The Stoic All the Stoics Admired

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Cato wasn't always Cato. He was a towering figure even in his own time. He was known for his honesty, his commitment, his self-discipline, and his incorruptibility. Even his enemies and political adversaries couldn't help but be impressed by it.

We can't all be Cato's, they would say with a shrug, and they had to hand it to him. He was better than they were morally and professionally. But you know, it's worth remembering that Cato wasn't perfect. He had flaws, he made exceptions, he made mistakes, he lost his temper, he miscalculated, he had an ego. Even his sense of justice, his most impressive asset, was sometimes too unyielding and at other times too self righteous.

The author Tanahasie Coates once said something that echoed that popular expression about Cato, but it had an important addition. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson, he said. Not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. The examples of Cato and Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King and Marcus Aurelius are rightly awesome, literally causing awe because of their incredible virtue and strength and power. Yet we should not forget that they were not superhuman, they were not perfect, they struggled like we struggled, and we should not let the magnitude of their accomplishments intimidate us from struggling to be like them.

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