How To Stand Before Kings | Everything You Need To Know About Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

The Stoics didn’t just stand before kings, they came to them as equals and in some cases, towered over them, their virtue putting them above any kind of worldly power.📕 Pick up a copy of Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/🎥 Watch the YouTube video of Everything You Need To Know About Marcus Aurelius' Meditations💡 We set up Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life to give you the absolute best of Stoicism, in just 14 daysGet Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  How to Stand Before Kings. Just a short while earlier, Zeno had been homeless and penniless, and now he was advising kings. Cleiantheus was a manual labor whose humility earned him standing ovations from passing Athenians. And then he took over the Stoic school. Arius and Athenodorus both earned the ear of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. Hadrian would stop by Epictetus's classroom and notes from those lectures would find their way to his successor Marcus Aurelius, a former slave entering the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in the world. What's so remarkable about it isn't just that the Stoics were humble men who were invited into the halls of power and influence, it's what a profile they cut

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  while they were there. "See a man diligent in his business," says the Bible, "and he shall standeth before kings." The Stoics didn't just stand before kings, they came to them as equals, and in some cases towered over them, their virtue putting them above any kind of worldly power. Even in the case of Marcus Aurelius, who was himself a king, don't we see him as greater than the greatest conquerors? Because he had first conquered himself? Luconius Rufus, who taught Epictetus, said that yes, kings should be philosophers, but more important, philosophers needed to be kingly people. By this, he did not mean grandiose and entitled and dictatorial. He meant that they had to be dignified and restrained.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  They needed to be the kind of person that other people wanted to follow. They had to lead themselves first. The greatest of the Stoics were great because they were humble, because they were decent, because they did the right thing, because they controlled the empire between their ears. And in this, the Stoics were so diligent in their business and their philosophy that they not only stood before kings, but stood above and apart from them. Anyways, if you want to learn more about the lives of the Stoics, you can check out the book by that name, Lives of the Stoics, From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. Grab that in the Day of Stoic store also. And then we have this Stoic Leadership Course, which is Lessons from the Stoics on How to Be a Great Leader

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  and what the Stoics learned from the leaders that they stood by and over. I'll link to that in today's show notes also. I think it's one of the best things we've done. We interviewed a bunch of modern Stoic leaders, including generals and GMs of basketball teams and people who run cities and large companies. I think it's one of the best courses we've done. You can check that out. And if you join Day of Stoic Life, you can get it for free. So a bunch of awesome stuff to check out as follow-ups to today's episode. But just do your job and do it well.

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  This is not only one of the greatest books ever written, it's maybe the only one of its kind. It's a book I've not just read, but reread and read again and again and again, because every time I get something new out of it. Talking about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And what I want to do in today's episode is give you some reasons to read Marcus Aurelius. I just want more people to read what I think is one of the greatest works, not just of literature, but of human artistic, philosophical and spiritual creation ever done.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  In Book Five, Marcus Aurelius talks about the proper role of philosophy in life. He says it's not as your instructor. He says it's as a kind of medicine, an ointment. He describes this sort of ancient remedy for this eye illness where they would crack an egg on you or something like that. But that aside, what I think his general point he actually is taking from Epictetus, who said, "You shouldn't leave my philosophy class feeling good. You should feel like you just came out of the hospital." He says, "'Cause you weren't well when you entered." The point of philosophy is to challenge you. It's to make you uncomfortable. It's to fix the illnesses of the soul, of the mind. Even though there are passages of meditations that are soothing and reassuring, a lot of them are jarring. A lot of them make you uncomfortable. A lot of them really make you think, or a lot of them maybe you instinctively disagree with. But that's the point.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  Philosophy is not supposed to be your instructor. It's supposed to be a kind of medicine.

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  You have the most powerful man in the world in an empire 2,000 years ago, who believed preposterous things about where the universe came from, and even their sense of right and wrong. And the Romans were like us and then were utterly not like us. And no one was more removed from normal, modern life than the emperor. You crack open this book, Meditations, to himself. And it's not just, oh, I get a sense of what he's talking about. But it sounds like he's speaking to you with what you are dealing with right now. What it is ultimately is the specificity. The total insularity of it makes it utterly generalizable and relatable.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  He was authentically being himself. And in that way manages to speak to millions for all time.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  What's incredible about this book, one of the bestselling philosophy books of all time, one of the most influential philosophy books of all time, one of the most unique philosophy books of all time. Because what Marcus Aurelius's meditation starts with is his list of debts and lessons. The things he learned, the people who made him who he was, the lessons that he wants to pass on. So it's not his pontifications, his theories about the universe. It begins with the people who helped shape him, who formed him, who gave him insights, and how those lessons shape him even to this day.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius's meditation should have no value to us whatsoever. It should be inaccessible, impractical, writing notes to himself on the front lines of a war in Greek, never intending it to be published, never expecting it to be published, not thinking of you or I at all. Writing totally about his own unique issues and problems and fears and worries and desires and aversions. But there's something, I think, about the specificity of it that actually makes it so general, that makes it so universal. The best comedy is incredibly specific and incredibly universal. And that's the beauty of Meditations, is that it's not for you, it's for him, a human being who had a lot of similarities to us. He managed to create something timeless and universal and practical and real and authentic.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  So this is not only one of the greatest books ever written, it's maybe the only book like it ever written. Just imagine the most powerful man in the world sits down to write notes to himself, never expecting it to be published, not thinking about an audience at all. It's a book to himself, for himself. It's a book for the writer, not for the reader. And yet, for almost 2,000 years, it's been a book that's changed the life and the lives of millions of readers, myself included. I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Now, if I was to describe to you a book that's only a couple hundred pages, there's no intense or complex philosophical concepts, that it's about seemingly simple things like how to deal with your anxiety, how to not be corrupted by success,

