Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

For nearly 3,000 years, it has reigned as perhaps the greatest story ever told. It is a story that has been

told and retold, adapted, and changed. It's inspired poems, it's inspired paintings, it's

inspired music. I'm talking, of course, about the Odyssey. And it's a favorite of many people,

but most of all, the Stoics. There is no work that the Stoics reference more than the Odyssey.

I'm Ryan Holliday, the author of The Daily Stoic, and I traveled thousands of miles, not

just to ancient Greece, where of course the Odyssey is set, but to Ithaca itself, where

it begins and ends.

To find out not just what the Odyssey is about, what it can teach us about life,

but also why it's so resonated with the Stoics and why it's resonating again today.

Odysseus would not have survived his Odyssey without the help of Athena, But his son Telemachus would not have survived

without Athena either. And I think it's illustrative the form that Athena takes, particularly

when she is aiding Telemachus. She pretends she is an old family friend named mentor.

Basically, Odysseus and Telemachus are a product of their mentors, as we all are.

Perhaps this is where the word comes from.

But the idea is that we are guided by the people who teach us, who have been further ahead than us.

Marks Ruelas is mentored by Antoninus. Zeno is mentored by Cretes. I was

mentored by the great Robert Green. The idea that you want to learn these lessons by painful

trial and error is insane. You want to benefit from the experience of others. That's the joke.

Any fool can learn by experience. I want to learn from the experience of others.

And Odysseus does this. He is aided constantly throughout the Odyssey by Athena and then

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