The Daily Stoic - Who Is Seneca?

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

Ryan tells the tale of Seneca, one of the three most important Stoic philosophers who advised an emperor and authored countless works of fiction and advice.This episode is brought to you by Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is the perfect system to use to set up your house with Smart Home functionality—and with the new Amazon Smart Lighting Bundle, it’s easy to get started. Just connect your Amazon Echo Dot with your first Sengled color changing light bulb and you’re on your way. Visit Amazon.com/dailystoic to get 20% off the bundle.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree'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. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. The more I read about them, the more more endlessly fascinated I am with Seneca. I mean, these brilliance, complicated, successful, false from grace, clauses way back up, gets caught up in one of the worst regimes in history, escapes sort of slinks, you know, out of it towards the end, then produces some of the most brilliant, provocative, philosophically wise writings ever put down

in any language, and then, you know, is tragically, his life is tragically cut short, some would say, in a way, with the chickens coming home to roost, but anyways, just a fascinating human being. And I think that's why his example has been so polarizing, also inspiring, flumixing, intriguing, all of these things. One of the crazy things that I think is underrated as far as as Sennaka goes, is just how influential he was in his own time as a writer. Like James Rom talks about this in his book on Sennaka,

which is very good, dying every day. He says, for most of history historians believe that Sennaka, the playwright and Sennaka, the philosopher politician were two separate people. The idea was no one could be so talented as to be both of those figures. And it's confusing, of course, because so many people in ancient Rome had the same names. But he's saying that's as if Emerson also wrote Gertz Faust. And as I say in Lies of the Stokes, it's actually more crazy. It'd be like if Emerson wrote Faust

and had served in the Lincoln administration. So, Sennaka is just all over the place. I mean, there is a line of graffiti at Pompeii from that time before the explosion of a line from Sennaeneca's place. So he was famous in his own time just as a writer. His philosophical work was famous, but obviously, he's much more famous to us today than it probably was in his own time.

Probably too close to his political stuff to have been fully appreciated. But, you know, just an intriguing figure because he probably writes about Stoicism, the most eloquently of all the Stoics, yet his lifestyle is not the most at odds with it, but the most complicated and real, right? I think Senica is relatable to us today because he did struggle, where it seems like Marcus Aurelius

was almost like a superhuman. And Ep Epicetus, of course, is superhuman. And James Stockdale, a superhuman. You know, Santa Cah, you get this hint of worldly ambition, and there's some Epicurian tendencies there. And he just feels like he feels like he'd be at home today in our world, as he would have been at one of Gatsby's parties in the Rurring 20s or at a French salon during the King Louis time. It's just an endlessly fascinating figure. I love talking about him. So I want to really answer that question. Who is Seneca? What was so incredible about the life of one of Stoicism's great thinkers?

And we put this episode together as part of the Lies of the Stoics campaign. She haven't even checked out the book yet. I definitely hope you do. There's one of my favorite chapters to write was the chapter on Seneca. But here is the life of Seneca. It's a short episode, but I think it packs a punch. And then of course, if you want to read more about Senaqa, check out the book or check out many, many, many of the things that I've written about it.

Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, 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? 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 topping 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. For a boy born in a tiny village in southern Spain, some 1,500 miles away from the place he dreamed of making a name for himself, it would please Lucius Enneus Seneca very much to know that we are still talking about him today. His fellow Stoics wrote at length about the worthlessness of celebrity, the foolishness of chasing posthumous fame, the inevitability of time passing and sweeping our names into obscurity. Seneca studied these philosophers, he read their writings, he agreed with them. The deep flood of time will roll over us, he wrote. Some few great men will raise their heads above it, but most are destined to depart into the same realms of silence and to battle against

oblivion. Aware as Seneca was of the improbability of lasting significance, it didn't deter him. If anything, it propelled this young man. In a way, it only reaffirmed what he already knew. Born with a chronic illness, Seneca realized at an early age what so many never do, life is short, fragile, and extraordinary. So we must see to it, he said, that our lives, like jewels of a great price, be noteworthy not because of their width, but because of their weight.

Let us measure them by their performance, not of their duration. That's exactly what Seneca did. He performed. Right down to the last moments of his life, a theatrical suicide that would rival that of his hero, a stoic philosopher, and Roman senator named Cato the younger, who famously disemboweled himself rather than live under Julius Caesar's tyranny. Unlike his hero, however, Seneca never got to taste any part of that freedom of Roman libertas that Cato and his predecessors had all enjoyed. Instead, he knew only of the Empire. Seneca would live through the reigns of the first five emperors of Rome, and to say it was a time of tremendous violence, paranoia, and uncertainty would unfairly understate it.