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  how to deal with annoying or obnoxious people, you'd think this would be a straightforward, easy book to read. But it's not. So I've been answering that question now for almost 20 years. How do I read Meditations? What translation should I read? What should I take out of it? So myself and the team at Daily Stoic have been hard at work on an awesome new course designed to help you do just that. Sort of a book club companion, how to read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Whether you're brand new to Stoicism or you're trying to take it to the next level, that's the thing about this book. Even if you've read it, you get something out of reading it again and again and again. Marcus Aurelius talks about how life is like a river and we never step in the same river twice. And it's true for this book, which I myself have read now hundreds of times. It's a bunch of custom self-paced modules

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  that give you everything you need to know about every little part of the book. There's video messages from me. There's a calendar to help you track your progress as you're reading. Then we're going to have a little group where we all get together and talk about these ideas. There's a reason this book has endured for so long. And there's a reason it's changed the lives of so many people. If you want to get the most out of it, if you want to understand what's really going on between these two covers, you can head over to dailystoic.com/meditations and sign up right now.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  I first read this book when I was 19 years old in my off-campus college apartment. And I took from it certain things. I've reread this book at least 100 times. Every time I pick it up, I get something different. There is this theme in Meditations of rivers and change, the ever-flowing nature of time. The Stoics were fond of this idea from Heraclitus that we never step in the same river twice. So what I got out of Meditations the first time when I read it as a teenager, and what I read it now in my mid-30s, having experienced things, gone through things, you know, the book is exactly the same, but I'm different. What I take out of it is different. When I read Meditations for the first time and I hear Marcus Aurelius talking about the plague, I think he's being metaphorical.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  And then 2020 comes along, and we go through our own and we realize, oh, he's being metaphorical and literal. We have to understand that Marcus Aurelius experienced so many of the things that you and I experienced through the course of our lives. But as the Zen saying goes, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." Your experience is who you are in that moment, what's going on with you at that exact second in your life. That's what opens you up to this idea. So when I say you should read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, I don't just mean grab this book, the Gregory Hayes translation or whatever, and read it once. I'm saying, no, you have to have a lifelong relationship with this text. It's a multi-year, ongoing journey that you go through it over and over and over again because you get something different out of it each time you read it.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  And that's continued to be true for me every single time I read it, including the time I'm about to spend with it right now.

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  We do ourselves a disservice when we make historical figures into more than what they are. When we forget that they were human beings doing the absolute best that they could. They weren't made that way, they became that way. One of the passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you." It's important we realize that he was doing precisely that, fighting to be Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't just naturally this guy, he wasn't naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally just, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him as it is. For all of us, it was a daily struggle. In fact, that's what Meditations was. It's the log, the historical record of Marcus Aurelius fighting to be what he wanted to be, what he was trying to be, like all of us, not actually getting there the vast majority of the time.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  That's what we're trying to do. We're all trying to fight to be what the better angels of our natures know we can be. We're fighting to be what we're capable of being. We're fighting who we know we want to be. We fight to be the person that philosophy tries to make us.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  The reason we study the greats is simple. Wordsworth said, "The lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime." We study Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and all the Stoics, all the greats and not so greats of history, to remind ourselves what's possible. And then he says, "And departing, we leave behind us footprints on the sands of time." His point was that our own exploits and deeds, our courage, our justice, our temperance, our wisdom, what we leave behind us can inspire the people who come after us. You think of Marcus Aurelius leaving Meditations behind him. What are you leaving behind? What's your legacy? What are you doing? That's the question for today.

• 12:25Ryan Holiday?

  In one point in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius tells himself to take Plato's view, to zoom out, to see things from above. And he does that. He talks about how enormous armies fighting over a border, a whole country, could be not that dissimilar from a far enough view to ants fighting over a piece of food on the ground. It's beautiful and quite impressive that he could come to this point of view because like, in Marcus's time, the highest he could have gotten off the ground was a couple-story building or maybe the top of a mountain. He didn't have the access to an airplane like all of us do. He would have never seen the blue marble photo which showed Earth from space. But when you get to Plato's view, you're just reminded how inconsequential most of the things we get upset about are. And then you are also reminded

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  of how interconnected and interdependent and together we all are. Marcus says this too, that the borders don't matter, that vast oceans don't matter. We're all in this same thing together and that we are tied together more than we'd like to think that we are.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  So this is what's crazy about Marcus. So Marcus lives in Rome, the Romans speak Latin, but the philosophical language at that time was Greek. So Marcus was writing to himself in Greek. When you read those passages or you listen to them and you're just like, that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Like, there's this one passage where he's like, "A stalk of grain bending low under its own weight, the way olive falls to the ground." He talks about the way that when you put bread in the oven, it breaks open on top. And we don't know why that happens. It's just this like beautiful inadvertent act of nature. He's just like writing like a poet, like a great writer. And again, he's writing in his non-native tongue to himself, never expecting anyone would see it. It'd be like finding out that like a comedian is like funny in their diary.

• 14:12Ryan Holiday?

  You're just like, wow, you're just naturally that. You're not turning it on or off. Right. It's just like intuitively part of you.

• 14:21Ryan Holiday?

  Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email totally for free to almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.