The Daily Stoic - Donald Robertson on the Life of Socrates and His Impact on Stoicism

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

It’s easy to forget that the Stoics, Socrates, and other ancient philosophers were just like us—human and therefore imperfect. But in his new book How To Think Like Socrates, author Donald Robertson peels back the mythology around the ancient philosopher and shows how we can apply his wisdom in modern times. Donald returned to the Daily Stoic podcast to talk with Ryan about Socrates’ fascinating life, what his flaws were, and his enduring influence on the Stoics.Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy.📚 Donald’s book, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, is out now! Pick up a signed copy at The Painted PorchGet a signed copy of Donald's other books Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor and How To Think Like A Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius at The Painted Porch🎥 Watch Donald Robertson’s first interview with Ryan on YouTubeSubstackX: @donjrobertsonIG: @donaldjrobertson✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing right now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with

me when I went to Australia, when I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So we're not staying in a hotel, we're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location.

You can find something awesome. You wanna stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels.

So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show. And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays,

we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. So long ago, a man brings wisdom down from the heavens. His name is Socrates. He's the hero of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. He's the greatest philosopher who ever lived, they thought.

Epictetus says he's the greatest athlete who ever lives. If you define an athlete as someone who catches the ball and throws it back, catches the ball, throws it back, which is to say, responds well to the situations and the circumstances of life. I think Socrates is a fascinating philosopher, a fascinating human being, and certainly a complicated one. And it's why I was excited when my agent Steve said,

hey, I'm putting this book in the mail for you. You're gonna wanna check it out. And he throws Donald Roberts'm putting this book in the mail for you. You're gonna wanna check it out. And he throws Donald Robertson's new book in the mail. Now I am a huge fan of Donald Robertson's work. I read some of his early stuff when I was working on Obstacles of the Way. That's how long now I've been a fan of his stuff. I really enjoyed his book,

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which is about Marcus Aurelius. I loved his biography of Marcus Aurelius called The Stoic Emperor. I've had him on the podcast a couple of times. We always get really into, I think, important stoic topics. I've been thinking about this thing that he said last time we talked.

I'll bring it to you real fast because it was really important. Hi, I was reading Hierarchles and the translator was making this note that when the Stoics started, they started with a kind of, they were very much descended from the cynics, right? There's this sort of rejection of earthly things. There was kind of this, it's hyper individualistic, you know, like focus on your

own self-improvement, forget everything else. And that as Stoicism evolves, she's sort of noting that it softens, right, that it softens into the notion of justice, even though Zeno talks about courage, temperance, justice wisdom, she's saying that the justice was was undervalued as a virtue. But by the time it gets to Marcus Aurelius, this idea of being community minded, of participating, of giving a shit aboutlius, this idea of being community minded, of participating, of giving a shit about other people. This becomes the primary Stoic virtue, which Marcus Aurelius says a number of times in meditations. What do you think about that evolution?

I think it's true. I mean, maybe in some ways they just conceptualized justice and social responsibility a little bit differently in classical Greece than they did in Roman society. But for sure, the cynics were less concerned with our social bonds and responsibility, and they do seem a bit harsh at times. And the stoics definitely... But Marcus Aurelius puts so much emphasis on justice. He actually literally says it wouldn't play, but it's the most important virtue. He mentions justice or natural affection or cosmopolitanism or something along those lines. That's something that has to do with our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with society and almost every page of the meditations. It's the main

theme really of the book, but that's not to my end. Obviously, Diogenes is a cynic. If he is concerned about society, it's in a more rudimentary way. Yeah. I've just been interested in that evolution now because it does seem that there is a hyper-individualistic, I don't want to say right wing because it puts too much of a modern political and but there does seem to be a misunderstanding today of stoicism. Yeah, that skips out on the inconvenience of having to care about other people and and perhaps the confusion is in the dichotomy of control. We don't really control other people. So maybe people are confused as to why they're supposed to care about their wellbeing. But Marcus Aurelius doesn't seem

to have any confusion in this regard. I think so. I mean, I think it's also linguistically, because we use the word stoic. Like all of these terms for Greek philosophy, their meanings became caricatured over the centuries, right? Sure. So what we mean by epicurean today, you know, generally is just somebody that enjoys, you know, fancy food and fine dining and stuff like that, right? Yeah.

