You Have Access to a Miracle of History
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It is remarkable and very, very lucky that the book survives. Imagine it was never written for publication, it could have been destroyed by a family member, it could have been lost to fire or to time, as all the writings of Zeno and Chrysippus were, as nearly half the writings of Seneca were. It could have been banned by the church or tucked away and forgotten in some archive, never to be seen again. So that meditations survives is a miracle of history.
We have in the pages of this little book the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world. We have him ruminating on how to deal with difficult people, how to overcome obstacles, how to face the inevitability of death. And we have him doing this for his own personal edification, not for posterity or for performance. But we could also say that this is all incredibly misleading as a result, and in fact, that many people have been misled by meditations. They think that Marcus Aurelius is depressing, they think stoicism is dark and joyless, even violent.
But what is written in the pages of meditations is not who Marcus Aurelius was. as a person, as a friend, as a husband or a father. We have to remember that in meditations we see only what he was struggling with, what he needed reminders of, of what he was trying to cling to, in a difficult moment. What was published in Meditations, you could argue, what survives in most of the Stoic writings, obliterates the full and complex human life behind those words. Because the Stoics weren't just leaders and philosophers, they were also parents and spouses and friends who
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