Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato | Ch. 2: The Pillar About this episode Today’s episode is an excerpt from Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni. This chapter deals with the early life of Cato, his promise and willingness to take on those who were clearly more powerful than himself, why he embraced the philosophy of Stoicism, how much he valued the “living tradition” by going barefoot and wearing out-of-date clothing, and more. Centered is a Mac and Windows app that helps you get into Flow and work faster...and healthier. Join thousands of users who have discovered their Flow States by running Centered in the background while they work. Download Centered today at centered.app/stoic and use the Promo Code “STOIC” by October 31st to get a free month of Premium, and also be entered to win a variety of prizes! Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com /stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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.
Transcript 0:03 Speaker 00 Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
0:46 Speaker 00 and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've raved about the book Rome's Last Citizen many times. It's a great book. One of the only biographies, other than Plutarch, ever written about Cato the Younger, the towering Stoic of the Roman Republic. And one of the things I try to do here on the weekend is provide excerpts or insights into some of those books. And so in today's episode, we have a chapter on Cato. I think you'll like this chapter. It's about the sort of early days of Cato.
1:30 Speaker 00 What makes Cato Cato? How he, born into this illustrious family, this long tradition, beginning with Cato the Elder, his great-great-grandfather, who, by the way, tried to ban the Stoics and all of philosophy from Rome. So as proud as he would have been of his great-grandson, I don't know how happy he would have been to see him become a practicing philosopher. In any case, we're going to talk about the early days of Cato's life, how he became the philosopher he became, how he studied, how he became so smart, and why he embraced philosophy and the living tradition of living austerely, frugally,
2:13 Speaker 00 what Marcus calls the cloak in the camp bed of Stoic philosophy. So enjoy this interview, this audiobook excerpt, which you can get anywhere audiobooks are sold. You can also pick up, of course, the physical edition of the book, which I quite like. And enjoy. Here is Chapter Two, "The Pillar", from Rome's Last Citizen by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.
2:43 Speaker 01 Two. The Pillar.
2:47 Speaker 01 Cato broke his early silence only once, in defence of a pillar. The pillar stood in an old basilica, or public meeting hall, and it crowded the seats of the tribunes who conducted business there. It should have been a simple thing to have it moved in the name of convenience, but the tribunes weren't counting on the fierce opposition of an eighteen-year-old without office and without authority on any topic except that very building. It was the Basilica Porcia. It carried Cato's family name, and it had been erected, the first of its kind, by Cato's great-grandfather. To move even a single pillar from this century-old place would be to disgrace the great man's legacy,
3:30 Speaker 01 at least in the eyes of his great-grandson. It was one thing to hold that view, petty as it sounds. It was another to convey it to a crowd of strangers for whom it was not a family matter. But Cato played upon the kind of Roman superstition so keenly felt that it led priests to repeat entire rituals if just one word of an ancient formula was misspoken. The kind of superstition that saw moving one pillar as tantamount to tearing down a whole building. Hadn't it served perfectly well, right up to the present? Hadn't it been good enough for the generation of Romans that had stood against Hannibal? Had the Basilica changed, or had the Romans changed? This was more than mere remodelling.
4:15 Speaker 01 This was about the old ways, the "most maiorum", brought into conflict with modern comfort-seeking. There was something strange about the youth who already spoke like an old man. But austerity was a winning theme, especially when the stakes were low, and Cato was already politician enough to sell it with charm. He won his case, the pillar stayed.
4:39 Speaker 01 It helped immeasurably that the man whose name was on the building, Cato the Elder, embodied the old ways. His life was the model for any Roman who called himself conservative, and above all, for his great-grandson. Cato the Elder had given his family its name. Originally just another in an interminable line of one, Marcus Porcius after another, he came to be hailed by the cognomen Cato, a title connoting wisdom and experience. His descendants took the title by hereditary right. The son of a farming family from the Roman countryside, Cato the Elder was well off enough
5:19 Speaker 01 to own his own land, but not above working shirtless in the field alongside his slaves, sharing their bread and cheap wine at mealtime. When he went to war for the first time, around 217, he was still at the tail end of boyhood. He returned with a chest full of scars and a veteran's record, the indispensable foundation of a Roman political career. At home in little Tuscullum, Cato the Elder made himself into something of a country lawyer. With little hope of payment, he spent his mornings in the town market, defending his neighbors in small cases before the local judge, returning in the afternoons to the plough. That might have been all.
