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Rome is the city that changed the course of history, the change of course of civilization, and it also changed the course of my life. Because about 20 years ago, I read this book, Marcus Aurelius' meditation, the private thoughts, the most powerful man in the world. I had no idea who Marcus Aurelius was, I had no idea about stoic philosophy, and he sent me down a rabbit. Marcus Aurelius led me to Seneca, Seneca led me to Epitetus, and indeed all the other stones. So this is an theoretical philosophy, isn't an abstract philosophy, it's a philosophy for life.
It was used by real people in the real world in this city. So that's what we're going to do in today's episode. I want to take you to the places where those people were challenged, where these ideas were tested, where they had to be put into practice, because ultimately that's what stoic philosophy is, something real, something tangible, something you do. Behind me is an enormous mausoleum, built by and for one of the most powerful men in history, a man of enormous ego and enormous animatization. Hadrian, when he had this built in 139 AD, he said to his architect, make it bigger and more impressive than it bestises.
And indeed it rivals not just Augustus, but it rivals some of the Egyptian pharaohs. And it held not just Hadrian's remains, but that of his successors to Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius himself. But Marcus Aurelius would have found this to be the antithesis of stoic philosophy. He actually addresses it in meditations. He says, consider that before long you'll be nobody, just like Hadrian, just like Augustus.
He said, so live and act with humility. Now you might think the fact that this is still here 2000 years later, that it's a museum, that it's endured through all these centuries, that it might disprove Marcus' point, but actually it doesn't, because you know what happened? And 400 AD Rome was sacked by the gods, and they broke into the temple, and they scattered the ashes everywhere. We have no idea where they are, they were lost to the ages, which is also something Marcus Aurelius talks about in meditations. He says, Alexander the Great and his neural driver, they both died, and the same thing happened to both.
And indeed, the same thing happened to Augustus, we have no idea where his body is, the same thing happened to Hadrian, the same thing happened to Antoninus, the same thing happened to Marcus Aurelius, and the very same thing will happen to you. He's saying, you know, ego is the enemy. Live with humility. Remember, you are not immoral, you are not a god, you are not special. You cannot defy the laws ultimately of gravity or of time, or of decomposition.
Behind me is one of the great trophies of the ancient world. It's over 130 feet tall, stretching way up into the sky. It's made out of enormous marble blocks, and the carving spiral up almost two dozen times. It's nearly 400 feet of ornate intricate carvings, depicting all of Marcus Aurelius' campaigns and victories in the Markomanic Wars, which were waged against Germanic tribes, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Rome. When Marcus Aurelius said, life is warfare and a journey far from home, this is what he was talking about.
He earned this in sweat and blood, and so did the Roman armies. And yet, this statue, which is put up to commemorate his victory, it's also a reminder of a Latin saying, the quistoic concept, this idea of sick transit, gloria. Right, all glory is fleeting, none of it lasts, but this does last. This statue has been here for almost 2, but there's a twist. You see, that's not Marcus Aurelius on the top of that statue, that's actually Saint Paul, because in the 1500s of Pope, the statue was beginning to crumble, set out to restore it.
He knocks Mark's really soft the top, and he puts Saint Paul up there instead, who as you'll see, he actually does have his connection to so-called. But when he puts a new base on there, and what does he put on the base, he celebrates himself, that he's the restore of this column. And then you know what else he does? He wrongly attributes the victory, which the relief is all about. To Ant and I, as Marcus Aurelius' stepfather and predecessor.
So in another way, it's a monument to how quickly our accomplishments are forgotten, how quickly we ourselves are forgotten, how things are obscured and rewritten, and we define, and we have no control over this whatsoever. Marcus was talked about this repeatedly in meditations about how history swallows us all up, how it forgets us, how names that were once in common use are quickly forgotten. Right down behind me are the ruins of Mamertine Prison, which isn't a super well-known historical site, but it should be a much better known one. In 65 BC, when Caesar wins the election of consul, there is a loser in that election. There's this sort of faux-populist named Cowlene, he's from an old money family, so he can't wrap his head around losing to someone like Cicero.