And what we mean by cynic with a small c is just somebody that kind of sneers at things and you know, as a negative attitude towards other people. And the sophist, skeptic, like these other words, academic, have all kind of become a little bit simplified or caricatured in their meaning over time. So stoic comes to mean just being like a robot or, you know, being unemotional. And that's actually how we use the term in psychology as a research construct. In research on lowercase stoicism consistently shows that it's problematic, it's toxic, it leads to increased psychological or emotional vulnerability. So we often have to explain to psychologists that what we mean by stoic philosophy is much more nuanced and complex, like, than just kind of suppressing your feelings.

It's like when people hear the word sexy, it doesn't have anything to do with sex anymore. It means beautiful or attractive or well designed or sleek or awesome. You know, when you hear stoic, 99% of the time, it's not remotely connected to stoic philosophy. And that confused, like even people that, weirdly even people that read Marcus Aurelius or other books on stoicism still kind of are viewing it through that lens in many cases. And so I've met people who read the meditations and I talked to them about this and they say that they hadn't even noticed that Marcus is talking about justice and society and natural affection. And I thought, how is it possible? Like, it's kind of the main, it goes on and on and on about it. It reminds me of this

quote from William Blake that says, we both read the Bible day and night, but you read black where I read white. I can't think, how could you have not noticed all the references, you know, to not being alienated from your fellow man and, you know, having love? At one point at the beginning, Marcus says that he's describing the ideal stoic. He's talking about Sextus of Chaeronea, like Plutarch's nephew, who was one of his stoic teachers. And he describes him as being free from passions. And he mentions anger. So free from passions such as anger and yet full of full of love.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite passages. Full of love. Like brotherly love he's talking about. Full of love is what we translate as natural affection. but it means the love of a parent for their children. It's kind of like paternal love. We might say platonic love, brotherly love. He thinks that's the pinnacle of Stoicism. And yet people think, have this kind of atomistic, individualistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people interpret stoicism in many cases. And I really think if Marcus Aurelius was around, he would think this is more or less

the opposite of what I thought the human ideal was. You guys are completely alienated from other people around you and the rest of society. And it's, so it's want to reverse that they want this. But in a sense, I think stoic virtue, particularly in Xeno and in the early Greek stoics, it's tied up with a pantheism. And I think one of the starting points is this idea that they want us to be more of one with the rest of the universe. They want us to realize our oneness with the cosmos as a whole and with our fellow men, like with other human beings.

It's extraordinary, by the way, just as a slight aside to that. Marcus mentions being a Roman citizen a couple of times in the meditations. But other than that, when he talks about overcoming anger, feeling love, overcoming alienation, he's talking about people in general, not just Roman subjects or citizens. And the people that he's dealing with as he's writing that are often what the Romans would have called barbarian envoys. It's strange to think that, again, we lose sight of that unless we imagine him writing the meditations in the evening after he's

had a meeting with a bunch of foreign envoys in the morning. And then also he'd been surrounded by foreigners. All the auxiliary units would have been Germanic tribesmen and people from other parts of the empire. Well, he's not just talking about his fellow well-educated, rich Roman senators who went to the same schools and had the same... He's not talking about our brotherly connection as he spent time with a couple hundred people

exactly like him in a beautiful marble palace. It's in the mud of a quincum, right? Like it's far away and he's surrounded by salts of the earth, regular ass people. He says at one point, actually in meditations too, but one he says that he says, I'm not talking about a bond of seed I eat like family or blood I erase

