This Cannot Be Taken (Only Given)

Powerful people can take from you. Yet the Stoics remind us: our character is our own.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  This cannot be taken, only given. Nero could take their freedom, he could confiscate their wealth, he could remove them from their positions. He was, after all, a tyrant, and in many cases, he did take those things. Just ask Seneca, ask Thrasia, ask Agrippinus, all Stoics whom we profile in Lives of the Stoics. But there was something else that not even the most powerful dictator can deprive someone of without their consent, their dignity, their self-respect, their values. It was this that Agrippinus maintained, despite the culture of fear around him, refusing even to attend Nero's banquets. Thrasia declined to take part in the farce that was so many of Nero's edicts and policies. He declined to participate in the fiction

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  and the unreality that Nero's enablers chose to co-sign. Seneca unfortunately did give up so much of his dignity and respectability in order to maintain his position with Nero, as did countless other Romans. Nero didn't take this from Seneca, it was given. As Sophocles said, "Whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave," although he went there a free man. The same holds true in our times. Powerful people can take from you, they can push you around, they can do great harm to you. But still, the Stoics would say that our character remains ours to preserve or debase. Our dignity depends on what we do and has nothing to do with external circumstances.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  We must never give it up.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  The