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 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. This says so much about you.
It seems like a rather small thing to clinch such an enormous position, but it's a true story when I tell in right thing right now. Hadrian decided that he could trust Antoninus with absolute power, a man he had no blood relation to, after watching Antoninus, who had no idea anyone was looking, carefully and respectfully guide his ailing father-in-law up a flight of stairs. Why would this have meant so much to the emperor of Rome? Perhaps because Rome's founding myths celebrated this exact behavior.
Captured in countless statues and paintings and mosaics, but best rendered in Virgil's the Aeneid, generations of Romans were told the story of Aeneas, the founder of Rome fleeing Troy with his enfeebled father in his arms. For all Rome's obsession with power, it was this beautiful act of compassion that Rome sought to memorialize. So we can imagine when Hadrian saw Antoninus helping his own father-in-law, he must have thought this is a man after Rome's own heart. It was a minor moment, but a revealing one.
It was a glimpse into Antoninus' character, as is the way we treat our own elders. It says something about a person and their society when the old are mistreated, when people who have served their country or a company are discarded after they pass their prime. That was a disturbing part of the pandemic when people tried to shrug it off as something that was only risky to old people, as if we don't have an obligation to our parents and grandparents. This is the disturbing part about people who talk about getting rid of the social safety matter, try to cut benefits to pensioners and retirees.
We are how we treat the vulnerable. We are how we treat the people who can't do much for us anymore. We are who we take care of. Aeneas understood this, and so did Antoninus and Hadrian.
So did Marcus Aurelius, who spent close to two decades learning from and helping Antoninus, never seeing him as a rival or as some old person in his way, but someone with wisdom and experience he could benefit from.