And so he attempts a coup, he alleges, a electoral fraud, and all this, maybe this is sounding a little bit familiar to you. But basically, he tries to overthrow an election, and this coup attempt almost succeeds, but he stopped the last second by Cicero. The old man was thrown in this prison, and Cicero and Cator Tuso, put him on trial and eventually he's executed. It is a narrow one thing, the Roman Republic is almost overthrown here, and it is saved by these two stokes. I tell this story because it is an important lesson, those were not just in the mix, they were willing to sacrifice and save and fight for their country.
They did not want to be complicit. I think we can contrast this with a couple generations later, Seneca gets this job tutoring the future emperor, a boy named Nero. And at first Nero seems like he's going to be a good leader, the first five years of Nero known as the Quinquinium Neuronis, that the five good years of Nero, that the five good years don't last. And he'll give way to bad year. Nero starts to lose his mind.
He becomes corrupt, he becomes deranged, he becomes cruel, he becomes an egomaniac. And Seneca turns on him, eventually, inevitably, but for far too long he is complicit. He tells himself he's the adult in the room. He tells himself that he's getting good things out of a bad person. He tells himself that if he quits he'll be replaced by someone worse, all of which continues to enable Nero to be a bad ruler, to do bad things to people.
And there are other stokes who choose a different pathisto, composition who we've talked about before, they fight back against it. Thrasi gives his life, eventually Nero does come for Seneca. That's the iron, that's why you shouldn't be complicit, that's why you have to stand up, that's why you have to speak up. It's going to come for you, inevitably, inevitably, anyway. So you might as well do the right thing while you can.
You might as well try to stop it while it still might make a difference. The one that was crazy about this statue behind me, it's actually fake, but the real Marcas Riesz, which is cast in bronze, is inside this museum. They had to move it inside because 2000 years of Roman weather had taken its toll on it. But the only reason it survives is because of a case of mistaken identity. Why did the Christians preserve this statue when they destroyed something like 20 other bronze equestrian statues from the ancient era?
It's because they thought it was the emperor Constantine. If they had known it was Marcas Riesz, they almost certainly would have destroyed it. So that's the funny thing and ultimately the proof of what Marcas really has said, which is that those who long for posthumous fame forget they won't be around to enjoy it. He also said that it's important we remember the people in the future will be as stupid as the people who are alive right now. The only reason this fame is that you survived.
The only reason that all the axes in this swear point to him, why Michelangelo built the base for it, is not because they read meditations and they were celebrating Marcas Riesz as a philosopher king. It's because they thought he was somebody else. It's because history is full of ridiculous works like that. The fundamental teaching of stoic philosophy is there's some stuff that's in our control, it's some stuff that's not. And here the Roman form, the empress palaces above me here, is the perfect example of this, because Marcas Riesz may have been the emperor of Rome, but he was still subject to fundamental human reality.
He couldn't control what the people down here said and did and thought. I mean he could to a degree, but not really. He couldn't control the fact that it was incredibly hot in the summer. I'm sweating right now. He couldn't control that it was extremely cold in the winter.
It didn't control world events. There were more things out of his control than in his control, even though he was the most powerful man in the world. And I think this is ultimately why the writings of Epictetus land with Marcas Riesz so much. Epictetus is a slave. Basically everything is out of his control, but he realizes that actually what's in his control is his own thoughts, his own opinions, the stories he tells himself, his own standards, of behavior, who he is as a person, and that ultimately freedom wasn't so much a legal status, but it was a state of mind, a state of being, and that he could be free anywhere.
And Marcas really is understanding how frustrating and difficult and unpredictable Roman life was. Human life was. He came to understand that to be free, to be truly powerful, it wasn't about conquering foreign lands, it was about conquering himself. It wasn't about getting everything he wanted, but controlling and limiting what he wanted. That if he wanted to have a good reign, he could do that by being a good person.
If he wanted happiness, it wasn't going to be about achievement or ease or pleasure. It was going to be around contentment and peace and tranquility. And so I could give you this lesson anywhere, but the point is you don't control what's going on out there, you don't control what's happening up there, you don't control other people really at all, only control yourself. As the Stoics say, being powerful is being under your own power, mastering yourself. Benjamin Franklin said, time is money in 1748.
