Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off, the little dose of courage and discipline and justice in wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com. Don't deprive yourself this fortune.
In the first century, a D. Fu would have argued that Epictetus was the most powerful person in Rome. Fu would have argued that this lowly slave possessed any power at all. In fact, his name said it all.
Epictetus literally translates to acquired one. Yet what philosophy helped Epictetus come to understand was that it was actually Nero and the other powerful men and women of the time who were the slaves. They were the ones who had been acquired by ambition, by desire, by insecurities, by money, by fame. All of us are born free, Epictetus came to see, but many of us relinquish this freedom of choice in favor of much more superficial things.
Or we so wallow in our unfortunate circumstances, our lack of literal freedom, that we fail to see where we do have choices, where we do have agency. If enslavement, the horrible torture that Epictetus experienced, the lifelong disability that followed it, if this didn't touch his power over himself, what excuse do the rest of us have? The world can upend us at any moment through illness, misfortune, even oppression. But there's one thing we always command, our own minds, our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs about what happens to us.
This is the empire we must rule. As Epictetus put it, even Zeus cannot deprive you of that fortune. So will you seize it? Or will you trade it away for superficial or shiny things?
Will you free yourself through your freedom of choice? Or will you hand that freedom over to the mob to your urges, to your fears? That is the question of your life right there. And you can argue that there's really no better philosopher to help you answer that question than Epictetus, your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher, as we've been saying.
After all, it was Epictetus who shaped the mind of young Marcus Aurelius, who proved the exception to the rule that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it was Epictetus' philosophy that James Stockdale used to survive his time as a Vietnam POW that Frederick the Great carried with him into battle and Teddy Roosevelt brought along and is famed River of Doubt expedition. And it's also the philosophy we've been exploring for the last month here with thousands of stokes all over the world. We've been doing Epictetus month the whole month of July, diving deep into his life.
And it's like a sea, we've got this course, How to Read Epictetus. It's a digital guide you can pair it with a copy of the discourses, his famous book brought to us by Arian, we carried at the painted porch. And on July 26th, we're doing a private Q&A session, a deep dive into the life of Epictetus and what he can teach us, what we can learn from him. I'd love to have you join me in there.
All you gotta do is grab the How to Read Epictetus course. I'll link to that in today's show notes, dailystoke.com slash Epictetus course. As I said, you can pair it with the Penguin Classics edition where you have a special deal. You can get that in the book from the painted porch, dailystoke.com slash Epictetus course.
And remember, if you are a member of dailystoke life, you get the course and all our courses for free, it's going to be awesome. I want to see you in there July 26th. Let's make July Epictetus month. Let's really learn a bunch from him together.
I've been learning a bunch as we've done this deep dive. I think we're really going to like it. Please stay at Epictetus course.