You Don’t Need Your Books | 9 Stoic Lessons From Roman Politics

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You don't need your books. You might think that Mark Srelius was never far from his books. And considering he was sometimes spotted reading at the Colosseum as the gladiator games raged below, this is not far from the mark. He loved to read, and he tried always to have a text from a philosopher or a dramatist or a historian with him.

But as it is for all of us, we don't always get our way. Sometimes life intervenes. and it clearly did for Marcus Aurelius. He spent years in dusty Roman army camps. He spent months on horseback over the course of his life.

There would have been times, as there are for all of us, that he was in a rut and just hadn't found anything good recently. And so he laid there, staring at the ceiling or thinking, or having a conversation, and and perhaps that's what he's referencing in this interesting passage in Meditations, where he says, a philosopher without clothes and one without books. I have nothing to eat, he says, as he stands there half naked. But I subsist on the logos, and with nothing to read, Marcus says, I subsist on it too. He is saying that there is more to reading than just books.

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