Cicero on The Paradox of Virtue
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Ryan presents the first of six readings of Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes. Cicero was considered Rome’s greatest politician, and he has survived as one of history’s most enduring chroniclers of Stoic philosophy and the Stoics themselves. As Ryan explains in Lives of the Stoics, these paradoxes are designed to question commonly held beliefs in order to promote reflection and discussion. In that spirit, the first paradox sees Cicero examine the idea that “virtue is the only good.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. |
| 0:08.2 | On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic |
| 0:13.3 | texts, audiobooks that we like here recommend here at Daily Stoic and other long form wisdom |
| 0:21.6 | that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. |
| 0:25.6 | We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that |
| 0:30.2 | you're able to apply it to your actual life. |
| 0:33.7 | Thank you for listening. |
| 0:36.9 | Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. |
| 0:41.5 | Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. |
| 0:46.5 | Today's episode we're going to hear from Cicero. |
| 0:49.5 | Cicero himself by way of an audio narrator. |
| 0:52.1 | But as I was writing about Cicero in lives with the Stoic, I don't say that he's a Stoic, |
| 0:57.3 | I say that he's a fellow traveler. |
| 0:59.6 | What's fascinating about Cicero is that he wrote beautifully about the Stoics. |
| 1:04.2 | He was friends with the Stoics. |
| 1:06.7 | One great Stoic, Diodotus, actually died in Cicero's house. |
| 1:12.7 | He wrote beautifully about the Stoics. |
| 1:15.0 | He called the Stoics the only true philosophers. |
| 1:17.8 | And in fact, if it were not for Cicero, much of what we know about the ancient Stoics |
| 1:21.7 | would not have survived to us. |
| 1:24.0 | And yet he did struggle to live up to the ideas. |
| 1:26.8 | But that's not what we're going to talk about today. |
... |
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