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They hated anything that the mob liked, that the the rabble life, right? Blood and circuses. They saw it as not just manipulative as it was and brain rotty as it was, but also that violence and degradation and and and cruelty was not good. We're told that Marcus really is demands that the gladiators fight only with wooden swords. He just didn't like that people were getting hurt.
And we see in Seneca's writing too that he deplores the violence of the Colosseum. And yet, just like today, we talk about being in the arena, the Stoic writing is filled with metaphors and pout the games. In one of his famous passages of meditation, which I think about in regards to sort of change and self-improvement, Marcus Smith talks about being a gladiator at the games, who's torn to pieces, who's bloody and bleeding and losing, just begging to be brought back the next day to do the same thing over and over again. He's like, it's not working. You have to change.
And they would agree that life was a back, that it was about being in the arena, that it was about being tested and being challenged, not holding your life too dearly, that you have to be courageous. You had to be tough. You had to be trained. Marcus Smith said, like life is in a dance, life is a fight. You've got to be dug in and ready for sudden attacks.
The gladiatorial games were a through line for the ancients' lives. Behind me is Circus Maximus, Rome's great chariot racing stadium. 250,000 people filled into this stadium. Chariot's race to faster than you can imagine was the actual sport of Rome far more than gladiatorial games. And we actually have an explicit mention of chariot racing in Marcus' religious meditations on the first page of it, actually.
He says he learns from his teacher not to support this side or that side in chariot racing, this fighter or that in the games. He said to put up with discomfort to not make demands, to do my own work, to mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers. Cherry racing was almost a political sport in Rome. It's interesting that the Marcus really would speak negatively of chariot racing, because actually the chariot racer was emblematic, was the symbol in the ancient world, in many cases, for one of the keys to a virtuous of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the chariot racer was the embodiment of discipline, or soft for cine.
Because if you think about what a chariot racer has to do, in some cases it's spurring the horse forward. In other cases, it's raining them back in. But it's this knowledge of that, this communion between the animal and the master, the director, he's steering, he's trying not to tip over, he's trying to go as fast as he's capable of going, but no faster, right? This sort of midpoint between the extremes of recklessness and conservatism, holding too much back. And so we can imagine, as the chariot's whipped by the emperor, whose house is actually right up there and could watch it happen from there, is seeing this visible embodiment, this metaphor of the key stoic virtue.
Sometimes we need to go faster, sometimes we need to pull back, but we always have to be in control of the rain. That's what sport represented in the ancient world. It's what it represents today. Cicero would talk about how temperance was the polish on all the other virtues. It's what determines how much and the degree to which we apply any of the other virtues. Without discipline,
none of the other virtues work, none of them make any sense. Seneca used to throw himself in that water. Well, not that fountain, but 2000 years ago, the water that feeds the treddy fountain in Rome, came from an aqueduct, a Roman aqueduct. Seneca would inaugurate every year by throwing himself into the freezing water. If this was part of the stoic idea that we treat the body rigorously, he said, so that it's not disobedient to the mind. We do hard things because they're hard. We make
ourselves uncomfortable because it makes us better able to handle the discomfort that life inevitably has in store for us. There may well be some benefits to the cold punges, but that's not why Seneca did it. He did it because he was practicing discomfort. He was building the metal muscle of doing hard things, of doing typical things, of doing unpleasant things so that when life demanded that he do them, he had the capacity for doing so. That's why we should practice doing difficult things, whether it's a cold plunge or a hard run or taking the stairs or putting yourself out there.