6:02 Speaker 01 But though the rule of the Republic passed through the same few families' hands year by year, there was still a narrow valve of Roman meritocracy, just enough room in each generation for the fresh blood of a few novi homines, new men. Cicero would later be one. So was Cato the Elder. The reason that this particular new man was plucked from arguing suits over cattle in the town square was that he was needed to make a point. Rome was enjoying its first taste of wealth, wealth that drained toward Rome from every edge of the world: wealth in tribute, wealth in plunder, wealth in gold and silver from
6:42 Speaker 01 the Spanish mines, wealth in the bodies of slaves from every conquered city and tribe, wealth in culture. Shining Greek bronzes and marbles were appearing in the city of mud huts and clay gods. Once, defending himself against corruption charges, Cato the Elder contemptuously listed just a few of the many routes by which an enterprising Roman might enrich himself through empire. I have never distributed my money, or that of our allies, in bribery. I have never placed garret and commanders in the towns of your allies, to seize their goods and families. I have never divided booty, nor what had been taken from the enemy, nor spoils among
7:23 Speaker 01 a few of my friends, so as to deprive those who had won it of their reward. I have never granted permits to requisition at will, so that my friends might enrich themselves by exploiting such authorization. I have never distributed the money for the soldiers' wine among my attendants and friends, nor made them rich at public expense. Those "never's" were only worth hammering on so vehemently because they were glaring exceptions. His colleagues had, frequently and gladly. As the wealth of the world concentrated itself in a single city, the old, rough equality among the elite was dying.
8:04 Speaker 01 With the right foreign postings, a fortunate few among the oligarchs suddenly set themselves off spectacularly from their fellows. The new wealth could turn luxury and dining into cutthroat sports. It could buy a senator's son the best foreign education. It could, and did, buy elections. For the first time, a select few were beginning to affect Greek learning, toying with the philosophy of Plato and the poetry of Euripides, not simply as academic pastimes, but as rich cultural capital. Such learning set the new elite apart from their uncouth countrymen, who still held to Latin as a point of pride at a time when there was no Latin literature to speak of.
8:48 Speaker 01 There was even a word to express what the authentically unpolished Romans possessed, and what the elite of the elite were leaving behind: latinitas, Latin-ness. The most fruitful attack on the new elite was simply that they lacked latinitas. They were decadent, cosmopolitan, un-Roman.
9:09 Speaker 01 It was an attack launched by a competing faction of the elite, not from anywhere significantly below. But it had no better spokesman than a country boy who lived Latin-ness. A frugal farmer, a scarred soldier, a plain loud speaker with a distinctive shock of red hair, always with a proverb at the ready. It was a neighbor who discovered Cato the Elder, a patrician senator who owned the next plot over from Cato's. And with that patrician's blessing, Cato was on his way to Rome and a sparkling career speaking for the old-time nationalist faction. Luck and talent would take him to the consulship and beyond.
9:50 Speaker 01 In Rome, he made up for his rustic accent with an untrained eloquence and an ability to wrap any controversy in the comfortable mantle of Latin patriotism. For example, in defense of a law banning women from wearing colorful clothes or owning more than half an ounce of gold, Cato said, "The community suffers from two opposite vices: avarice and luxury, pestilential diseases that have proved the ruin of all great empires. The brighter and better the fortunes of the Republic become day by day, and the greater the growth of its dominion. So much, the more do I dread the prospect of these things taking us captive, rather than we them.
