Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like you

all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps. Can you imagine? In some ways,

the ancient world seems so remarkably similar to ours.

Marcus Reyes has a passage in meditations pepping himself to get out of bed early in the morning.

His name was Marcus.

Maybe your name is Marcus today.

People like sports then.

They fell in love.

They liked eating olives.

There's a passage in Seneca's letters where he talks about getting impatient as he waits for his table before dinner and then sits frustrated as they stick him with a bad one.

So when we hear that the ancients were parents, we think they were just like us.

And they were.

There's another passage in letters from a Stoic where Seneca talks about a kid making a sandcastle at the beach.

But all these similarities can also obscure just how terrible

the ancient world was and how lucky we are. As Anthony Everett writes in his biography of the

Emperor Hadrian, one of the consequences of the high rate of infant mortality in the ancient world

was that the upper class parents took care not to become too attached to their children

until they were reasonably confident that they would live. He goes on to explain that infants

often didn't get a full name until their ninth or tenth day alive, that first week being so

particularly perilous and survival so uncertain. Even many centuries later, it wasn't uncommon for families to give

two male sons the same name, expecting quite morbidly that only one would carry it all the way

...