The Daily Stoic - The Marcus Aurelius Quote Steven Pressfield Couldn’t Ignore

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

In today's episode, Ryan and Steven Pressfield discuss one of Marcus Aurelius’ most striking lines: “Life is warfare and a journey far from home.” What begins with the epigraph to Steven’s new novel The Arcadian turns into a conversation about the hero’s journey, the ideas we carry with us for decades, and reincarnation. 📚 Grab signed copies of Steven’s books at The Painted Porch: The ArcadianTurning ProPut Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To BeThe War of ArtThe Daily PressfieldThe Warrior EthosA Man At ArmsGates of Fire The Virtues of WarSteven Pressfield is an American author of historical fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays. Steven wrote for 27 years before he got his first novel published. During that time he worked 21 different jobs in eleven states. Steven taught school, drove tractor-trailers, worked in advertising and as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He worked on offshore oil rigs, and picked fruit as a migrant worker.Follow Steven on Instagram | @steven_pressfield Check out more of his work on his website: https://stevenpressfield.com/🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Do you know what an epigraph is? Not an epitaph. An epitaph is what goes on your tombstone. Also the name of maybe the greatest newspaper in the history of the United States. the tombstone epitaph. No, an epigraph is the quote that goes like in the front of a book or maybe at the top of a new chapter or a part one, part two, part three of a book. I love epigraphs. If you've read any of my books, you know, I'm a sucker for epigraphs. You know, part of how I research with no, because I'm just always collecting these little things.

And I don't always know how or want to integrate them into the text. I want to sort of sit it there. It's like it's, it's kind of capturing the theme. It's a meditation. It is the inspiration for the chapter. I'm writing. I did epigraphs quite a bit in, I mean, my first book has an epigraph. One of the ones I'm proudest of is the epigraph to conspiracy, which has a quote from Walker Percy's Lancelot, one of my favorite books. I didn't do epigraphs as much in the virtue series. I did, you know, one at the beginning of the book. And then there's one for part one, part two, part three, but I didn't do one, you know, at the top of every chapter. I'm trying to practice a little discipline. Apparently, it comes from the Greek word epigraphy, which is the act

of inscribing or inscription. It's funny, I pulled up the Miriam Webster definition of this, just so I made sure I had it exactly right. It says a quotation said at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest a theme. And then it has like recent examples from the web and it's quoting a vulture article from November 2025. And it says, that's the bitter epigraph that opens this invigorating first episode of Death by Lightning and one important aspect of the book on which the miniseries is based, Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic. Ooh, I just love that because like, that is one of my favorite books. Destiny of the Republic is an incredible book by Candace Miller.

It's not as good as River of Doubt, but it's pretty damn good. I want to say two things on epigraphs real quick. Number one, I have found so many things that I love through epigraphs. To me, one of the things in epigraph is a chance to do, gives an author, a writer, a chance to kind of co-sign or endorse or go like, hey, this is cool. You've heard of this? Maybe also to go like, hey, I'm cool. I've heard of this.

But the point is, I'm always marking books. circling the thing that's mentioning the epigraph going, ooh, I want to, I want to hear more about that. I never heard. It's just a great way to discover stuff. It sends you down a rabbit hole. But also, I feel like epigraphs have set the tone for what I'm reading and then also set the tone for what I'm right. Okay. So for what we are going to talk about today, I was struck reading Stephen Pressfield, one of my favorite writers. His new novel, The Arcadian, which is incredible. It's part of this series. he's working on. You maybe read the first book in this series, which I raved about, a man at arms. There are just very few people who do historical fiction better than Stephen Pressfield.

I am the acknowledgement, not the epigraph of one of his books, the Daily Pressfield. But so I pop open the Arcadian and I notice, boom, Marcus Aurelius quote as the epigraph. life is warfare and a journey far from home. So the difference to be clear pertaining to Stephen Presfield, the difference between an epitaph and an epigraph would be, the graph is Marx really saying, life is warfare and a journey far from home as the front page to the Arcadian. An epitaph is something Stephen quotes,

I have it on my wall on the other side of this wall here. He quotes the famous epitaph to the Spartans at Thermataph. in Gates of Fire on the last page, go tell them stranger passing by here, obedient to their laws, rely, which I went and saw last summer in Greece. So I knew I was going to love this book because, first off, the Marxist, but that's one of the most fascinating and revealing passages and meditations, because you can read it both philosophically and literally. It is one of the few biographical notes from Marcus, although it's easy to miss, which is what we're going to talk about in today's episode. So Steve and I are nerding out a little bit about a Marcus Aurelius passage, which is not something I necessarily expected we would do when he came out. But as I said, Stephen Pressfield, if you don't know his stuff, I don't know what you're doing with your life. Turning Pro, the War of Art, the War Ethos, Gates of Fire.