10:32 Speaker 01 I hear far too many people praising and admiring those statues that adorn Athens and Corinth, and laughing at the clay images of our gods standing in front of their temples. I, for my part, prefer those gods who bless us." When he represented Rome abroad, he governed provinces with the same thrift he used to manage his farm. Gone were the public banquets, retinues of attendance, and slave-toted litters that usually dignified high-ranking Roman officials. During a year-long governorship of nearer Spain, Cato boasted that he stormed more rebellious cities than he spent days in the country, and, at the end, he proudly left his horse
11:14 Speaker 01 behind rather than ship it back to Rome at state expense. There was little doubting that all of this fanatical economy was genuine. Cato practised it both in public and private. In private, his extreme frugality took on a tinge of cruelty. "Never own an old slave," Cato advised his fellow farmers. "As soon as he's too worn out to plough, sell him for what you can get and let someone else waste food on him." It was advice that he was unafraid to put in writing, because it was of a piece with the war record, the budget trimming, and the refusal to learn Greek, and it all played extraordinarily well. There was no better publicist of Cato's virtues, it was said, than Cato.
11:59 Speaker 01 No one was more thrilled when he learned that his name was officially becoming proverbial, as in, "What do you expect? We aren't Catos." And no one was more eager to help the story make the rounds. The best measure of Cato's swelling clout was his willingness to take on a man who should have been untouchable: the victor over Hannibal and Cato's ex-superior, Scipio Africanus. Scipio was as urbane a man as his era could have produced: a Grecophile patron of foreign philosophers, whose war record made him a legend in his own time. To Cato, Scipio was a disgustingly liberal spender, with no concept of military discipline.
12:42 Speaker 01 To Scipio, Cato was a crabbed and cruel leader of men, whose mercilessness in the provinces only sowed the seeds of more insurgency. Their rivalry, which spanned two decades, was at the heart of Rome's culture war. By the time of its climax in 185, seventeen years after Scipio's defeat of Hannibal had brought the war to a close, Cato's traditionalist faction had chipped enough away from the hero's aura to bring a charge of corruption against him. Scipio stood accused of accepting a stupendous bribe from a foreign king. On the day of the trial, after the prosecution had laid out the accusations in exhaustive
13:23 Speaker 01 detail, Scipio rose in his own defence and spoke a single grave sentence: "Romans, this is the date on which I conquered Hannibal."
13:34 Speaker 01 Hardly a soul in the crowd, the jury, or even the prosecution, had not carried a shield, taken a wound, or lost a brother or son in that great war. Those memories were enough to see the general carried from the court with all charges dropped to tears and cries of gratitude from the assembled. But they were not enough to save his reputation. The more perceptive members of the crowd must have realized that Scipio had offered not a word of rebuttal. Scipio himself felt that the trial had permanently shamed him. He spent the few remaining years of his life in self-exile and ordered that he be buried away from the city that had spurned him.
14:13 Speaker 01 When he died, he left on his tomb not a catalogue of accomplishments, but only this inscription: "Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones." A year after the trial, his leading rival neutralized, Cato the Elder put himself forward for Rome's most rarefied office: censor. Officially, Rome's two censors conducted the regular survey of the city's assembled manpower. But from that simple counting function flowed remarkable authority. The censors compiled the lists of the senatorial and equestrian classes and could eject any man from his class on a whim. They could expel members of the senate, who otherwise served for life.
14:58 Speaker 01 They set the code of public morals and enforced it through the examples of those demotions. And they held sweeping power over the public finances. Such was the responsibility of the censorship, that only the most accomplished politicians, typically ex-consuls, were permitted to run. In Cato's year, Scipio's old faction put up seven candidates, all running as explicit anti-Catos and pledging to wield the censorship's powers with a light hand. Cato, on the other hand, ran on a platform of unabashed traditionalism. He called out by name those he considered corrupt and luxury-glutted, declared Rome in need of a great purification, and pronounced himself "the severe doctor" to carry it
15:43 Speaker 01 out. As it would for the length of Cato's career, that message found an eager audience among the downtrodden, even more than among the elite. Cato won convincingly, and with him, the only other candidate for censor who shared his punishing platform.