No one's station in life put them high enough or far enough from the reach of the bloodlust of these evil emperors. Most people opted to keep their heads down to simply endure the political chaos to stay completely off the Imperial Court's radar. Seneca, on the other hand, spent all of his life attempting to maneuver towards and within the turbulent court regimes. And according to the historian Dio Cassius, he nearly got himself killed doing so. After masterfully pleading a case in the Senate in front of the Emperor Caligula, Caligula ordered Seneca to be put to death, but afterwards let him off Dio says, because he believed the statement of one of his female associates to the effect that Senaika had consumption in an advanced stage and would die before a great while. Senaika's

chronic illness saved his life, at least temporarily. Caligula's successor Claudius didn't care how long Senaika had to live when he came to power in 41 AD, one of his first orders of business, was to banish Senaika from Rome. What for? We don't know. Most likely, a blanket persecution of philosophers were some trumped up charge. And any case, Senaika was sent packing to the distant island of Corsica. His time in exile was productive at first. He wrote three famous works, Consolation to Polybius, Consolation to Helvia, and On Anger

in a short span. But the isolation would soon begin to wear on him. Soon the man who had not long before been writing consolations to other people clearly needed some consoling himself, then again who wouldn't? Soon the man who had not long before been writing consolations to other people clearly needed some consoling himself, then again, who wouldn't? Even the strongest animal begins to wilt when deprived of its friends in the herd, but thankfully Seneca had begun his practice of letter writing, which would continue all his life. He wrote about a lot of different things in that time, about friendship, about love,

about nourishing the body, about wealth, and status, and how quickly life can be flipped upside down. In a play he wrote towards the end of his life, Seneca captured just how capricious and random fate could be. No one has had so much divine favor, he said, that they could guarantee themselves tomorrow. God keeps our lives hurtling on spinning in a whirlwind. Well, in 50 AD, Seneca didn't know it, but his trials were about to improve, and his life was about to be spun in a whirlwind that history has not fully wrapped its head around. The Empress Agrippina plotting for her son Nero to be the Emperor

someday recalls Seneca from Corsica to tutor her boy. A statue of Sena and Nero done by a Spanish golter at Wardo Barone manages to perfectly capture the dynamic between this wonderful teacher and this strange headstrong student. Sena sits with a document that he's written across his lap trying to point to a spot in the text, trying to instill in his young charge the seriousness of the tasks before him. Nero is hooded, his expression is so-in, both fists are clenched and one of them rests on his temple as if he can't bring himself to pay attention. Soon enough he is thinking I won't have to endure Senuka's lectures much longer, then I'll be able to do whatever I want. Senuka can clearly see this language, and yet he proceeds.

He proceeded for many years, in fact. Why? Because he hoped that some of it, any of it, would get through. Because he knew the stakes were high, because he knew his job was to teach, to try, and he was going to die trying to teach Nero to be good. A few short years later, Sena would run afoul with Nero, realizing alarmingly late just how deranged Nero was, Senika tried to walk away from politics. Nero would not let him.

Instead, paranoid and cleaning house of potential enemies, Nero sent goons to demand Senika's suicide. Senika made no plea for pardon. When his request for something to write down his will was denied, he turned to his friends and said he could bequeath to them the only thing that mattered. His life, his example, it was heart-wrenching and they broke down when he said these words.

Where he said, chiding gently, not just his friends, but the audience of history, are your maxims of philosophy or the preparation of so many years of study against evils to come? Who knew not Neuros' cruelty, he said, after a mother and a brother's murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor. Hugging his wife, he urged her not to grieve for him too much and to live on without him. Instead, she decided to go with him. Slittingly arteries in their arms, they began to bleed out.

Senaqa's meager diet seemed to have slowed his blood flow, so next he willingly drank a poison he had kept for precisely this moment, but not before pouring a small libation out to the gods. When this poison did not work, Senaqa was moved to a steam bath where the heat and dense air finally finished him off. Shortly after his body was disposed of quietly without funeral rights, per request that Seneca had made long ago, which to the historian Tacitus was proof that like a good stoic, even in the height of his wealth and power, Seneca had been thinking of his life's clothes. The stoics were not just thinkers and writers.

Even 2,000 years ago, they talked about pen and ink philosophers. They meant that derisively. They wanted philosophers who were doers, right? And that's the point of stoicism. It's to help make you better in the real world. And so the new book, Lives of the Stokes, is going to look at how did these actual human beings live the ideas in the philosophy they espoused. In all my other books, I've been talking about the ideas, the teachings of stoicism, but this is the first time the lives of the

Stokes have been documented all in one place, literally ever in history. It's how did these men and women apply the ideas of stoicism to the challenges of their lives and of their times. From the Stokes, we can learn so much about resilience, about perseverance, about happiness, about virtue. So I'm so excited about the new book, Lies of the Stokes, The Art of Living from Xenodomarkis Relias. Please check it out. and thank you very much. Lies of the Stokes, The Art of Living from Xenota

Marcus are really by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, available anywhere books are sold. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.