12 Stoic Lessons from The Odyssey

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. For nearly 3,000 years it has reigned as perhaps the greatest story ever told. It is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and changed. It's inspired poems, it's inspired paintings, it's inspired music.

I'm talking, of course, about the Odyssey. And it's a favorite of many people, but most of all, the Stoics. There is no work that the Stoics reference more than the Odyssey. I'm Ryan Holiday, the author of The Daily Stoic, and I traveled thousands of miles, not just to ancient Greece, where of course the Odyssey is set. but to Ithaca itself, where it begins and ends.

To find out not just what the Odyssey is about, what it can teach us about life, but also why it so resonated with the Stoics and why it's resonating again today. Odysseus would not have survived his Odyssey without the help of Athena, but his son Telemachus would not have survived without Athena either, and I think it's illustrative the form that Athena takes, particularly when she is aiding Telemachus. She pretends she is an old family friend named Mentor. Basically, Odysseus and Telemachus are a product of their mentors, as we all are. Perhaps this is where the word

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