16:01 Speaker 01 Cato was a man of his word. During the year of his census, many a Roman must have suffered cold sweats at the thought of stepping up to the inquisitor's table, declaring on oath his family, class, wealth, and land holdings, and submitting to an examination of morals. Woe betide the promising politician who kissed his wife in public, the prosperous merchant who was too fat to serve Rome in war, the senator who made a joke in Cato's presence. Scipio's own brother was singled out, ostensibly for luxurious living, but also it was widely suspected for spite. Some parts of Cato's purge sound eminently sensible even now, such as the ex-consul ejected
16:45 Speaker 01 from the senate for impressing his lover with a private execution at a banquet. But some of his platform was only conceivable in a city that knew no right to privacy in our sense. Rome, in many respects, still thought of itself as an army. The state was expected to reach behind doors and around drawn curtains. So it was within Cato's power to tax at ten times their value any expensive possessions he considered a waste of money, including fine clothing, jewels, gold and silver plate, and furniture. It was within his power, a few years later, to advocate a law that capped the number of guests at a dinner party.
17:26 Speaker 01 Cato's Rome was one in which distinction in learning, in style, in entertaining, in essentially anything except warfare, was suspect. And though this cutting down to size naturally made him a whole legion of senatorial enemies, not to mention the owners of the buildings he demolished because they encroached on public land, or the citizens whose water supplies he cut off because they were siphoning from the aqueducts for free, Cato's spectacle of strictness won the people's cheers. They even voted him a statue, a frowning one, no doubt, whose inscription praised him for coming to the rescue, when the Roman state was tottering to its fall.
18:09 Speaker 01 In his last years, Cato turned his single-mindedness on the enemy of his boyhood: Carthage, the state that had sent Hannibal to set Italy on fire. Hadn't Carthage already been crushed? Yes, presumably. It had long since been reduced to a Roman satellite. The small army it had left was not even permitted to march past its own borders. But as the head of a delegation sent to North Africa to arbitrate a land dispute in 157, Cato was shocked to discover that the Romans hadn't been paying adequate attention. He found Carthage rich again, thriving from the Mediterranean trade, its markets stocked
18:49 Speaker 01 with fat produce, its population healthy, growing, full of resentment toward Rome, and only three days' sail away. From the moment his delegation was tersely asked to leave Carthage, the threat of renewed war, whether real or imagined, dominated Cato's mind. "The Carthaginians are already our enemies," the old man informed the Senate on his return, luridly narrating the atrocities he had witnessed in his youth. "He who prepares everything against me, so that he can make war at whatever time he wishes, he is already my enemy, even though he is not yet using weapons." For the rest of his life, Cato tirelessly hammered on that theme.
19:33 Speaker 01 Whether the subject was farming, or religion, or the number of guests allowed at a dinner party, every one of his public utterances ended in the same offhand, ferocious way. In addition, Carthage must be destroyed. Any laughter at the non-secator would have died away with one look at his face. It was the foresight of a statesman, or a legendary display of grudge-holding, or even the first recorded incitement to genocide. The Senate's resistance eroded bit by bit, until Rome's ships sailed for decisive, preemptive war. Eleven years after Cato took up his ruthless campaign, Carthage was destroyed utterly,
20:17 Speaker 01 though Cato did not live to see it.
20:23 Speaker 01 Perhaps he found it a satisfying end. Many years before, he had left his farm for war. Now, his persistence had sent a new generation of Romans against the same enemy, this time to finish the work. Some things, then, had not changed.
20:42 Speaker 01 But in the end, even Cato had altered with the times. Having made a career railing against the corruption from the east, Cato, at the age of eighty, gave in to the inevitable and taught himself Greek. Some sources maintain that he finally took up the kind of books that he had so begrudged Scipio. Others allege that he had to begin with the alphabet, an elderly schoolboy. A concession like that, from the most Roman man in Rome, meant that, for all of his unbroken political success, one of the great causes of his life had largely failed. The Rome of Cato's old age was one dramatically more open to the world than the one of his childhood.
21:25 Speaker 01 The Rome of his children would be more open still. Latinites would still be a fault line in Roman politics, but it would be an increasingly symbolic one. It would be preached by men who spoke Greek from childhood. Cato the Elder understood as much, and it infuriated him. One of his last writings, in a manual for his son, deplores it: "In due course, my son Marcus, I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Greeks, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings, while not taking them too seriously. They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy:
22:07 Speaker 01 When those folk give us their writings, they will corrupt everything. All the more if they send their doctors here, they have sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine, and they charge a fee for doing it."