Daily Pressfield, and then the new one, the Arcadian. Oh, he signed a bunch of them while he was here. He's amazing. Had an incredible life. Let's just get into it. Here we go. So your book starts with a Mark's Travely's epigraph, which is one of my favorite quotes in meditations. He says, life is warfare and a journey far from home. And I, the first time I read this, took it as being metaphorical. And then I was 10 years ago or so I gave a talk in Budapest, and I was flying into Budapest. And so I was like, I know nothing about Budapest. I was like, I should read about it. And so I'm reading about it on the airplane.

This is embarrassing, but I'd already written two books about Stoic philosophy at this point. And it hit me that Marx Realis had been to Budapest. As I'm reading like the Wikipedia page, I go, wait, we're so far from Rome. This is insane. How could the emperor of Rome been in Budapest? then I'm going down the Shrabba. I'm looking at this map of like the known travels of Marxist. I mean, he dies in Vienna.

And I go, oh, that, that quote, that life is warfare and a journey far from home. Like, it hit me in a new way because I had the physical manifestation of how far he had traveled. And then I realized I think he was being a lot more literal than I took that quote to me. Oh, I took it the opposite way. Okay. I thought I know the guy traveled long ways, you know, journey far from home. And to me, talk about reincarnation. Yes.

I mean, I sure I think the same metaphor you thought. I thought far from home is our place among the stars, you know. And life here we're down in this purgatory that's warfare. Oh, I see. And we're a long way from our real home beyond the stars, you know. That's a very interesting interpretation. Now maybe he probably didn't mean it. No, I mean, I think it's probably working on a bunch of different levels.

And he probably also means like life is fighting and arguing and struggle. And, you know, it's lonely and takes you away from home. But, I mean, he spends the majority of his reign or large chunks of his reign, you know, fighting with the Roman army in these frontier provinces. I think it works on both levels. But you go, oh, this guy wasn't dealt the hand that he wanted to be dealt. He had a nice palace. He had a great way of, yeah.

But he didn't get to live in it. Yeah, yeah. That's so true. Yeah. Wow. But he sure made the most of it, you know. But, I mean, what I took it to mean as an epigraph, which is like some version of the hero's journey, that it's, you've got to fight for things. It takes you far away from where you want to be. And it's also in a way of battle to get back home. Yeah. And the other epigraph, just for anybody that's a writer here, this is a quote from Empedocles. Well, I'm not even sure who Empedocles was just that he was a Greek philosopher. pre-socratic philosopher who I was just reading about, went for, because of this discovery, do you know how he died? No. So in Pedicles believed, this is one of the dangers of the muse stuff we've been talking about.

So he believed that all his works were a gift from the gods and that he himself had become immortal through his gifts and creativity. And so he died throwing himself into a volcano to prove that he was a god. Oh, wow. So you have to be careful. The line between... Note to self. Stay away from volcanoes. The line between mysticism and insanity is thin.

But in any event, the quote that is at the start of this book is something I carried with me for like 40 years. I don't know I ever told you this, Ryan. No, no, tell me. I don't even know where I discovered it, but I read it and I thought, this is fantastic, whatever. And I thought, there's a story in here, but I had no idea what it is. and I just kept it with me forever. And what the heart of the quote is, is he empedically says in this really high-flown, archaic way,

anyone who commits murder, who takes another life, and including soldiers who kill in war in an honorable cause, three times 10,000 years, that soul shall wander, an outcast from felicity. And so I thought, this is justice, this is karma, and I thought, this is my character, Teleman. So when I finally put those two together, I thought, oh, he's going to lead these many lives. Yes.

And this is why. He's serving out his sentence. He's serving out his sentence. Not that he was an evil guy. He was just a soldier that fought in war. And so anyway, if you're a writer and you've got a quote floating around in your head, hang on to it. Yes. Because it may, you know, come to fruition at some point when you can't predict it.