He specifically says why and it's odd that he would say that because it really highlights the fact that he's talking about Probably love towards the people he's at war with Yeah, just you know I did I think becomes highlighted more if we really try and visualize the historical context in which he's writing this. If we're to believe Lucian, the chronology of this, annoyingly, is there's some debate among scholars. But one interpretation is that 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in a single day at the beginning

of the Marcomannic War at Curnuntum, where Marcus then stations himself. That would have been one of the biggest defeats in Roman military history. And then Marcus goes there and stations, which must have been incredibly risky. So knowing that he's in this place where loads of women have been slaughtered by the Germanic tribesmen, he's telling himself, nevertheless, I have to view these people as my brothers and sisters. Yeah, it's, he's being tested at the realist level because the preservation of the empire is at stake, public opinion is at stake. He's just witnessed a horrible atrocity and he's trying to go back to his philosophical

first principles and go, not what do I emotionally think in this moment, not what is politically convenient to think in this moment, not what will rile the troops up in this moment, but like what on my bedrock values as a human being do I want to believe in this moment? And that reminds me of something that I wanted to mention actually, and we kind of came close to earlier when we were talking about how often he'd been bereaved and lost all of those children, but also many other friends and family members that he'd lost. It only as I was working on the graphic novel, and again, like trying to really visualize Marcus's life, did it really dawn on me. I just, I remember just kind of setting up one day and thinking it really hit me for the first time

suddenly that Marcus Aurelius during the plague, surrounded by people who at one point increasingly were probably plotting to assassinate him. Also many people assumed that Marcus Aurelius was going to die because he looked very frail, stationing himself at the frontier where he was risking his life. All of these things combined, when I really just started to picture it, I suddenly realized he really must have woken up each morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, I'm actually still alive. He was living on borrowed time. He really must have felt that, and even beyond the like, all the like, again, all these people around him were gossiping about they thought he's not going to last much longer. And he had that going on for at least a decade, I think.

People speculating about his impending death. What must it be like to know that that's the gossip and that some people in the wings are just waiting for you to die? His sense of his own mortality, I really think, must have been much more pervasive and intense than it would be for most of us. You can see, first off, Donald has a delightful accent, but he's a really deep thinker about philosophy and stoicism.

And look, there's been some people in the stoic world that have not always appreciated my writing or the success of my writing. It's probably more the latter than the former. I'm sure if I was selling zero copies, they'd all be a lot friendlier. But Donald's always been cool to me. Even if he wasn't, I'd be a fan of his stuff

because he's great. I always enjoy talking to him. So in today's episode, we're gonna talk about Socrates and how to think like Socrates. So this is a continuation of How to Think like a Roman Emperor. It's sort of a sequel or stylistically similar book, but it's just a great book.

And we had a really fascinating conversation. Donald is a writer, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and a trainer, and he's a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. And he specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills. And he's really excited about the relationship between modern psychotherapy, CBT,

and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. You can check out Mark Shreeles, the Stoic Emperor, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and his new book, How to Think Like Socrates, in the Painted Porch. He's got a great sub stack, I'll link to that. And you can follow him on Instagram, at Donald J. Robertson. I'm Alice Levine.

And I'm Matt Ford. And we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, British Scandal. And in our latest series, we're heading to the eighties. And yes, we'll be talking about perms, shell suits, and enormous mobile phones, but that's alongside a scandal that is guaranteed to blow your mind. Yes, get ready for gold, greed and betrayal.

We are telling the story of one of the biggest heists in this country's history. And how what started as a slick operation spiraled into absolute chaos. We're gonna be unraveling the true story behind the Brinks matte heist, the double crosses, murders and the true story behind the Brinks Mat heist, the double crosses, murders and the global hunt for the missing gold.

And the romancing. Oh, always the romancing, Matt. Turns out there's quite a lot in London, Shady Underworld. To find out the full story and why it'll make you take a long hard look at your gold jewellery, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus, on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. I'm Alice Levine and I'm Matt Ford and we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast British Scandal. And in our latest series we're heading to the 80s.

