiah Osgood,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  Cato was not totally in the right, but he was more in the right than Julius Caesar, who in the end marched troops against his own country. Cato could have folded. He could have fled. He could have tried to play both sides. He did not. Instead, he gave everything to this cause he knew was just. He gave everything to protect the ideals that Rome was founded on. He did not succeed, but he did the next best thing. He gave his best, which is what we have to do when we find a cause that is right. We must be like Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem, "The Last Word." We must be like Cato. "They outtalked thee, hissed thee, tore thee. Better men fared thus before thee, Fired their ringing shot and passed, Hotly charged and broke at last.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  Charge once more, and then be dumb. Let the victors, when they come, Win the forts of folly fall. Find thy body by the wall."

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  I tell Cato's story in Lives of the Stoics, which I suggest you read and definitely listen to Josiah's episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I really enjoyed this one. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Hi, Ryan. Thank you.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Hi. Yeah, of course.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Um, I have more of a general question.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  Is that because you're in outer space?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I didn't have much choice in the background. I'm at work and there's a whole, there's a big mess behind me. Um, so I know a lot of the ancient Stoics did not leave a lot of written material. So we focus a lot on the big three, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, because they left the most, whether it's written by them or their students. Are there any other Stoics that left reading material that we should perhaps, you know, learn more about, like as we, you know, proceed in Stoicism?

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  So this book was translated relatively recently and I enjoyed it. This is Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus's teacher. And it's called That One Should Disdain Hardships. And I read this in March last year. I'd read some of his stuff online before, but it's basically like a set of notes from different talks. And like, so one of them is that women too should study philosophy, should daughters receive the same education as sons, which is more effective, theory or practice, that kings should also study philosophy, that exile is not an evil. He writes an essay that exile is not evil, and he's exiled four times

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  on trumped up charges. You know, he says, he has one on what is the chief end of marriage? Is marriage a handicap for the pursuit of philosophy? Should every child that is born be raised on food, on clothing and shelter? He has one on whether you should cut your beard or not. It's, it's, it's, it's really fascinating. James Stockdale did a number of short books, sort of inspired by Stoicism. So I would check that out. As far as the originals go, pretty much everything else is fragments.

• 4:50Ryan Holiday?

  If you read Lives of the Stoics, which is my book, it gives you pretty much everything that there is from those people. Unfortunately, almost everything else is like a letter here or, you know, a quote here. The record is pretty sparse. The only thing I do hold up some hope on is that we have now begun to develop the technology where they can take some of the rolled up papyrus that was entombed in the ash at places like Pompeii, and they

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  can look, they can like x-ray inside it and read it. And so it may well be that in time, if the works haven't already been destroyed in various excavations, we may, over the next 50 years, discover or rediscover some of these lost works from the Stoics, which would be pretty awesome.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Good afternoon. First of all, I just want to say thanks to your book, Ego is the Enemy.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  It literally stopped me from, shall we say, talking back to a previous boss that I was working under.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Can it help me put some things in context at the time? Two questions. You had mentioned, I thought, in a recent email, that one of the downsides to the Stoics was their persecution of Christianity. I wasn't sure if you mentioned Marcus Ross, in particular, or Stoics in general. Was there a particular reason for that? And I'm not a citizen of the back stoicism, but I'm curious what the reasons were for that.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So, I actually have a section on this in Lives of the Stoics. Let me find it, because it's worth reading. There's actually a fascinating novel called Blood of the Martyrs, which is by Naomi Murchison. It's a novel about Christians in Nero's court, which she was trying to sort of write, she was writing it as Nazi Germany is rising in Europe and sort of beginning their persecution. So, it's a tricky thing. So, obviously, put it this way, Rome Thought that the Christians were heretics and the Stoics at different junctures were

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  in charge of Rome. And so I more think about it as the Stoics did nothing to stop a persecution or a sort of a set of discriminatory practices that they could have done something about. But let me see here. So Junius Rusticus is Marcus's philosophy teacher who Marcus puts in charge basically of Rome. He's the mayor of Rome. And it's Junius Rusticus who persecutes or adjudicates the trial of Justin Martyr, one of the most famous Christian martyrs.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  You can contrast this. Seneca's brother Gaio, who's mentioned in the Bible, adjudicates a case involving St. Paul and lets him go free. So it's not as if the Stoics sort of are universally caught up in this, but there is, there is some, there is some unpleasantness here. So this is, this is what I say. Justin had in fact studied under a Stoic teacher in Samaria, but left the school in favor of the burgeoning Christian faith. Many of Justin's writings would evoke similarities between the Stoics and the Christians, and he may have well been familiar with Junius Rusticus's own philosophical work. He quite reasonably

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  expected a favorable ruling from his Stoic judge. As a devout Christian, he knew that a century before Seneca's brother had fairly judged and freed St. Paul in Corinth. But this was Rome in a very different time, and Rusticus was not simply a pen and ink philosopher. His job was to protect the peace. These Christians refused to acknowledge the Roman gods, the supremacy of the Roman state, and this was to them crazy disruptive and dangerous. Wasn't Rusticus's job to enforce the laws to prevent these kinds of things from happening? And perhaps with Marcus away at the front and no one to check him, Rusticus was a little lost in the sway of his own power. In her 1939 novel about Christianity in ancient Rome, written as fascism was crushing religious minorities in Europe.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Naomi Mitchetson has a Stoic philosopher attempt to explain this collision course between the Stoics and the Christians. The Christians were being persecuted, he says, because they were against the Roman state. No Roman ever really bothered about a difference of gods. In religious matters, they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not of the individual heart, but only a social invention, or had become so. And yet politically, they did and must persecute equally and equally must be attacked by all who had the courage. So the point is, there's this sort of Roman policy that the Stoics declined to question, that puts them on a collision course with a faith or a religion

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  that questions almost all the essential tenants of the Roman state. Does that make sense?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  No, that seems pretty fair as well, right? I understand why Rome persecuted the Christians. It's more of the Stoics were Roman, more than the Romans were Stoic. Is that fair to say?

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's fair to say, but we also, this idea of learning from the past, I don't have any problem saying, you know, Rusticus sits at the head of this trial of this guy who's basically being set up on bogus charges for being a heretic. And instead of letting him off or exiling him, or coming up with some, you know, symbolic punishment, he orders him to be scorched and beheaded, right? So there were options and the Stoics don't take those options, and that's to their eternal shame.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  And this is a quick second part of the question. Do you know of any writers who've written on the relationship, like positively, between Stoicism and Christianity?

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  I think you'd like this book, The Blood of the Martyrs. And then I do think there are some books out there. I've seen them. I just haven't, I just haven't read them. It was only sort of tangentially related to what I was talking about in Lives of the Stoics. But if you find something good, let us know.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Thanks, appreciate it.

• 11:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  So I recently listened to your podcast with Shane Parrish from Farnham Street Blog.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  So I started looking at his blog and so he has all these mental models and you know, he has one article about how to make smart decisions without getting lucky. And so I just wanted to know if you have various mental models about various decisions that you make, various people that you reach out to.

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I don't know. I sort of go back and forth on the mental models things. When I read them, I find them very interesting. I just don't know if people actually explicitly use them, you know. I don't know if Warren Buffett, when he's evaluating a stock, actually goes, "Let's divide by zero here," or you know, whatever the mental model is. It's sort of one of these things that makes sense to me rationally, and then I wonder how they actually get applied. You know, someone's recommending

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  that Shane has a good course on decision making. I would probably agree with that. I did talk about decision making in my interview with Annie Duke when I had her on the podcast. She's great, and she has a new book about this. So I might start by that.