I mean, the obstacle is the way it came because I wrote down this passage in meditations. and I thought, oh, there's something here. And then, you know, many years later, that became that book. And there's something magical about that, too, where you save something and then it pops in your head. Oh, this is exactly where I can use that thing that I've been keeping. Something in us recognizes something, even if we can't put our finger on it, you know. This is a value. Hang on to it, you know.

I think that's time travel. The mystical example is it's some form of time travel, right? Certainly your past self is flashing forward and giving you something. thing in the future, right? Like, for me, it's no cards when I'm like, how did I know? How did I know that this was exactly what I needed? When I was writing Courage's calling, I decided the third part, I would talk about the 300 Spartans, I would tell that story. And so, you know, in 2020, when I'm working on the book, I go, okay, so obviously I have to go back and read Herodotus and his story. And, you know, I opened up a book that was at that point 20 years old for me, or no, not 15 years old. And

How did my college self highlight and underline the exact passages that I would need to write a book that I had not even conceived? That gets me very excited when that happens. That's time travel to me. I know I got a bunch of talks coming up. I got a bunch of travel coming up. I got a bunch of videos I'm going to do. So I was starting to think about what I'm going to wear. And so I was shopping for some basics from Quince who I've been wearing a bunch.

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and it was so ungodly hot there. Like, it was the hottest it's ever been, which exacerbated. another experience if you've ever been to Europe, just how bad the mattresses are there. So I was excited to be home because we've been gone for a while, but I was really excited to be home and sleep on my eight sleep pod. I missed it every night I was gone. It cools the mattress, cools my wife's side differently than my side. It doesn't matter how hot the room is. The bed is just perfect. Monitor's your sleep rate. I was putting my son to bed last night,

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and you get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it. Let's talk about Telemon a little bit. I don't know if I wasn't paying attention. It was very obvious to me that he's the same, that is a reincarnation of the character from a man at arms. Yeah. But I didn't know he appeared in the other books.

Ah. Have you been doing this a long time? Yeah, but the first, he was in, he was in tides of war and he was in the virtues of war. Yeah. So that's probably 15 years ago. But as a minor character. Yeah. And then I sort of, for like 10 years, I thought, I got to do something with this character,

but I couldn't figure out what it was. So he was sort of, you know, asleep for about 10 years. And then with a man in arms, I said, okay, give him a couple hundred years, thousands of years. Well, right. That's his thing. But wait, isn't there a similarly named character in Gates of Fire, or that's a coincidence? No, there's no one. Okay.

There's some similar name, right? Not that I can think of. I see. It certainly wasn't intentional if there was. Oh, telemonious. Hmm. There's a Telemonius on Gates of Fire. There is.

So maybe it's... Are you sure? Why did you look that up? I have it in my phone. Oh, wow. Well, Telemon is a real name. Yes. It's a real ancient Greek name.

Yeah. So maybe it was... artistically in there longer than you knew. Yeah. So anyway, he evolved out of the two characters in those two books and then got his own book and now he's got two more. It made me think there's a, have you, did you watch the second Gladiator movie? No, I didn't. I thought it was pretty good, the new Gladiator sequel, but there was famously a script

floating around for many years written by Nick Cave, musician, that had Maximus, because he dies at the end. So what are you supposed to do with the character? right? And the device was that he is this reincarnated warrior spirit for like every general. It shows him as a modern Marine. I'm glad I didn't see that. Oh, really. But it's just, it's a fascinating device. When you have the character and the ethos of the character, can they transcend their singular space in time? Well, for me, the concept of the thing, as you know, is that he has committed a crime in the deep past and is being punished by heaven for this and is

punishment is to live lifetime after lifetime always as a soldier. Yeah. Always killing and being killed. So that gives you the sort of the license to track his evolution. Right. Like the new one that I've that I've just finished is a prequel. Like way back in time. Before a man at arms or between a man of arms?

Way before man in arms. Like set in the era where the continents drifted apart that far back in history. Like a prehistoric character. Well, not prehistoric, but in my concept of what that time was like, there were great civilizations that had tremendous access to the occult powers that we've lost. Yeah. And the civilizations are gone now, totally, you know, under the land, whatever. And the same character, Telemon is sort of, it's like the young Telemon. So this is his origin story.

Sort of, yeah. Maybe I'll go back and I have even more of an origin story. But a lot of the kind of points of view that he has about fighting only for money, you can sort of see in this book where that all came from. Right. Yeah. Which is fun, you know? Do you believe in reincarnation? I do, absolutely.