And yes, we'll be talking about perms, shell suits and enormous mobile phones. But that's alongside a scandal that is guaranteed to blow your mind. Yes, get ready for gold, greed and betrayal. We are telling the story of one of the biggest heists in this country's history. And how what started as a slick operation spiralled into absolute chaos. We're going to be unraveling the true story behind the Brinks Mat heist, the double crosses, murders

and the global hunt for the missing gold. And the romancing. Oh, always the romancing, Matt. Turns out there's quite a lot in London, Shady Underworld. To find out the full story and why it'll make you take a long hard look at your gold jewelry, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. So I was reading Emily Wilson's book, The Case Against Socrates, which I thought was interesting because she famously has this biography of Seneca and they're both pretty

negative. Like, I feel like she both dislikes Seneca and Socrates, which in a way was refreshing. Like I think it's always good to see the critical side of a person, but Socrates especially is so beloved and celebrated historically. It was interesting to read like kind of a steelman case against Socrates, which is what I kind of felt

like she was doing. There's IF Stone's book, the trial of Socrates or something like that it's called, where he deliberately sets out to kind of portray him as guilty. Yeah, to convict him. Yeah. But it's kind of got an obvious agenda, right? It's biased. I don't think it's a balanced portrayal of Socrates.

Hers? I haven't read hers actually, but his is definitely kind of self-consciously biased. Well, it's interesting. What I sort of took from it is like, for all of Socrates' brilliance, there was a lack of social intelligence perhaps. Like what I thought was so interesting that you have theoretically the wisest man in the world,

and he's kind of surprised by this whole thing. Well, I'm gonna say the thing But I thought it was so interesting that you have theoretically the wisest man in the world, and he's kind of surprised by this whole thing. Well, I'm going to say the thing that I find with Socrates is he's just riddled with paradoxes, right? It's at the same time that you say that, Epictetus, like 400 years later or whatever, says to his students something really weird about Socrates. He says the main thing that you guys could learn from Socrates is how to engage in philosophical debates without it degenerating into a quarrel. So he thinks Socrates exemplifies some kind of social skills.

Except it does end in a quarrel and they kill it. It ends up getting executed. Yeah. But he got beaten up in the, sometimes we're told he got beaten up in the street and things like that. And also they tried to execute him several times. The oligarchs tried to execute him as well. We don't even know how many times they tried, possibly three or four times. There was this trial where the mob called for him to be executed as well. So I'm counting maybe three, four times the Athenians tried to kill him. Well, there's that Andy Warhol line about how art is getting away with it.

Have you heard that? Socrates doesn't get away with it. But on. You know, like there's something about, I'm not saying he's wrong about any of the things, but there's at some level, he manages to be right and upset everyone in being right. And there's something wrong about that. That's a paradox. He sort of gets away with it until he doesn't. He gets away with it until he's like 71 or 72 though, which is not bad. That's true. Yeah. And I mean, he, he makes it through the 30 tyrants, but you're right,

he is paradoxical because Diogenes, the cynic, just basically rejects society completely. And then you might have Seneca, who is a philosopher, but very much inside the system. Seneca says like a philosopher should be different on the inside, but on the outside, be exactly like everyone else and be able to operate in, not just in public life, but at the height of public life. And Socrates is kind of somewhere in the middle and he's transgressive, but you're right, not so transgressive

that they have to nip it in the bud. And yet in the end, it does catch up with them. I'm going to try and avoid saying the word paradox every two minutes, right? But like he, everything about him is paradoxical. He's the Greek word that they use, Plato uses for him, is atopos, which is hard to translate, but it means out of place, like kind of weird, like a misfit. But at the same time, he's the quintessential Athenian philosopher. In a sense, he couldn't be more Athenian, but he's also kind of out of place and they see him as a misfit. He's kind of apolitical, but he's also besties with Alcibiades, who he's kind of like seemingly grooming to become the ruler of Athens, like almost like a proto Alexander the Great. Like he has this vision

about uniting all of Greece and maybe even invading Persia. So he almost is a bit like Seneca, advising Nero in terms of his relation with Alcibiades. And he had other powerful, like political figures that were associated with him as well. But he also hung out with prostitutes and slaves and you know, you name it. And slept outside and was just, yeah. It's a fascinating sort of series of contradictions. And yeah, I think what I was most struck by

is that the vehemence of the backlash seems to catch him by surprise. Like for someone who's so wise and such a good reader of people, he seems to be surprised, like he calls himself the gadfly, but what do people do with flies? They swat them. Yeah. There's an argument. He's clearly asking for it. Plato portrays him at some points

