The Daily Stoic - Cicero on The Paradox of Virtue

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Ryan presents the first of six readings of Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes. Cicero was considered Rome’s greatest politician, and he has survived as one of history’s most enduring chroniclers of Stoic philosophy and the Stoics themselves. As Ryan explains in Lives of the Stoics, these paradoxes are designed to question commonly held beliefs in order to promote reflection and discussion. In that spirit, the first paradox sees Cicero examine the idea that “virtue is the only good.”✉️  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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Today's episode we're going to hear from Cicero, Cicero himself by way of an audio narrator. But as I was writing about Cicero

in lives of the Stoic, I don't say that he's a Stoke, I say that he's a fellow traveler. What's fascinating about Cicero is that he wrote beautifully about the Stoics. He was friends with the Stoics. One great Stoic, Diodotus, actually died in Cicero's house. He wrote beautifully about the Stoics. He called the Stokes the only true philosophers. And in fact, if it were not for Cicero much of what we know about the ancient Stokes would not have survived to us. And yet, he did struggle to live up to the ideas. But that's not what we're going to talk about today. In today's episode, I'm bringing you some of Cicero's famous book,

Stoke Paradoxes, where he explores the ideals and the contradictions, the complexities of Stoke thinking, and I'll give you what I wrote about the Stoke Paradoxes in lives of the Stokes. In 46 BC, Cicero published the Stoke Paradoxes dedicated to Marcus Brutus, who himself had strong stoic leanings. In what was a more rhetorical exercise than a serious philosophical treatment, he explored six of the primary stoic paradoxes. Number one, that virtue is the only good, two that it is sufficient for happiness, three that all virtues and vices are equal, four that all all fools are mad, five, that only the sage is truly free, and six, that the wise person alone is rich.

Now, these are not paradoxes in the logical sense only in the sense that they fly in the face of common sense. It's actually the counterintuitiveness of these ideas that the Stokes leaned on to catch people's attention. How can virtue be the only good if we also need health and money to live? Is a lie really as bad as killing someone? Plenty of philosophers were visibly poor. How were they rich? And so the possibilities for discussion, for counter examples, for a gacha moments were endless, and Cicero loved noodling with the prompts laid down by Zeno and Clienti's in Aristo,

everyone else. And that's what I'm going to bring you in today's episode part one, and then we'll have part two shortly. Enjoy it. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Paradox 1.

That virtue is the only good. I am apprehensive that this position may seem to some among you to have been derived from the schools of the Stoics and not from my own sentiments. Yet I will tell you my real opinion, and that too more briefly than so important a matter requires to be discussed. By Hercules, I never was one who reckoned among good and desirable things, treasures, magnificent mansions, interest, power, or those pleasures to which mankind are most chiefly addicted. For I have observed that those to whom these things abounded still desired them most. For the first of cupidity is never filled or satiated. They are tormented not only with the lust

of increasing, but with the fear of losing what they have. I know that I often look in vain for the good sense of our ancestors, those most continent men, who affixed the appellation of good to those weak, fleeting circumstances of wealth, when in truth and fact their sentiments were the very reverse. Can any bad man enjoy a good thing, or is it possible for a man not to be good when he lives in the very abundance of good things? And yet we see all those things so distributed that wicked men possess them, and that they are inauspicious to the good.

Now, let any man indulge his railery, if he please, but right reason will ever have more weight with me than the opinion of the multitude. Nor shall I ever account a man when he has lost his stock of cattle or furniture to have lost his good things. Nor shall I seldom speak in praise of bias, who, if I mistake not, is reckoned among the seven wise men. For when the enemy took possession of pre-en, his native country, and when the rest so managed their flight as to carry off with them their effects,

on his being recommended by a certain person to do the same. Why answered he? I do so for I carry with me all my possessions. He did not so much as esteem those playthings of fortune, which we even term our blessings to be his own. But someone will ask, what then is a real good? Whatever is done up rightly, honestly and virtuously is truly said to be done well. And whatever is upright, honest and agreeable to virtue, that alone, as I think, is a good thing. But these matters, when they are more loosely discussed, appear somewhat obscure. But those things which seem to be discussed with more subtlety than is necessary with words

may be illustrated by the lives and actions of the greatest of men. I ask then of you whether the men who left to us this empire, founded upon so noble a system, seemed ever to have thought of gratifying averis by money, delight by delicacy, luxury by magnificence, or pleasure by feasting. Set before your eyes any of our monarchs, shall I begin with Romulus, or after the state was free with those who liberated it? By what steps then did Romulus ascend to heaven? By those which these people termed good things, or by his exploits and his virtues? What are we to imagine that the wooden or earthen dishes of Numa Pompilius were less acceptable to the immortal gods than the embossed plate of others?

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I pass over our other kings for all of them, accepting Tarkwinn the proud, were equally excellent. Should anyone ask, what did Brutus perform when he delivered his country? Or as to those who were the participators of that design, what was their aim in the object of their pursuit? Lives there the man who can regard as their object, riches, pleasure, or anything else than acting the part of a great and gallant man. What motive impelled Kaya's museus without the least hope of preservation to attempt the death of Porcena? What impulse kept codes to the bridge, singly opposed to the whole force of the enemy? bridge, singly opposed to the whole force of the enemy. What power devoted the elder and the younger deacious and impelled them against armed

battalions of enemies? What was the object of the continents of Chias Fabricius or of the frugality of life of Manias Curius? What were the motives of those two thunderbolts of the Punic War, Publius and Neacipio, when they proposed with their own bodies to intercept the progress of the Carthaginians? What did the elder, what did the younger Africanus propose? What were the views of Cato, who lived between the times of both? What shall I say of innumerable other instances for we abound in examples drawn from our own

history? Can we think that they proposed any other object in life but what seemed glorious and noble? Now let the deriders of this sentiment and principle come forward. Let even them take their choice, whether they would rather resemble the man who is rich and marble palaces, adorned with ivory, and shining with gold, in statues, in pictures, an embossed gold and silver plate, in the workmanship of Corinthian brass, or if they will resemble Fabricius, who had and who wished to have none of these things. And yet, they are readily prevailed upon to admit that those things which are transferred

now hither, now thither, are not to be ranked among good things. While at the same time, they strongly maintain and eagerly dispute that pleasure is the highest good. A sentiment that to me seems to be that of a brute, rather than that of a man. Shall you endowed as you are by God or by nature whom we may term the mother of all things, with a soul, then which there exists nothing more excellent and more divine, so degrade and prostrate yourself as to think there is no difference between yourself and any quadruped. Is there any real good that does not make him who possesses it a better man?

For in proportion, as every man has the greatest amount of excellence, he is also in that proportion most praiseworthy, nor is there any excellence on which the man who possesses it may not just leave value himself. But what of these qualities resides in pleasure? Does it make a man better or more praiseworthy? Does any man extoll himself in boasting or self-recommendation for having enjoyed pleasures?

Now, if pleasure, which is defended by the advocacy of many, is not to be ranked among good things, and if the greater it is, is not to be ranked among good things. And if the greater it is, the more it dislodges the mind from its habitual and settled position, surely to live well and happily is nothing else than to live virtuously and lightly. Thanks so much for listening.

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