The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Afford To Be This | How 300 Spartans Saved Western Civilization

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

When we react emotionally, we rarely make things better. When we get angry? We always make things worse—for ourselves and others.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🪙 Carry The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion as a reminder to pause. A pause creates space. A pause creates clarity. A pause can change everything. | Grab The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion at dailystoic.com/pause👉 Get $20 off when you purchase the Pause & Reflect Medallion and Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Course for Controlling AngerSupport 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/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women help you learn from them. to follow in their example and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. were more of a nobody. Maybe if people weren't counting on you. Maybe if you didn't have kids, maybe if the stakes were lower, maybe if you never had to think about financial security or making

payroll or what kind of example you were set in. Maybe then you could afford to be a hothead. Maybe then you could be easily triggered. Maybe you could be petty, hold grudges, indulge your passions. But right now, these days, you absolutely cannot. I shall do nothing. And, Malice, Lincoln wrote in a letter during the Civil War. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing. By the way, Lincoln's a main character, actually the final character in wisdom takes work, and you can pre-order the book right now, dailystoic.com slash pre-order. We are not Lincoln, but what we do matters. People are looking to us. People are affected by the decisions we make, which is why, like him, we need to be reminded, as Marcus Aurelius did remind himself repeatedly

in meditations, not to give him. into our temper, not to lash out, to calm down, not to turn everything in to something. When we react emotionally, we rarely make things better. When we get angry, we almost always make things worse for ourselves and others. We make things harder. We make the more tense. We blind ourselves. We miss opportunities for connection, collaboration, and community. So today, tomorrow, always, when we find ourselves getting upset, we have to stop, and say, I can't afford this. We need to stop as Athena Doris told young Octavian to do and count the letters of the alphabet. We need to look in the mirror. We need to stop. We need to pause and

reflect. And by the way, if you need any help with that, which I certainly do, the Daily Stoak pause and reflect medallion might be the perfect thing for you. I've got one in my pocket right now. It's a physical reminder for me, something I touch, run my fingers over the letters of the alphabet, which it has on there. And I go, I'm going to pause here before I react. I don't want to let my emotions rule my decisions. I can't afford to get upset here, right? Delay is the best remedy. It has that from Seneca on there. I think it's important. I think it's one of the best things we've made here at Daily Stoic. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can also find it at store.dailystoic.com. We also have a great course on anger, the Tame Your Temper Challenge, which is 11 days focused on

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The future of the West, every great accomplishment of Western civilization from the Renaissance to the American Revolution to the Internet Age, all of it is hanging in the balance, although they don't fully know this at the time. There is courage and then there is heroism. There's sacrifice, and then there's selflessness. And if you don't know the story of the 300 Spartans, which is way more beautiful and way more complex than the comic book, I'm actually here at the Hot Gate, the stand where 300 Spartans and a few thousand other Greek soldiers

by the rest of Greece one week. They go up against something like a million Persian troops. The King Xerxes eager to avenge the humiliation of his father intent on subjugating not just all of Greece, but all of the world. And while some Greek city-states see the writing on the wall, some take huge bribes, some switch sides, and the shaky alliance of the different Greek society is being sorely tested, the future of the West, every great accomplishment of Western civilization from the Renaissance

to the American Revolution to the internet age, all of it is hanging in the balance, although they don't fully know this at the time. But 300 elite Spartan soldiers led by King Leonidas head to the hot gate, this narrow mountain pass here at Thermopylae, where the Persians have to pass through this bottleneck. And if the Spartans perhaps can hold them off, can show that they are not invincible, perhaps they think it will bind the rest of Greece together. Leonidas like Churchill understands that this is an existential battle of civilizations. He says, we either have to kill the barbarians or we will be killed by the barbarians. And so they march to a man, each one of them, a father of a living son, traversing something

like 250 miles across Greece, knowing that they will face probably the worst odds in the history of warfare. And the only advantage here is this strategic one, that the Persian army has to fit through this narrow bottleneck. And more importantly, they have the moral advantage. They are fighting for something. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for their civilization. They are fighting for each other. Leonidas tells Xerxes, if you had any knowledge of the noble things in life, you wouldn't covet the possessions of others. He says, I would rather die for Greece than rule over the entire thing. thing. But the insatiable conquerors of history, they don't understand it. They don't understand people who are not transactional, people who believe in ideas or ideals. But Leonidas believes

he is a descendant of Hercules. And here at this crossroads, literally, he's choosing between the easy road and the hard road. And so Leonidas and the Spartans choose virtue. They choose courage. They make the choice of Hercules. And Leonidas says, look, if this relies on numbers, It's never going to work. But if it relies on valor, if it relies on courage, maybe we have a chant. And so when Xerxes sends his final demand for surrender, he says, lay down your arms. The Spartans utter their famous reply, Molan Labe, come and take them. For four days, just the idea of tangling with the Spartans keeps the Persians at bay.

This is buying critical time. Xerxes doesn't understand what he is losing by giving up the initiative. But the Spartans, again, fighting freely, having chosen to be there, are united in a way that the Persians can't comprehend. The Persians are being lashed from behind. They are largely slave. They have been conscripted. They don't know why they're there. There is no argument for why they deserve to take over the world.

