You Can’t Afford To Be This | How 300 Spartans Saved Western Civilization

When we react emotionally, we rarely make things better. When we get angry? We always make things worse—for ourselves and others. 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🪙 Carry The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/anger-medallion as a reminder to pause. A pause creates space. A pause creates clarity. A pause can change everything. | Grab The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/anger-medallion at dailystoic.com/pause http://dailystoic.com/pause 👉 Get $20 off when you purchase the Pause & Reflect Medallion and Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Course for Controlling Anger https://store.dailystoic.com/cart Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.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 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  You can't afford this. Look, maybe if you were more of a nobody, maybe if people weren't counting on you, maybe if you didn't have kids, maybe if the stakes were lower, maybe if you never had to think about financial security or making payroll, or what kind of example you were set in. Maybe then you could afford to be a hothead. Maybe then you could be easily triggered. Maybe you could be petty, hold grudges, indulge your passions. But right now, these days, you absolutely cannot. "I shall do nothing in malice," Lincoln wrote in a letter during the Civil War. "What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." By the way, Lincoln's the main character, actually, the final character in Wisdom Takes Work,

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  and you can preorder the book right now, DailyStoic.com/preorder. We are not Lincoln, but what we do matters. People are looking to us. People are affected by the decisions we make, which is why, like him, we need to be reminded, as Marcus Aurelius did remind himself repeatedly in meditations, not to give in to our temper, not to lash out, to calm down, not to turn everything into something.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  When we react emotionally, we rarely make things better. When we get angry, we almost always make things worse for ourselves and others. We make things harder. We make them more tense. We blind ourselves. We miss opportunities for connection, collaboration and community. So today, tomorrow, always, when we find ourselves getting upset, we have to stop and say, "I can't afford this." We need to stop, as Athenodorus told young Octavian to do, and count the letters of the alphabet. We need to look in the mirror. We need to stop. We need to pause and reflect. And by the way, if you need any help with that, which I certainly do, the Daily Stoic Pause and Reflect Medallion might be the perfect thing for you.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  I've got one in my pocket right now. It's a physical reminder for me, something I touch, run my fingers over the letters of the alphabet, which it has on there. And I go, "I'm gonna pause here before I react." I don't want to let my emotions rule my decisions. I can't afford to get upset here. Right? Delay is the best remedy. It has that from Seneca on there. I think it's important. I think it's one of the best things we've made here at Daily Stoic. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can also find it at stuart.dailystoic.com. We also have a great course on anger, the Tame Your Temper Challenge, which is 11 days focused on improving your management of your temper. All of that, I'll link to that in today's show notes.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  They go up against something like a million Persian troops. They are fighting for something. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for their civilization. They are fighting for each other. The future of the West, every great accomplishment of Western civilization, from the Renaissance to the American Revolution to the Internet age, all of it is hanging in the balance, although they don't fully know this at the time.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  There is courage and then there is heroism. There's sacrifice and then there's selflessness. And if you don't know the story of the 300 Spartans, which is way more beautiful and way more complex than the comic book, I'm actually here at the hot gate, the stand where 300 Spartans and a few thousand other Greek soldiers buy the rest of Greece one week. They go up against something like a million Persian troops. The king Xerxes eager to avenge the humiliation of his father, intent on subjugating not just all of Greece, but all of the world. And while some Greek city-states see the writing on the wall, some take huge bribes, some switch sides.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  And the shaky alliance of the different Greek societies is being sorely tested. The future of the West, every great accomplishment of Western civilization, from the Renaissance to the American Revolution to the Internet age, all of it is hanging in the balance, although they don't fully know this at the time. But 300 elite Spartan soldiers led by King Leonidas head to the hot gate, this narrow mountain pass here at Thermopylae, where the Persians have to pass through this bottleneck. And if the Spartans perhaps can hold them off, can show that they are not invincible, perhaps they think it will bind the rest of Greece together. Leonidas, like Churchill, understands

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  that this is an existential battle of civilizations. He says, "We either have to kill the barbarians or we will be killed by the barbarians." And so they march to a man, each one of them a father of a living son, traversing something like 250 miles across Greece, knowing that they will face probably the worst odds in the history of warfare. And the only advantage here is the strategic one, that the Persian army has to... Fit through this narrow bottleneck. And more importantly, they have the moral advantage. They are fighting for something. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for their civilization. They are fighting for each other. Leonidas tells Xerxes, if you had any knowledge of the noble things in life, you wouldn't covet

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  the possessions of others. He says, I would rather die for Greece than rule over the entire thing. But the insatiable conquerors of history, they don't understand that. They don't understand people who are not transactional, people who believe in ideas or ideals. But Leonidas believes he is a descendant of Hercules. And here at this crossroads, literally, he's choosing between the easy road and the hard road. And so Leonidas and the Spartans choose virtue. They choose courage. They make the choice of Hercules. And Leonidas says, look, if this relies on numbers, it's never gonna work. But if it relies on valor, if it relies on courage, maybe we have a chance.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  And so when Xerxes sends his final demand for surrender, he says, lay down your arms. The Spartans utter their famous reply, molan labe, come and take them. For four days, just the idea of tangling with the Spartans keeps the Persians at bay. This is by a critical time. Xerxes doesn't understand what he is losing by giving up the initiative. But the Spartans, again, fighting freely, having chosen to be there, are united in a way that the Persians can't comprehend. The Persians are being lashed from behind. They are largely slaves. They have been conscripted. They don't know why they're there. There is no argument for why they deserve to take over the world. And so, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the physical three to one.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  But here it's three hundred to one, three million to one, and many times more. And it's towards the end of the first day, having made essentially no progress, that Xerxes sends what's known as his immortal troops, the 10,000 immortals. And even here, they are thrown back, not just once, but twice. And three times, each time we're told Xerxes, who's watching from a distant viewpoint, is rising in his seat in anguish as they are being thrown back, thrown into repeatedly they fall for this trick where the Spartans who are normally marching in lockstep their their phalanx impenetrable they break ranks and pretend to retreat and then when the enemy rushes them they reform and slaughter them and then as the first day bleeds into the