as Kenneth Lick in the Gorgias. He's portrayed as anticipating the fact that he's going to run into a problem with this. Actually, also in the first Alcibiades, which is set much earlier, he kind of says something that foreshadows, Plato has him kind of foreshadowing the fact that he's going to run into some danger because of the Athenian state. But then in Xenophon, you get him saying stuff like he implies that Socrates thought he was becoming elderly and he was at risk of losing his faculties and he didn't want to become a burden to his friends and family. He rationalizes it a bit and says he wasn't afraid of dying because he felt in Greek society

he'd reached this age where he saw his life is approaching its natural end anyway. He essentially leaves his family to fend for themselves. Do you know what I mean? There's something unsympathetic about the way in which he makes himself. It's like he makes himself a martyr, right? In a way that is not aggrandizing, but it's like he was insisting on the martyrdom

and at every step they were willing to let him off the hook in some way. Yeah. It's definitely possible that it's kind of by design and he saw this as an opportunity to grandstand. I think it's in Xenophon, there's a Greek word that refers to his, that means big talk. It's a little bit ambiguous. And he says that he upset the jury because of his big talk. For somebody who says his philosophical method is meant to be a kind of therapy for alleviating people of intellectual conceit or arrogance, this is kind of a big part of what Socrates claims to be doing.

In court, he came across to them as being incredibly arrogant. And that upset them. Yeah. For someone who had been so artful for so long and had gotten away with it for so long, there is kind of a boneheadedness to his approach. For people who haven't read the book or don't know about Socrates, you know Socrates gets sentenced to death, but I think when you dig into the details, there's this- Spoiler alert. Yeah, yeah, he does. He dies in the end.

There is this kind of revealing little detail, which is a certain percentage of the Athenians, but by no means a large majority vote to convict him. And then Socrates has to give a speech where he gets to explain, he gets to plea for leniency or propose a punishment. And his speech goes over so poorly that more jurors vote to sentence him to death

than to convict. So there are, but what that means is that there were people who thought he was innocent and wanted him to. Who found the speech so obnoxious and repulsive that they deserve, they believe that the speech deserved the death penalty, not the actions themselves. Which is, because we're not told that much about what offended them about that.

He says his punishment is an alternative to death penalty. So normally he would have suggested exile or some heavy fine or something like that. But he suggested he should be given free meals for life, basically. Like an Olympian's pension. Yeah, yeah. And that, for some reason, that really upset them. It's almost like it was impious.

He committed the crime. One of the crimes is sort of impiety to the gods. He basically commits it in front of the jury. Yeah, yeah. If you think about it. There are many odd things about it. I mean, like, so throughout that trial, like, Plato portrays him as saying men of Athens to them.

And so it may be that he's also offending them by not saying men of the jury. Like he's not really... And he implies, Plato has him kind of implying that he doesn't really recognize their authority as his judges. He goes on this whole thing about puncturing intellectual conceit and questioning the whys and finding out they weren't really wise and finding out that no one really possessed moral wisdom. But all that time, the subtext is he's standing in front of the jury that are about to judge him. So he's imp of implying, look, none of you guys understand the nature of justice, right? By the way. So that probably aggravated them as well.

Well, that's the paradox, right? Socrates is the man who knows that he knows nothing. And yet, like we read the dialogues today and they're brilliant and interesting, but it struck me thinking about in the moment, if you actually were on the other side, he would come off as a complete know-it-all. He's doing this thing that's incredibly obnoxious, like when you're in a discussion with someone and they're like, I don't know, but here, let me tell you all the problems with your thing. And you go, but I don't know. He's clearly criticizing other people without necessarily owning that criticism. And I suspect that would have been extremely aggravating. One of the strange things about him, I'll try to avoid saying paradox again,

the sophists set themselves up to be experts, wise men. So knowingly they would say, I am wise, I am an expert. You guys should all come and listen to me. I'll give an amazing speech, go away and memorize it. And Socrates, rather than assuming the role of an amazing teacher, kind of casts himself more in the role of a really artful and skilled student. So he rather than giving lectures, typically, he's the one asking questions. But that also means it would be like you're attending, and often he's at the lectures or sophists and asking them these questions.