Tell me about that. I hope it's true because I don't want it just to end. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, you have kids, right? And when they were born, they came into this world with their own personality, right? And even with their own calling, right? their own destiny in a way. Same thing with kittens and puppies and I'm sure horses and everything like that.

So it does make you wonder where does that come from? Yeah. You know that, what is that Tennyson's? I think it's Tennyson. Wordsworth, intimations of immortality. Do you know that poem where he says, we come into this life, not naked or something like that, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our,

home. So if it's good enough for Wordsworth, it's good enough for me. Well, when I was reading the book, I was thinking of that famous patent poem that he wrote where he believes he's the reincarnated spirit of all these different warriors. Yeah. That was such a great scene in the movie patent today. You know some version of that happened in real life? Really? Yeah. So in the movie, they're in North Africa or Europe. He's like, this is where Roman Carthage fell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Between the wars, he was touring a battle from the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War. Oh.

And he's being told how the battle went by the tour guide. And he says, no, no, no, that's not how it happened. And he starts to, he was like, I know, I was here as a boy. And he was born well after the Civil War. And the Dosen's kind of like, what's happening. It's being corrected by Patton. They're interrupted by this old man who says, no, no, no, he's right. I was here.

That's how it went. Wow. This Civil War veteran intervenes and sides with Patton. Wow, what a great story that is. And for Patton, I think, obviously, there's some element of the movie device in here, too. For Padden, that's proof that, you know, he was his reincarnated spirit. I would argue he just really loved history. Patton's dyslexic.

And so growing up, his parents take him out of school and they just read to him orally until he's like 12. And I think he imbibes these. stories and his imagination. Could be. And it becomes a part of him. So whether it's literally, do you believe in reincarnation? I mean, I don't, I'm not so mystical as that. But I do think there's some way, at the very least, through story, he's able to live

multiple lives. I certainly believe that literature is a form of reincarnation because we're able to take these lessons and these ideas and make them live again. And then we can add their experience. into our own lives. That's something Seneca said that through the study of philosophy, we annex all of the wisdom of the past into our own sphere. So I believe in that. Do I believe in literal reincarnation? I don't know. Not anymore out of the possibility to me of the other sort of religious ideas. And also in the movie Patton, there was a thing about the German officer that

was supposed to get into Patton's head who says he's going to invade Sicily because Al's subiades invaded Sicily. That's what the next thing is going to be. I don't know. Whether there was any truth of that at all, it's interesting. It's funny Jet Li was here yesterday, you know, the Kung Master. Oh, really? It's some interesting people in here. He believes in reincarnation. And he was saying the proof of that for him was, as a young kid, he gets sort of selected to be in this sort of Chinese school of martial arts. All the kids are selected for their physical attributes. But why did he pick it up faster than the other kids? And he believes, He believed it was past knowledge that he was drawing on.

Uh-huh. Interesting. I mean, I've done past life regressions, you know. What is that? Have you ever done that? No. It's, you know, they sort of, actually, this was a friend of mine who did it for me, who was a hands-on healer.

Yeah. And they put you on like a table, like a massage table and kind of work on you to get you deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into that state, you know? Yeah. And then they say, okay, now you're going to come out into a place. Tell me what you see. Yeah. And you start to see stuff.

you know, and you talk. And I've actually, in the new Telemond book, I started off with something that really happened to me in a past life regression. So, you know, and a feeling in it, I'll give you sort of the short version of this. I was on an ancient battlefield, and I was like a kid,

and I was looking for, the fight was over. There were bodies everywhere on the battlefield. And I was looking for my, brother and I couldn't find him. And I knew he was dead because he would have found me if he was alive. So the short version of it was I buried him on this battlefield. And as we're doing this past life regression, I felt, although he was dead, waves of love coming from him. Like I never felt in my life, not even close. Yeah. From any, you know, overwhelming. And so I, I, I just thought, I don't know what that means, but there's something to that.

And I remember my friend who was doing that when we kind of came out of it, he said, you can always go back to that, you can always access that. That love. That love. Yeah. But I have not been able to. Huh. Many times I've tried, but it sure made a tremendous impression on me because I never in my life,

in real life, have I felt anything like that. Do you have a brother? I do have a brother. Oh. But this brother in the thing was actually my friend that was doing the hands-on healing with me. So which he's always felt like a brother. Yeah. Anyway, who knows what it's all about.

