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. Do you have this too?

They were tough. They knew that life was tough. They knew that a fragile person would not

survive. They also knew back in the days of ancient Rome that life was fragile, that even

tough people could be cut down by disease or events or a tyrant. So yeah, there was a gruffness to the Stoics, a weariness

of getting too close or too attached, lest your heart be broken by fortune. But does that

mean that the Stoics were unfeeling, utterly disconnected, harsh, and invulnerable?

Hardly. In his fascinating biography of Marcus Aurelius, which you can grab from the

painted porch, and he's discussed it on the podcast many times, Donald Robertson takes pains

to note a virtue exhibited by Marcus Aurelius's incredible mother, Lucilla, and he refers to her natural affection.

While the mothers of many emperors before him were ambitious and cruel, she was kind and

generous and genuinely loved by her own children.

Marcus, Donald Wright, came to agree with Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, that generally speaking,

those among us who are called patricians are rather deficient in precisely this quality.

Both Marcus and Fronto Donald point out use the word that Paul would use in the Bible,

which he used to say that Christians were to be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love.

The Stoics loved and were loved. They honored their parents. They played with their children.

And this is exactly how one would describe Cato's relationship to his brother, who lived very

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