So it does potentially make us think of being at a lecture and then there's some guy sitting at the back. A heckler. A heckling and asking loads of really provocative questions. And it could be the rest of the students all turn around and think, this guy's more interesting than they did giving the lecture, But it's also quite disruptive. Yes. Well, and it was interesting. I read your book and then I read this biography of Ben Franklin. And what I thought was so interesting is here you have another guy who brings wisdom down from the

heavens. Like literally, like brings lightning, like discovers electricity effectively, right? He's brilliant. He's wise. He's philosophical, but he also has this sort of social acuity that allowed him, he too kind of was disruptive and transgressive, but he managed to do it. He would write these letters from a pseudonym. He kind of assumed this character. It was just fascinating to watch this other guy who has a long life in public service at the highest level

and effectively has no enemies. And it was just like, oh, okay, Socrates was this brilliant person who we can learn so much from. And then he also kind of has this other thing which a lot of intellectuals and very brilliant people struggle with, which is how do you engage with other people?

How do you get people to change their minds? And how do you do it without alienating unnecessarily wide swaths of the population? I mean, today, most people don't think philosophy is for them. We have a different version of that problem. But it just struck me as the sort of the tragic flaw of Socrates, even though we see him as this kind of humble figure, was a kind of arrogance, but then also indifference to other people's feelings.

Yeah. But at the same time, I mean, we said he survived the plague of Athens. He survived the whole Peloponnesian war, even though he fought in it. Loads of Athenians were killed in the war. Lots of hoplites were lost. And, you know, he took all these risks. Like he lived quite a dangerous life, involved with politics and so on. Al-Sabidi's got assassinated. Socrates survived a bit longer. So in some ways also, I think we can see evidence in the dialogue and we have to qualify everything by saying the sources that we have are semi fictional, not completely reliable, contradictory, ambiguous, blah, blah, blah. But in the literary

account of Socrates that we have, he does exhibit in some ways quite a lot of social skills, right? I think there are some situations where he's able to question people quite provocatively, but he also compliments them at the same time, right? And he also steel mans their arguments sometimes, right? And then there's other times where he's portrayed saying things that do seem quite tactless. Like he says something that seems quite insulting towards Critias, the guy that becomes the head of the 30 tyrants. So he upset the wrong guy there. And then it sounds like Critias had a kind of vendetta against him after that.

Sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's like none of this knowledge, wisdom, whatever, doesn't exist in a vacuum. We perceive Socrates only on the page now and whether he was right or wrong, but being right or wrong also exists within a social context and a political context. And just that, I think that's, to me, what's so fascinating about the Stokes is how, as it makes its way from Greece to Rome,

they have to navigate that. It's a philosophy not for the classroom or the garden, but a philosophy for life. And life is filled with complicated, petty, addictive, angry, powerful people. Did you know that after World War II, the US government quietly brought former Nazi scientists

to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s, the US Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public? These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not. They're well-documented government operations that have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke Lamanna, a Marine Corps recon vet, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown. It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted, Declassified Mysteries.

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Apple podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. I mean, when I was writing the book, that was kind of one of the things that excited me about it. I think it's often the case that classicists and historians can see there's a really amazing story. It's become maybe that used to be well known, perhaps in the ancient world, and then becomes kind of inaccessible somehow over time. Like most people today would say they knew Socrates drank hemlock and maybe that's about all they know. Maybe they've read a bit of the Republic or something. Or they know the method. Yeah. They don't really know that much. I mean, many people are surprised to know that he served in the military.

