The Daily Stoic - Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato | Ch. 2: The Pillar

Episode Date: November 21, 2021

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why he embraced the philosophy of Stoicism, how much he valued the “living tradition” by going barefoot and wearing out-of-date clothing, and more.Centered is a Mac and Windows app that helps you get into Flow and work faster...and healthier.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.

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. 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 and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wunder'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. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stood Podcast. I've raved about the book Roam'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 Kato. I think you'll like this chapter. It's about the sort of early days of Kato, what makes Kato Kato? How he borne into this illustrious family, this long tradition, beginning with Kato the elder, his great,grandfather, who by the way tried to ban the Stoics and all the philosophy from Rome. So as Pratt as he would have been of his great-grandson, I don't know how happy he would have been to see and become a practicing philosopher. In any case, we're going to talk about the early days of Kato'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, brutally, what Marcus calls the cloak and the campbed

of stoic philosophy. So enjoy this interview, this audiobook excerpt, which you can get anywhere audiobooks or sold. You can also pick up, of course, the physical edition of the book, which I quite like and enjoy. Here is chapter 2, The Pillar, from Rome's last citizen by Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman. by Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman. Two, the pillar. Kato broke his early silence only once in defense 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 18-year-old without office and without authority on any topic except that very building. It was the Basilica Portia, it carried Cato's family name, and it had been erected the first of its kind by Cato's family name, and it had been erected the first of its kind, by Kato's great grandfather. To move even a single pillar from this century-old place would be to disgrace the great man's legacy, at least in the eyes of his great grandson. It was one thing to hold that few, 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 remodeling.

This was about the old ways the most myorom 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 Kato was already politician enough to sell it with charm. He won his case, the pillar stayed. It helped immeasurably that the man whose name was on the building, Kato 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.

Kato the Elder had given his family its name. Originally just another in an interminable line of one Marcus Portius, after another, he came to be hailed by the Cognomen Kato, a title connoting wisdom and experience. His descendants took the title by hereditary right. The son of a farming family from the Roman countryside, Kato the elder was well off enough to own his own land, but not above working shirtless in the field alongside his slaves, sharing their bread and cheap wine at meal-time. 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 to Schoolham, Kato 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. 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 novy hominés, 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 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, Kato the elder contemptuously listed just a few of the many roots 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 garrison 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 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 attendance and friends, nor made them rich at public expense. Those nevers 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. With the right foreign postings, a fortune at 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, tying 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. There was even a word to express what the authentically unpolished Romans possessed, and what the elite of the elite were leaving behind, Latinitas, Latinness. The most fruitful attack on the new elite was simply that they lacked Latinitas. They were decadent, cosmopolitan, un-Roman. 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 Latinness, 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 neighbour who discovered Cato the Elder, a Patrition Senator who owned the next plot over from Cato's. And with that Patrition'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. 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-announce of gold, Kato said, The community suffers from two opposite vices,

Averis 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. 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 Roma broad, he governed provinces with the same thrift he used to manage his farm, gone with the public banquets, retinues of attendance, and slave-toted

litters that usually dignified high-ranking Roman officials. During a year-long governorship of Neurospane, Cato boasted that he stormed more rebellious cities than he spent days in the country, and, at the end, he proudly left his horse behind rather than ship it back to Rome at state expense. There was little doubting that all of this fanatical economy was genuine. Cato practiced 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 plow, 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 peace 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. No one was more thrilled when he learned that his name was officially becoming proverbial, as in, what do you expect, we aren't Catoes? 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 of over Hannibal and Cato's ex-superior Scipio Africanus. Scipio was as a bayoneman as his era could have produced, a grecafile 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. To Scipio, Cato was a crabbed and cruel leader of men whose mercilessness in the provinces only soed 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, 17 years after Scipio's defeat of Hannibal had brought the war to a close, Kato's traditionalist faction had chipped enough away from the heroes Aura to bring a charge of corruption against him. Scipio stood accused of accepting his

dupendous bribe from a foreign king. On the day of the trial, after the prosecution had laid out the accusations in exhaustive detail, Scipio rose in his own defence and spoke a single grave sentence. Romans, this is the date on which I conquered Hannibal. 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. 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, Kato 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 sanitorial 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. They set the code of public morals and enforced it through the examples of those demotions, and they held sweeping power of the public finances.

Such was the responsibility of the censorship that only the most accomplished politicians, typically ex-concils, were permitted to run. In Kato's year, Scipio's old faction put up seven candidates, all running as explicit anti-Kato's, and pledging to wield the censorship's powers with a light hand. Kato, 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 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. Kato was a man of his word. During the year of his censors, many a Roman must have suffered cold sweats at the thought of stepping up to the inquisitors' table, declaring on oath his family, class, wealth, and land holdings, and submitting to an examination of morals. Woe betyred 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 Kato's presence. Scipio's own brother was singled out, ostensibly for luxurious living, but also it was widely suspected for spite.

