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. This cannot be taken only given.
Nero could take their freedom, he could confiscate their wealth, he could remove them from their positions. He was, after all, a tyrant, and in many cases he did take those things. Just ask Santaica, ask Thrasia, ask Agrippenus, all stoics whom we profile in lives of the Stoics, but there was something else that not even the most powerful dictator can deprive someone of without their consent, their dignity, their self-respect, their values. It was this that Agrippenus maintained, despite the culture of fear around him, refusing even to attend Nero's banquets.
Thrasia declined to take part in the first that was so many of Nero's edicts and policies, he declined to participate in the fiction and the unreality that Nero's enablers chose to cosign. Santaica unfortunately did give up so much of his dignity and respectability in order to maintain his position with Nero, as did countless other Romans. Nero didn't take this from Santaica, it was given. As Sophocles said, whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there, a free man.
The same holds true in our times, powerful people can take from you, they can push you around, they can do great harm to you. But still the Stoics would say that our character remains ours to preserve or debase, our dignity depends on what we do and has nothing to do with external circumstances. We must never give it up.