The Queen is doing hard things just for you, and that's why Seneca practiced doing them right here. The ancient world was not a quiet place. They might not have had motors and sirens and jackhammers, but it was no easier than you can imagine. These are the baths of Diocletian, basically the world's largest chin. We know it was incredibly loud because Seneca tells us how loud it was. We don't know if Seneca went to this one, probably not. He said he could hear the
pans slapping the fat backs of old men. He said he could hear the hissing of their breath. He said he could hear athletes throwing a ball back and forth, yelling at each other. He said he could hear the screams of people having their armpit hairs picked out, and then he could hear vendors shouting out what they were selling. He could even hear the police arresting someone out on the street. It was
ungodly loud. Trying to describe it to his friend, Lucilius, he says conjure up in your imagination, enough sound to make you hate your hearing. And if you could hear all this as he was trying to focus, as he was trying to write, which if you've ever been in a loud city, if you've ever been in a coffee shop trying to work, if you've ever been in your own office, you couldn't concentrate all the noise and the chatter and the dip. But Seneca, getting to the core of what there was a myth on a real practical level, talks about how you have to have the discipline to be able to tune this out. He says you can't control the noise that other people are making. You can't ask them to be quiet,
but you can control your ability to be able to tune them out, to lock in, to focus, to concentrate, as Marcus really said, like a roman, doing this task in front of you as if it matters, as if it was the only thing in the world. This notes believe that inner peace wasn't something that you got from your environmental conditions, that it wasn't about running away or turning away or even turning down. It was about tuning out, it was about stillness, it was about finding that stillness. The idea of Adiraxia wasn't about a silent meditation retreat, it was about finding stillness and peace and tranquility inside the noisiness of the world, because the world then and now is always going to be noisy. So one of the hardest things to be able to do is to focus amidst the craziness, with your device going off, with your kids running around, people coming in and out of your office with the interruptions, with the noise, with the sirens, with all the things that are going to happen, you have to be able to find the stones, you have to make room for the stones, you have to insist on it, you have to see it as a discipline, as something you work for, not something you are given.
Very hard to be good at something by yourself on your own. Marcus Lewis, we talked about how just as reading and writing requires a master, so too does life. Who are your teachers? Who's challenging you? Who's pushing you? Epictetus would talk about his teacher, Musonius Rufus, who
taught him peer in Rome. Musonius would come to him and say, I'm going to afflict you with some kind of hardship or difficulty, and Epictetus was supposed to answer such as life, such as life. Every great athlete you could imagine has a coach, they have multiple coaches, they have performance coaches, swing coaches and shot coaches, and strengthen conditioning coaches, they have business coaches, CEOs have coaches, CEOs also have their board of directors. Presidents have not just a cabinet, but a kitchen cabinet, they have their formal and their informal advisors. The point is, you have to have someone who is challenging you, who's pushing you, who understands that most of us are going to take the easy way if it's left up to us. So we supersede that discipline by not leaving
it up to us, putting our training methodology, putting our decisions in the hands of someone who knows better, who has our best interests at heart. Doing this, this 50k, I worked with a trainer, his name is Chris Colson, I've worked with him for years, but I said, hey, this is what I'm doing, this is the shape that I want to be in, like, what kind of schedule do I need to be on? He put me on a schedule, he picked out my diet, we would meet twice, so when I didn't want to do it, he would say, all right, you've got to do a makeup, when he would find, you know, me trying to cut corners in the workouts, he would push me, he would have me get to the weight I was comfortable with, and then put a little bit more on there, that's what great coaches and teachers do, because life is going to do that, it's going to say, oh, you think you're capable of this? Well, actually, you're also going to be able to have to have this, here's a new skill that's required, right? Change disruption is always happening, the game is always evolving, if you stay the same, you are already falling behind. So who is your
master, who is your teacher, who is challenging you to do hard things, who is teaching you, how to do hard things, ideally you want someone who has been through hard things like this before, so they can teach you and instruct you and help you do the thing that you want to do. This is where Marcus Aurelius lived, the Imperial Palace on Palantine Hill, from ancient Rome, and he said, this enormous palace, all these rooms, all these luxuries, all of it, just for him, for exclusively his use, he said, you know, it's possible to live well, even in a palace. What he meant is that living in a palace isn't good for you, Seneca would say that luxury resides under marble and gold, he saw all this as oppressive, he saw all this as corruptive, he saw all of it as fundamentally not normal, which it isn't, and so in meditations, which he's writing here, in this very building, he's trying to stay humble, he's trying to remind himself what's actually important, he's trying to avoid being stained, he says, died purple by the cloak of the emperor, but also the trappings of the palace, and we should remember this wherever we live, however nice our dwellings are, that it's possible to live well anywhere, it's possible to be good, anywhere, decent, anywhere, value the right things, anywhere, but in fact it is sometimes in the most luxurious and exciting and beautiful of places, that that
job is actually even harder.