Yes. There's a lot of stuff they don't know about him. And to some extent, I think that's because in the dialogues, again, on the one hand, he's portrayed almost like in a play, interacting with famous historical figures. There are references to historical events, but despite that, he still comes across overall as if he's in a kind of bubble and he's wandering around in pleasant groves or in gymnasia, chatting about abstract stuff. Well, the world is kind of falling apart around him in a sense. They're in the middle of this epic war that he's involved in, and he's dealing with these key

political figures in it. So our impression of Socrates is somewhat abstracted from his historical context, but Marcus Aurelius would have had a much stronger sense, for example, even many centuries later, that Socrates was this flesh and blood rounded figure that fought in the military, that knew key political figures, that lived through a plague. And everyone that studies the classics knows that, but I just kind of felt it's not even like the story of some historical figures' lives is kind of boring in a way. But Socrates' life is really colorful and dynamic. He knew these amazing people and did amazing things. And we're kind of sleeping on this in a way. You know, people don't know about it. It would make a good,

in some ways it would almost make a good movie. And so I kind of wanted to find a way to bring it to life, almost like a movie or a graphic novel or something. I mean, really like a lot of books, I'm sure many authors do this. Maybe you do this as well. That when I'm writing, I kind of think, what's the book that I would have wanted to... If I could go back in time and give my 17-year-old self a book about Greek philosophy, what would it look like? I think it would be like an adventure story that really brings a history to life and weaves the philosophy into it. Like you say, makes it more connected to real life. You know, Socrates was said

to be the first philosopher who brought philosophy down from the heavens and applied it to daily life. And you know, he doesn't even do that consistently. Sometimes he talks about pretty abstract things. But the thing that caught my eye also coming from a background in therapy as a cognitive behavioral therapist, there are more so also in Xenophon. So we have Plato's dialogues, but we also, a lot of people perhaps don't know that we also have a load of dialogue, like 30 or 40 dialogues from Xenophon when a Socrates' other students. And there were many, many other dialogues that circulated in ancient world that are lost today. In Xenophon, who perhaps influenced the Stoics as much or even more than Plato.

There are, the dialogues tend to be shorter. And some of them look remarkably like cognitive therapy. There are a couple in particular that I don't have any hesitation saying look a lot like someone doing relationships counseling. There's one, I'll tell you what they are, like just so, because we need concrete examples, because most people have read the Republic or things like that. Maybe they've looked at the Apology and you see fragments of this kind of therapeutic Socrates in those. But in Xenophon, there's one where he's talking to Lamprocles, who's his eldest son. And Lamproclese says, I just can't put up with my mom nagging me. He's like probably 15. And so it's this teenager

complaining about his nagging mom. To his dad. Yeah. And he's really angry about this. And so Socrates does something that resembles relationships counseling or cognitive therapy with him. And so he's not talking about metaphysics. What does he tell him? The first thing he does something that resembles relationships counseling or cognitive therapy with him. And so he's not talking about metaphysics. What does he tell him? The first thing he does, interestingly, is something that he seems to be known for doing. He does in other dialogues as well. His opening gambit is to say, do other people feel the same way about your mum that you

do? Yeah. Right. And so, and he gets a bit pushback against this, but this is a key move in cognitive therapy as well, right? Because the cardinal problem in my view in psychotherapy is we have beliefs, thoughts, opinions, judgments about the world, and we look at the world through those, like we're looking through a colored lens. So something happens that psychologists tend nowadays to call cognitive fusion. Right. So I think my mom's unbearable. Right. Now I just see her as being unbearable. I don't make a

distinction between my judgment that she's unbearable and the external person. The Stokes would say that your opinion is that she's unbearable. She is not objectively unbearable because there's an interplay between the two of you. The two things just become fused together normally though. And so we have to start therapy by prizing them apart and getting me to realize, no, the unbearableness comes from your opinion, your judgment about your mom. That's your impression of her. It may or may not be accurate. It might not be the whole story. And one way

to prize these two things apart and make me aware that the judgment comes from me is to start saying, do other people all see her in the same way. He does the same thing with two of his best friends. There's a guy called Chirophon, who is Socrates' lifelong friend and also seems to maybe be a philosopher as well. He's almost his constant companion, but we don't hear that much more about him. But he's a really eccentric character as well. He's described as the bat and he's kind of manic and he's described as being very gaunt. So? So he's a colorful character. And Chirithon is the one that goes to Delphi and asks, is any man wiser than Socrates? Right? So he's a very intriguing figure. His little brother, Chiracrates, falls out with him and refuses to speak to him because

of some squabble over inheritance. Right? And Socrates is with them him and refuses to speak to him because of some squabble over inheritance. Socrates is with them and he thinks, I need to do something about this. So he starts talking to Chirocrates and he says, what's up? And he says, my brother's just a royal pain in the butt. He's just absolutely unbearable. He's really mad with him. You can tell from the way he's talking.

