Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoic early and ad-free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. 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 to 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. Who will you emulate?
No one did it better. No one did more for the historical record. Without Cicero, much of the Stoic canon would have been lost. We are lucky that this great and articulate mind of antiquity spent so much time with the Stoic texts. It is through him that some of the best Stoic wisdom was preserved. Cato, on the other hand, hardly wrote anything down. He didn't provide us with any dialogues or essays. He hardly talked about Stoicism at all.
Yet we are far luckier for his contributions to the philosophy because he showed us what a Stoic was supposed to do. In Lives of the Stoics, I am fascinated by this contrast, the two biggest contemporary Stoic philosophers. They were friends and rivals, colleagues and opponents, but their biggest divergence came not in terms of policy, but in how they lived.
Cicero was a fantastic writer, but he was also preposterously ambitious and vain. He was enormously wealthy through rather dubious means. And during the vexing political dilemmas of his time, he often chose self-preservation over principle. Cato, on the other hand, was not a particularly good writer, and few, if any, of his speeches survive.
but his character, it spoke loud enough to make up for it. He was brave. He was unbending. He was unwavering in his commitment to justice and virtue. And so which in the end is the greater contribution? Which is the greater example?
Neither man was perfect, but they do present us with distinct paths. Which will we choose, words or deeds? Preserving this philosophy on the page or embodying it in practice? The world needs both, of course. But if we had to choose, we'd take the latter over the former any day.
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