22:21 Speaker 01 There is a surviving bust of Cato the Elder, and it looks like a man who could have written those words. The faces submerged in creases. The corners of the mouth are pulled down. The nose wrinkles up in the beginnings of a sneer... of bigotry, perhaps. Or obstinate pride.
22:41 Speaker 01 Two more generations of Mark Porci bring us down to ninety-five, to the birth of Cato the Younger. The younger Cato must have passed under the great frowning statue almost daily. He was the heir of a family no longer "new", one for whom the fame and even the name of their historic ancestor was a blessing and a burden. A forebear already having reached the prize of the consulship, the Catos were now and in perpetuity a "consular" family. They could expect to run for and win the offices Cato the Elder had scraped for on the strength of name recognition and competence by association, if nothing else. But shame on any Cato who wasted such an advantage.
23:25 Speaker 01 Other Romans might use "we aren't Catos" as a flip excuse, but those attached to the name had a long way to fall. It was presumed, in fact, that they had fallen by default. The myth of universal decline was set as deep in the ancient mind as the myth of progress is in ours. It permeated politics and religion. It was a powerful figure for poets. Virgil, writing a generation after Cato the Younger, took decline for granted in these lines on an ancient warrior from the epic Aeneid: "As he looks about, he sees a giant stone, an ancient giant stone, that lay at hand by chance upon the plain,
24:08 Speaker 01 set there as boundary mark between the fields to keep the farmers free from border quarrels. And twice-six chosen men with bodies such as earth produces now could scarcely lift that stone upon their shoulders. But the hero, anxious and running headlong, snatched the boulder." Twelve times weaker. The Romans of Cato's day felt themselves in a similar relation to their ancestors. The ancients were, almost by definition, purer, wiser, braver. In every Roman home of consequence, the faces of the fathers themselves were witness to the decay. Death masks pressed from the flesh, realer than any photograph, hung on the walls in their stern rows, eyes empty and staring.
24:55 Speaker 01 Robbed young of a father and a guardian in turn, Cato the Younger seems to have chosen his third and most lasting father from among those death masks. He conceived of his challenge like this: "To show the same qualities that were so valued in his great-grandfather, and to do so in a world grown four generations worse." The Rome of Cato the Younger was not merely feeling tremors of a cultural and political rupture; an earthquake was fully underway. Cato the Elder grew up under catastrophic but unifying attack from abroad. His great-grandson grew up under a homegrown reign of terror. It was in that world that Cato the Younger set himself the task of proving his great-grandfather's model
25:40 Speaker 01 still possible and still indispensable, just as the pillar in Cato the Elder's basilica, no matter how the tribunes complained, remained in exactly the right place. An added danger dogged Cato the Younger's efforts: affectation. Both Catos and their constituencies celebrated the same old Roman ideal, but Cato the Elder had lived it and done so unself-consciously. He had learned to speak in the town market, not a school of rhetoric. He had been a small farmer and a citizen soldier at a time when both roles were dying out. In fact, his own life encompassed much of the change.
26:22 Speaker 01 By the end, he wasn't a ploughman, but a land speculator and shrewd investor. It was for an audience that had experienced such change that he wrote his famous book "On Agriculture", among the oldest known ancestors of all Latin prose. It was a compendium of practical farm advice: how to run an olive press, how to treat a sick ox, which gods to sacrifice to and when. It was not, in other words, a handbook of advice for those who had grown up on the land, learning by experience. Those people had farmed for centuries without the help of books. But under the pressures of cheap imported grain and cheap imported slaves, the people of Rome had largely left the plough.
27:07 Speaker 01 So Cato the Elder did not write for simple farmers. He wrote instead for citified investors of the kind he himself had become: "Men who would run plantations with the help of dedicated managers and enslaved prisoners of the foreign wars."
27:24 Speaker 01 If one Cato's life had spanned both worlds, the others was firmly planted in a latter-day Rome. In imitating his ancestor so closely, Cato the Younger was setting out on a lifelong project of calculated anachronism. It might bring reverence or ridicule with little middle ground. If it was going to work, if it was going to look like something more than pretension, the persona could not slip for a moment. Even then, there would still, sometimes, be laughter. And Cato's search for a way to cope with laughter may help account for the single greatest exception to his work of imitation. Cato took up with the same people his great-grandfather had considered a dangerous foreign cult: the Stoics.