And so, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the physical three to one. But here it's 300 to 1, 3 million to 1, and many times more. And it's towards the end of the first day, having made essentially no. progress that Xerxes sends what's known as his immortal troops, the 10,000 immortals. And even here, they are thrown back, not just once, but twice and three times. Each time we're told Xerxes, who's watching from a distant viewpoint, is rising in his seat in anguish as they are being thrown back, thrown into the seed. Repeatedly, they fall for this trick where the Spartans, who are normally marching in

lockstep, their phalanx impenetrable, they break ranks and particularly. tend to retreat. And then when the enemy rushes them, they reform and slaughter them. And then as the first day bleeds into the second, it's clear to Leonidas that reinforcements are not going to come, that this is in fact a one-way mission. And yet they remain and fight well that night, knowing that they will probably eat the next day in the underworld, he tells them. Once again, Xerxes demands their surrender. And when they decline, he says, I will fire so many arrows, it will block out the sun, then we shall fight in the shade, the Spartans reply. Leonidas tries to send a few injured men home, hoping not just to spare them, but to send

a message home in each of the three declines. No, I came here to fight. I'll be a better man if I stay, they said. And so the Spartans stood in silence on this third day, each of them beaten down, all of them bloody, all of them wounded, so fewer than 300 left. By 9 o'clock, a little bit earlier than it is now. The heat is already up. They sweat in their armor. Their bodies are coursing with whatever remains inside them. They know they'll never see their family or Sparta again, and Leonidas gives the order to march forward. The Persians hit them with a fury, and still the Spartans stay together. Uncommon valor, as it's been said, is here a common virtue. And the men pass beyond themselves, fighting not just beyond themselves, but fighting beyond any capacity.

capacity, one could have imagined, but I think at some level they know. They know this is it. They will not grow old. They would soon fall. They would not live even until tomorrow. Leonidas is killed in the middle of the final day. The men rally repeatedly, one, two, three, four times to save him. They bring him back, and then they fight again. Now leaderless, each man stepping in to fill the void of the man who falls before him. And eventually, inevitably, they are overwhelmed. Three days of battle, plus the four days of waiting, they have bought Greece one week. Xerxes has to ask one of his advisors, how many more men like this are there in Greece?

And he's told, there are no men finer than these, but all fight just as well. You know, when Churchill said that never before have so many owed so much to so few, he was right speaking about the Royal Air Force and the Blit. But in fact, we all owe everything to this moment. All the accomplishments of Western civilization hinge here in the balance.

There's a great Emily Dickinson, poem where she says, it feels ashamed to be alive when men so brave are dead, one envies the distinguished dust. These Spartan soldiers give the full measure of devotion, as they did at Gettysburg. You know, we say that freedom isn't free. It's actually purchased here by this sacrifice. The victories that follow at Salamis and Plantea, they were only made possible here. The ideas of a Western civilization, of even something like a NATO alliance, of a United States, all of it hinges here. The ideals that we celebrate today, they are proved in blood here at Thermopylae. You know, these men, you could say it was not theirs to reason why. Theirs was to do and die. That's

actually what the monument here at Thermopylae said. It says, tell the Spartans passer-by, that here obedient to their laws, we lie. Their example of courage, their embodiment of the most critical of the Stoic virtues, it stands. It stands eternal. None of them, survived, yet they proved to be far more immortal than any of Xerxes troops. In Stephen Pressfield's amazing novel about Gates of Fire, he asks, you know, why? Why did they do this? What motivated them? One of the questions of the book is what is the opposite of fear, right?

What's the virtue? It's more than courage here, because it's about what it was about. It wasn't just their training that made what the Spartans did possible. It was also their wives, it was their culture, there was a Spartan's saying of women of Sparta that said, come back with your shield or on it. There's a story about a Spartan wife who watches her husband, the king, get killed, and the killers offer to spare her if she's quiet. She offers their neck and she says, no, this too will be a service to Sparta. The Spartans were more than just warriors, more than just courageous fighters.

That's what Pressfield concludes in Gates of Fire. He says, the opposite of fear is love. Love for country, love for one another, love for ideas, love for freedom, love for the vulnerable and the weak. We see this even in Leonidas's parting words to his wife. He says, marry a good man who will treat you well, bear him children, and live a good life. It was about more than him. He knew he had been given a prophecy that a Spartan king would have to die on the battlefield for Greece to remain free. And so there, at the hot gates, he was willing to give everything an act of devotion. The Spartans could have ruled all of Greece.

Leonidas could have used this moment for his own gain, but he declined. And so in this moment, he transcends mere self-interest, self-preservation. He does something totally insane. And yet, it is the highest and greatest plane that a human can reach. You know, I think about the people who registered to vote and were beaten for it. I think about organizers who went up against entrenched power, knowing they would almost certainly be crushed. Think about the people who testified in trials facing threats to their own safety and reprisals.

You think about this selfless act, megaloscopcia, but this is a selfless moment, a beautiful act of human greatness. And this, the thing we are willing to give, that full measure of our devotion, to a stranger, to what must be done, this is what makes us great. It takes us higher. It's what transforms us, as the Spartans did, from mere bravery to heroism. Maybe for a moment, maybe to just one person, maybe to be enshrined in the history books for all times. And what matters is who is impacted by that. And we have to try. We have to go for it.

And we can learn from the Spartan. Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. If you want more Stoic wisdom in your inbox, you can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. It's totally free. Can unsubscribe at any time. We'd love to have you. Dailystoic.com slash email. Look, ads are annoying.

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