But in any event, that really made a deep impression on me like, there's got to be something to this. Well, at the very least, I think there's something to the kind of mystical, supernatural thing you're talking about. Like, I was just reading an early copy of Robert Green's new book, which is all about sublime experiences. Oh, I'm really looking forward to that one. It's so good. waiting for like seven years. I know, I know. And when you read it, the amazing thing is when you read it, you're like, I see where,

this is what I told it. And I was like, hope this comes off as a compliment. I see the seven years. Uh-huh. Like, I see why it took seven years because it's just at another level. Uh-huh. Like the writing is better, not that he's not an amazing writer, but it's just so, like, in one of the scenes, he tells the story of the Temple of Demeter and the, the mysteries

that they would go. And it really feels like you're there, which is funny because in another scene, and one of the other sections is about historical sublime, like how you can connect with history that you have an experience. So it's all very similar to what we're talking about here. But just the ancient relationship with those sort of things you can't explain and the sort of what you're talking about, we live in a hyper-rational objective, sort of distilled world that kind of tries to keep all that stuff at remove. Yeah. You know, God bless him for even thinking of writing a book about the sublime. Who else would think about that? Yes. I mean, nobody, right? Yeah. And, you know, so it's such a

great contribution, you know, to have a mind like his, you know, that's going to really commit. Yeah. God bless him. Because, I mean, you believe, like, you say a prayer to the muses. You believe in reincarnation. You believe in the Desmond, like the voice that talks to you. What does all that mean to you? Like that's clearly an important part of your, both your sort of practice as a person, but also your creative practice. I ask myself, we all ask ourselves, how does the world work? Yeah. You know? And like you say, our dumb down world says, oh, we're only this body, da, da, da, da.

But I absolutely believe that there is at least another dimension directly above us where the muse lives, you know, angels, whatever. And that we as writers, and I'm really interested to hear what you say about that, that's what we kind of access. That's what we channel. That's where the books come from or movies or everything like that. But part of me, of course, is really skeptical. I'm, you know, I'm born here. I'm a material body. So I really try to reinforce within myself the reality that there are other forces and other entities out there that are on our side and are aiding us.

And it's our job to connect to them, to open ourselves up to them. And so if that's the sublime, I don't know what you call it. It's the divine anyway. There's something beyond us that we don't control and can't fully conceive and certainly can't comprehend. I'll concede to all that. You know, there's something. I mean, just one of the ways you're in touch with that as an artist or a creative

or anyone that makes something is that sense of like, where did that come from? Yeah. You know what I mean? Look at what you've created here, you know, a kid from Riverside, right? Yeah, Sacramento. How did this or Sacramento? You went to school in Riverside. No, that's true.

But I just mean like, like, just where did those words come? Like, you're sitting there and you're almost like, you're typing the end of a sentence that you're in the middle of. Like how, and this goes back to Plato. Like, how do you know this? Yeah. There is something fundamentally otherworldly about the creative act because it's coming from somewhere or something. Even if you want to just tell me it's this emergent thing happening in our brains, it's crazy. I mean, you've heard so many stories about like musicians that are driving down a freeway and it's suddenly a song complete.

Yeah. And they're rushing to get it down. Yes. How does anybody, I mean, it comes. could be the subconscious, you know, I suppose. But I don't know. That's a, I don't, that doesn't have. I mean, but even the subconscious, that's pretty, like, so it's like your brain and then you have another part of your brain.

And it's just like, yeah, there was this old, there was this theory that at one point our brains, you know, we have two hemispheres of the brain. Have you heard the bicameral mind theory? No. It was sort of popular and then discredited. But it's kind of this out there theory that like at one point we had two brains. And, you know, now our brains that, they, they. communicate with each other, right? But, but, like, what if they didn't? Like, what if they were separate? And, like, the ancients would hear the voice of God, like, go do this, or you need wooden walls or,

you know, all the different things? What if that was just one side of the brain talking to the other side of the brain, but they didn't recognize it as such? But even that's insane. Like, the idea that, like, you can know something and not know it, even your idea of the resistance. It's like, I want to do this. and then there's some part of me that doesn't want me to do it, and then I can make myself do it. That's crazy. How is any of that work? There's something just unfathomable about that.