Isn’t This What We’re After?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hadrian had everything. He could do anything. He commanded an enormous army. He had access to the smartest advisors and the most illustrious men in the world.

He could send for anyone summon. anyone. And yet here he was travelling more than five hundred miles from Rome, to the distant Greek city and Roman colony of Nicopolis, to attend the lectures of a former slave? It's pretty incredible and beautiful too, no? There is something poetic about Hadrian, then the emperor, sitting like an eager student at the foot of a man whose name literally just meant

acquired one. And yet in this instance was the slave not then the master? Was that not the powerless conquering the power full? Marcus Aurelius, a lifelong student of Epictetus and the adopted grandson of Hadrian, contrasted the great conquerors of the world against the wise men of history, and he believed that the thinkers came out the better. Because, he explained, the philosophers knew the what, the why, and the how.

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