28:11 Speaker 01 Cato the Elder expelled Stoicism from Rome. Cato the Younger was instrumental in replanting it. The imperial chronicler Pliny the Elder found it "a very remarkable fact that the same Greek language that had been proscribed by one of the Catos was introduced among us by the other." He was exaggerating, but not wildly. Toward the end of the Elder Cato's life in 155, Rome received a strange diplomatic delegation from Athens. It came to plead for Roman mediation of a local dispute, and, Athens being Athens, it was comprised of three philosophers:
28:51 Speaker 01 Carneades the Skeptic, Critelaus the Aristotelian, and Diogenes the Stoic. While they waited for their chance to address the Senate, the philosophers did what came naturally: they lectured. Rome had never seen a spectacle like it. The foreign stars performed for packed crowds, the city's youths abandoning all of their other pleasures to cheer wildly. It was a pop-cultural fad of the first order: a Greek invasion.
29:20 Speaker 01 Part of the appeal was in the near-limitless scope of philosophy. In a world without academic disciplines as we know them, philosophy was politics and logic, ethics and science. This was the first opportunity for a whole generation of young Romans to consider whether the universe would be consumed in fire, or which was the best form of government, or whether knowledge itself was possible. All at once, in the span of a few days, everything that underlay the order of their city was up for grabs. Everything that seemed solid was slipping.
29:55 Speaker 01 That was bad enough for the censor, but his indignation reached the breaking point when Carneades played an unthinkable trick. He spoke, in Cato's presence, on two sides of the same topic on two consecutive days, just to show that he could. Having spent the first day praising his host's strong unbending sense of justice, Carneades took back everything he had said.
30:20 Speaker 01 He denied that justice existed, and concluded, in a double-twisting backward somersault of logic, that there was no such thing as truth, except, maybe, the proposition that there was no such thing as truth. A matter of days later, he and the other two were sent packing on a boat for Greece, thanks to Cato.
30:41 Speaker 01 As satisfying as their expulsion must have felt, the irritant that had been shipped off soon returned, and many times over. Cato the Elder ultimately concluded that the corrupt tide of philosophy could not be stemmed. From a city in which a live stoic had provoked a sensation, Rome had become, by Cato the Younger's time, a city in which no leading house was considered entirely cultured if it lacked its own tame philosopher. Philosophical study was no longer a suspect youth craze, but a finishing school. Cato the Younger was by no means unique in seeking that kind of training. He was unique in the lifelong doggedness with which he pursued it,
31:23 Speaker 01 and the thoroughness with which he put his career on hold for it. And he was a true reflection of his ancestor in his disdain for philosophy as art, or performance, or diversion. Others were shopping for a conversation piece; Cato was seeking something deeper.
31:43 Speaker 01 What exactly? More specifically, what about Stoicism appealed to a privileged young man who could have had his choice of competing schools? And what caused him to reject the genteel, non-committal eclecticism affected by so many of his contemporaries? To begin with, the Stoics were as hard as uncompromising as Cato the Younger aspired to be. They taught: whether you were a foot underwater or a fathom, you were still drowning. They were no more or less good, no more or less bad. All virtues were one and the same virtue, all vices were the same vice. Your lungs were either full of water or of air.
32:27 Speaker 01 In that austere scheme, the vast diversity of characters and types were reducible to two: the sage and the fool. Fools were universal. Even practising Stoics lumped themselves in as equally foolish, equally mired in error and sin, and equally miserable. Of sages who alone were happy, Socrates himself was perhaps the only known case. What could such a philosophy possibly offer to the aspiring fool? At the very least, it offered the possibility of swimming toward air. The aspirant might learn to sever happiness from everything fickle and fading, and to
33:08 Speaker 01 guard it in the single place it was safe, in the practice of virtue. A Stoic trained himself for indifference to all things outside the magic circle of the conscience. The choice between comfort and pain, wealth and starvation, even life and death, was always indifferent. To be sure, it was preferable to eat rather than go hungry, but there was no real happiness in the choice. It was always secondary to maintaining the virtuous life. Pain was always welcomed as a chance to grow in virtue.
