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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts,

audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend.

We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. In the old days, in the ancient days, the Epicurians and the Stoics were rivals. They hated each other. In fact, there's one Stoic I talk about in lives of the Stoics, this guy named Dio Timis, who so hated Epicurus that he writes this series of letters that are in the past.

They're purportedly to be by Epicurus that are in fact forgeries to kind of frame the Epicurians as these heedness, as these liars, as these bad influences.

None of it was true. This is obviously a betrayal of Stoicism. But I think it just highlights the rivalry that was long believed to exist between these two major philosophical schools.

In some ways, kind of the narcissism of small differences because the Stoics and the Epicurians were closer than one might imagine. The Epicurians weren't these pleasure loving heedness and the Stoics weren't these pleasure hating gluttons for punishments not by any means as we are going to talk about as you are going to see in today's episode.

But I think it's worth pointing out, you know, who to send a quote more than any other philosopher is Epicurus. He quotes his rivals. He says because I read like a spy in the enemy's camp. He says I'll quote even a bad line. He said I'll quote even a bad author if the line is good. Well, what we're going to be doing today is quoting a whole letter, an actual letter, not a fraudulent one from Epicurus himself. This is Epicurus is letter to Menesius.

It's a fascinating letter one. I think you absolutely should listen to it's sort of laying out his understanding of both ethics and be aesthetic life. How one finds pleasure not in sex or drugs, rock and roll or whatever, but in virtue itself.

And it's never a bad time to hear someone speak as eloquently of virtue and the pleasures of the good life as Epicurus does in this letter. Enjoy. And if you want to read some more Epicurus, there is a great book called The Art of Living, which is from Penguin Classics. It's a collection of Epicurus's writings and his fragments.

I used it as a source and stillness is the key. And I think you will like that. I would check that out and carry the painted porch. I will link to it in today's episode.

Let no one win young, delayed to study philosophy, nor when he is old, grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul.

And the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by is like the man who says that the age for happiness is not yet come to him or has passed away.

Wherefore both when young and old a man must study philosophy that as he grows old he may be young in blessings through the grateful recollection of what has been. And that in youth he may be old as well, since he will know no fear of what is to come.

We must then meditate on the things that make our happiness, seeing that when that is with us we have all, but when it is absent we do all to win it.

The things that I used increasingly to commend to you, these do and practice, considering them to be the first principles of the good life.

First of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men's minds and do not assign to him anything alien to his immortality or ill-suited to his blessedness.

But believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness and immortality, for God's there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision.

But they are not such as the many believe them to be, for indeed they do not consistently represent them as they believe them to be.

And the impious man is not he who denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many.

For the statements of the many about the gods are not conceptions derived from sensation, but false suppositions according to which the greatest misfortunes befall the wicked and the greatest blessings the good by the gift of the gods.

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