Some parts of Kato's purge sound eminently sensible even now, such as the ex-concil ejected 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 Kato'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. Kato'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 sanitorial 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 fore. In his last years, Kato 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 had 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, Cater 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 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 Kato's mind. The Carthage Indians 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, Kato tirelessly hammered on that theme. 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

off-hand, ferocious way. In addition, Carthage must be destroyed. Any laughter at the non-secure 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 Kato took up his ruthless campaign, Carthage was destroyed utterly, though Kato did not live to see it. I keep a bad glove. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host.

I'm proud to introduce you to the baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad.

I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast.

Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. 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.

But in the end, even Kato had altered with the times, having made a career railing against the corruption from the east, Kato, at the age of 80, 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 alleged 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. The Rome of his children would be more open still. Latin ites 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, when those folk give us their writings, they will corrupt everything. All the more of these end their doctors here, they have sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine, and they charge a fee for doing

it. There is a surviving bust of Kato 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. Two more generations of Mark Porci bring us down to 95, to the birth of Kato the Younger. The Younger Kato must have passed under the great frowning statue almost daily. He was the heir of a family no longer knew, one for whom the fame and even the name of their historic ancestor was a blessing and a burden.

A forebearer already having reached the prize of the consulship, the Kato's were now and in perpetuity a consular family. They could expect to run for and win the office's Kato the Elder had scraped for on the strength of name recognition and competence by association if nothing else. But shame on any Kato who wasted such an advantage. Other Romans might use, we aren't Kato's, 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 hours. It permeated politics and religion. It was a powerful figure for poets. Virgil, writing a generation after Kato the Younger, took decline for granted in

these lines on an ancient warrior from the epic Annead. As he looks about, he sees a giant stone, an ancient giant stone, that lay at hand by chance upon the plane, 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, 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 Kato's day felt themselves in a similar relation to their ancestors. The ancients were, almost by definition, pure, 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. 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 Kato the younger was not merely feeling tremors of

a cultural and political rupture, and earthquake was fully underway. Kato the Younger was not merely feeling tremors of a cultural and political rupture, and earthquake was fully underway. Kato the Elder grew up under catastrophic but unifying attack from abroad. His great-grandson grew up under a home-grown reign of terror. It was in that world that Kato the Younger set himself the task of proving his great-grandfather's model 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 Cato's and their constituencies celebrated the same old Roman ideal, but Cato the elder had lived it and done so unselfconsciously. 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. By the end he wasn't a plowman, but a land speculator and true 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 books. But under the pressures of cheap, imported grain and cheap, imported slaves, the people of Rome had largely left the plough. So Cato the Elder did not write for simple farmers. He wrote instead for city-fied 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.

If one Kato's life had spanned both worlds, the others was firmly planted in a latter-day Rome. In imitating his ancestor so closely, Kato 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 Kato's search for a way to cope with laughter may help account for the single greatest

exception to his work of imitation. Kato took up with the same people his great grandfather had considered a dangerous foreign cult, the Stoics. Kato the Elder expelled Stoicism from Rome. Kato the Younger was instrumental in replanting it. The Imperial Chronicle, Pliny the Elder, found it a very remarkable fact that the same Greek language that had been proscribed by one of the Katoes was introduced among us by the other. He was exaggerating, but not wildly.

Toward the end of the Elder Kato'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, Carniades the Skeptic, Cretaleus 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 cities' youths abandoning all of their other pleasures to cheer wildly. It was a pop-cultural fad of the first order, a Greek invasion. 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. That was bad enough for the censor. But his indignation reached the breaking point when Carniades 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 hosts' strong, unbending sense of justice, Carniades took back everything he had said. He denied that justice existed, and concluded, in a double-twisting backward-summersault 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 Cater. 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, 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, 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. Kato was seeking something deeper. 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 gentile, non-committal eclecticism affected by so many of his contemporaries. To begin with, the Stoics were as hard as uncompromising as Kato 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. 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 admired 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 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. 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 reasons 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, in noble parts of the soul, 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, banished the passions, and you were proof against misfortune. banished 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 F, was the deepest meaning of agreement with nature and the highest reward of their practice. As one Stoic taught, 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 Kato 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. 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, 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 Kato took from his tutor, a Hellenized Middle-Eastoner 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 bare headed in rain and heat. He learned how to endure sickness in silence, how to speak bluntly and how to shut up, how to meditate on disaster, and suffer the imagined loss of everything again and again. In effect, Kato 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

Kato the elder, the ones that came from Latin soil, were but dead. In stoicism, Kato the younger found them again as part of a living tradition. The old Kato 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. From the very beginning, Kato the younger's example, the bare feet by the force of his example. From the very beginning, Cato the Younger's example, the bear feet, the out-of-date and wrong-colored clothing, the ostentatious poverty, was derided by some as a transparent act, and part the yetor it may have been.

Rejecting creature comforts, living the hard, soldily 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? Kato 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 Kato 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. 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 dailystowic.com slash courage is calling or you can just go to

store. DailyStowic.com. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the daily stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.