Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You could do it on your own. You could wing it. You could hope to stumble through and come out the other side with a comprehensive understanding of a book that, while pretty short and to the point, is still, as we said earlier this week, pretty difficult.
Marcus Aurelius, the author of that book we're talking about, Meditations, would steer you in a different direction, though. Mastery of reading and writing requires a master, he said, and he knew this from experience. Sometime around the year 140 AD, Marcus was introduced to the philosophy that would change his life by his teacher, Rusticus. The remembrances of Epictetus, as Marcus would refer most gratefully to that book that Rusticus gave him, he said, which he supplied to me out of his own library.
We could imagine the underlinings in Rusticus's copy that would have called Marcus's attention to particularly important passages. We can imagine the marginalia that would have provided valuable context and insights. We can imagine the discussions the two might have had as Marcus was familiarizing himself with this wisdom. In fact, Marcus would write in meditations about going straight to the seat of intelligence.
By that, he'd been asking questions, hearing from the experts, really wrestling with ancient wisdom as it was meant to be wrestled with. So if we're going to sit down and read Marcus Aurelius's meditations today, why wouldn't we do the same? For the past decade here at Daily Stoic, we've been engaging with meditations day in and day out, wanting to understand its wisdom so we can apply it to our own lives. We spent hundreds and thousands of hours with the book itself and spent just as many hours hunting down papers and analysis by scholars and historians and translators, many of whom have gotten to talk to in an interview.
It's been the work of a lifetime exploring the depths of meditations, making sense of what Marcus wrote and what those writings can do for us. And as Marcus said, it requires the help of a master. And if you want to go deeper into meditations along with me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world, well, this is a time because it is meditations month here at Daily Stoic. April is the month Mark's release was born.
And in honor of that wonderful birthday almost 20 centuries ago, we're going to be diving into meditations as a community, doing a kind of book club about it. And if you want to grab that guide, we'll actually throw it in for free. You can join me in a live session. We're going to be doing about it and all of that.
Grab the meditations month bundle. I'll see you in there. Let's do a deep dive together into one of the greatest books of all time. I'll link to that in today's show notes.
I think this is awesome. And I hope you like it.