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  second it it's clear to Leonidas that reinforcements are not going to come that this is in fact a one-way mission and yet they remain and fight well that night knowing that they will probably eat the next day in the underworld he tells them once again Xerxes demands their surrender and when they decline he says I will fire so many arrows it will block out the sun then we shall fight in the shade the Spartans reply Leonidas tries to send a few injured men home hoping not just to spare them but to send a message home and each of the three declines no I came here to fight I'll be a better man if I stay they said and so the Spartans stood in silence on

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  this third day each of them beaten down all of them bloody all of them wounded so fewer than 300 left by nine o'clock a little bit earlier than it is now the heat is already up they sweat in their armor their bodies are coursing with whatever remains inside them they know they'll never see their family or Sparta again and Leonidas gives the order to march forward the Persians hit them with a fury and still the Spartans stay together uncommon valor as it's been said is here a common virtue and the men pass beyond themselves fighting not just beyond themselves but fighting beyond any capacity one could have imagined but I think at some

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  level they know they know this is it they will not grow old they would soon fall they would not live even until tomorrow Leonidas is killed in the middle of the final day the men rally repeatedly one two three four times to save him they bring him back and then they fight again now leaderless each man stepping in to fill the void of the man who fails before him and eventually inevitably they are overwhelmed three days of battle plus the four days of waiting they have One week, Xerxes has to ask one of his advisors, "How many more men like this are there in Greece?" And he's told, "There are no men finer than these, but all fight just as well." You know, when Churchill said that never before have so many owed so much to so few,

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  he was right, speaking about the Royal Air Force and the blitz. But in fact, we all owe everything to this moment. All of the accomplishments of Western civilization hinge here in the balance. There's a great Emily Dickinson poem where she says, "It feels a shame to be alive when men so brave are dead. One envies the distinguished dust." These Spartan soldiers give the full measure of devotion, as they did at Gettysburg. You know, we say that freedom isn't free. It's actually purchased here by this sacrifice. The victories that follow at Salamis and Planteia, they were only made possible here. The ideas of a Western civilization, of even something like a NATO alliance, of a United States, all of it hinges here. The ideals that we celebrate today,

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  they are proved in blood here at Thermopylae. You know, these men, you could say it was not theirs to reason why. Theirs was to do and die. That's actually what the monument here at Thermopylae says. It says, "Tell the Spartans passerby that here obedient to their laws we lie." Their example of courage, their embodiment of the most critical of the Stoic virtues, it stands, it stands eternal. None of them survived, yet they proved to be far more immortal than any of Xerxes' troops. In Stephen Pressfield's amazing novel about Gates of Fire, he asks, you know, "Why? Why did they do this? What motivated them?" One of the questions of the book is, "What is the opposite of fear?" Right? What's the virtue? It's more than courage here,

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  because it's about what it was about. It wasn't just their training that made what the Spartans did possible. It was also their wives, it was their culture. There was a Spartan saying of women of Sparta that said, "Come back with your shield or on it." There's a story about a Spartan wife who watches her husband, a king, get killed. And the killers offer to spare her if she's quiet. And she offers her neck. And she says, "No, this too will be a service to Sparta." The Spartans were more than just warriors, more than just courageous fighters. That's what Pressfield concludes in Gates of Fire. He says, "The opposite of fear is love. Love for country, love for one another, love for ideas, love for freedom, love for the vulnerable and the weak." And I think we see this even in Leonidas's parting words to his wife.

• 13:04Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Marry a good man who will treat you well, bear him children, and live a good life." It was about more than him. He knew he'd been given a prophecy that a Spartan king would have to die on the battlefield for Greece to remain free. And so there, at the hot gates, he was willing to give everything, an act of devotion. The Spartans could have ruled all of Greece. Leonidas could have used this moment for his own gain, but he declined. And so in this moment, he transcends mere self-interest, self-preservation. He does something totally insane, and yet it is the highest and greatest plane that a human can reach. You know, I think about the people who registered to vote and were beaten for it.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  I think about organizers who went up against entrenched power, knowing they would almost certainly be crushed. Think about the people who testified in trials, facing threats to their own safety and reprisals. You think about this selfless act, megaloscopia. But this is a selfless moment, a beautiful act of human greatness. And this, the thing we are willing to give, that full measure of our devotion to a stranger, to what must be done, this is what makes us great. It takes us higher. It's what transforms us, as the Spartans did, from mere bravery to heroism. Maybe for a moment, maybe to just one person, maybe to be enshrined in the history books for all time.

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is who is impacted by that. And we have to try, we have to go for it, and we can learn from the Spartans. Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. If you want more Stoic wisdom in your inbox, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. It's totally free. Come on, subscribe at any time. We'd love to have you. dailystoic.com/email.