And again, there's a lot of pushback. He's like, you don't tell from the way he's talking. And again, there's a lot of pushback. He's like, you know, you don't understand the guy's an idiot and da da da da. And Socrates says, but does everybody view him in the same way? Right. And he gets pushed back against this, but he's just beginning to prise apart the value judgment, the opinion from the external person. There are other, other emotions are available. Like there might be other ways that you could view and interpret your brother's behavior. And this is how cognitive therapy usually begins as well. This is what we sometimes call cognitive diffusion or cognitive distancing. It's creating this distinction between our opinions and the things to which they refer that then becomes integral to Epictetus' stoicism.

The handles. Which handle you're going to grab? Which handle you use. There's more than one handle, buddy. So Epictetus says, people aren't upset by events, but rather by their opinions about them. And no one ever quotes the next sentence of the same passage where he says, for instance, and he goes straight for the jugular, he says, death isn't inherently inherently terrifying because if it was, Socrates would also have been terrified of it. And Socrates provides a famous role model of somebody who exhibits equanimity in the face of his death. So there's another perspective on death that's available, right? It's not the only way of viewing it. It's not intrinsically terrifying.

Some people aren't terrified of it. Your mom isn't intrinsically annoying. Yeah. Like- Yeah, you can say a lot of things about Socrates. He was obnoxious. He was annoying. He could have been more socially adept, but you can't say he wasn't brave. And you can't say that he didn't stick to what he thought was true. He saved the life of at least one officer, possibly two. And I think he probably had a reputation for being a brave infantryman or hoplite. Let's throw in some trivia, right? Some geeky stuff. I think the way Socrates is exhibited, so Xenophon, who was a famous Athenian general, has a bunch

of dialogues where Socrates shows pretty intricate knowledge of training and tactics and strategy. Some people think that must just be Xenophon putting these words in Socrates' mouth. However, it's not necessarily so because Plato also shows Socrates talking to two generals, Lackeys and Nicias, about military training. And so it may be that Socrates wasn't an ordinary hoplite. He may have been more like a centurion or a sergeant major. He's a guy that's comfortable liaising with senior officers and seems to actually have had training.

He's had some kind of education in military strategy and tactics. So- some kind of education and military strategy and tactics. Right. So it is, it's interesting. I wonder how much of the, our understanding of Socrates is a projection of our understanding of philosophers now. So we think of philosophy as and philosophers as somewhat superfluous, somewhat abstract, somewhat pedantic. We think of them as removed from everyday life. We have this idea that they're not athletic. We have that, like our understanding of philosophers today, if you were to tell someone to imagine a philosopher,

I think we project, we just dress that up in a toga and put it in Athens when in reality his biography makes it clear that this guy's physically fit, this guy's hearty and tough, this guy's engaged in public life, he's good at helping people solve practical problems. People want to be, he is annoying in some ways, but young people clearly want to be like him. He's interesting and impressive and inspiring. All the things that philosophers are not today. He's the Greek word they use for him is... He has a Megalosuchia, I believe is the Greek word, which means like a big soul. And this is a term that the ancient Greeks used to refer to somebody who had, I don't know, I'm not sure what the English equivalent

would be, like someone who's just has a really striking character who stands out head and shoulders above other individuals of their time. And they said that of Alcibiades and Socrates. So that makes it even more interesting that the two were associated. So Athenians would be like, these are two of the most outstanding figures of our lifetime. And they were perceived as being, I guess you could say in completely different ways, incredibly charismatic or striking or memorable people. Yeah. It's interesting how far we are from that today. You couldn't pick a series of words to be further from your person's average conception of a philosopher today. Yeah. There is Sconstance in Ivory Tower, whereas Socrates was doing philosophy on the street with

prostitutes and slaves and also famous politicians. He was in the agora, which is like a shopping mall. I mean, who does philosophy in a shopping mall? Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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