33:42 Speaker 01 And what was a virtuous life? To live in agreement with nature. Reason was nature's best gift, so living by nature meant, first of all, living by reason. Self-seeking, cowardice, grief, and all evil emotions could only enter the mind with reason's assent. The trained stoic was skilled at holding back. What was promised in return was no less than freedom from passion, a word that, for all of its positive connotations today, carried in the classical world nuances of suffering and passivity, meanings that are preserved in the phrase "the passion of Christ". Plato taught that the passions were natural, if ignoble, parts of the soul.
34:26 Speaker 01 Aristotle recommended moderating them, not stamping them out. But to the stoics, they were alien. With enough practice, the passions could be exiled from the citadel of the self. No unhappiness could touch the well-intentioned man. Banish the passions, and you were proof against misfortune. Banish the passions, and you were independent of the world, the owner of an unshakable contentment. Others could fight fate. The stoic would choose to love it. And this amor fati was the deepest meaning of agreement with nature and the highest reward of their practice. As one stoic taught,
35:06 Speaker 01 "If I actually knew that I was fated now to be ill, I would even have an impulse to be ill." What the stoics offered Cato was not idle speculation, but a way of being, a simple and ready-made life that had already been cut to fit his character. There were, in fact, highly-developed stoic metaphysics and stoic logic, but in making the journey from Athens to Rome, a second-rate Greek philosophy had developed into a first-rate Roman religion.
35:36 Speaker 01 Stoicism became, above all, a practical guide to life. The Stoics who flourished in Rome were the ones who set aside their more implausible doctrines and tailored their teaching to a people who loved things that worked. Similarly, what Cato took from his tutor, a Hellenized Middle Easterner named Antipater, was not first and foremost dialectics or paradoxes, but exercises that could be put to use the day they were learned. He learned how to subsist on a poor man's food or no food at all, how to go barefoot and bareheaded in rain and heat. He learned how to endure sickness in silence, how to speak bluntly and how to shut up,
36:17 Speaker 01 how to meditate on disaster and suffer the imagined loss of everything again and again. In effect, Cato was learning how to reincarnate his holy ancestor, and to do so in the most intellectually respectable way possible. Why Stoicism? Because the values of Cato the Elder, the ones that came from Latin soil, were potent but dead. In Stoicism, Cato the Younger found them again as part of a living tradition. The old Cato never knew how stoic he was. It took his descendant to merge Greek philosophy and Roman patriotism to make that foreign school fully Roman by the force of his example.
37:01 Speaker 01 From the very beginning, Cato the Younger's example, the bare feet, the out-of-date and wrong-colored clothing, the ostentatious poverty, was derided by some as a transparent act, and part theater it may have been. Rejecting creature comforts, living the hard soldierly life, those virtues were still every bit as publicly lauded as they were in the days of Cato the Elder, even if they were honored more in the breach than in the observance. That could hardly have been lost on the younger Cato, growing up as he did in a city obsessed with rediscovering the lost ancient formula for the good life. Cato the Elder, it was agreed, had had it. If the great-grandson was cut from the same cloth, why not pay attention to him?
37:48 Speaker 01 Cato was determined to wear the mask until it fit. This was the source of his commitment to a school that promised to teach him how to endure laughter and abuse, to teach him to harden himself by seeking it out, to teach him to be ashamed only of what was really shameful. Seneca, the great imperial stoic, relates the story of what Cato did when visiting the baths one day, he was shoved and struck. Once the fight was broken up, he simply refused to accept an apology from the offender. "I don't even remember being hit."
38:24 Speaker 00 My new book Courage is Calling is now officially a New York Times bestseller. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the book. It was literally and figuratively overwhelming. We signed almost 10,000 copies of the book, which just, you know, it hit me right here, and I appreciate it so much. If you haven't picked up a copy, or you want to pick up a signed copy as a gift, please do. You can get your copy at dailystoic.com/courageiscalling, or you can just go to [email protected] .
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