Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient

wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom, everyday life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy

that has guided some of history's greatest men and women.

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Little is needed for the happy life.

Little is needed for the happy life.

Zeno came to stoicism with nothing.

He lost it all in a shipwreck and rebuilt his life.

Cleanthes, his first grade student, was not much better off,

making a living as a manual laborer in Athens.

Epictetus would come from slavery, something quite worse than poverty. He afterwards became

free, Thomas Wentworth Hon, would write in his

1865 translation of Epictetus, which is a good translation by the way, although I

recommend the Penguin Edition or Robin Waterfield's recent translation.

But Higginson says that Epictetus lived very frugally at Rome teaching philosophy.

Simplicus says that the whole furniture of his house consisted of a bed, a cooking vessel, and an earthen lamp.

And Lucian ridicules a man who bought the latter after his death in hopes to become a philosopher by using it. It was this tradition,

ironically, that would so prepare Marcus Aurelius for a life in an imperial palace.

From boyhood, he had been training in the stoic and cynic model by sleeping on a hard mattress and wearing rough clothes.

He didn't want to be soft. He didn't want to be spoiled. By the time he assumed the purple cloak of the Emperor he was indifferent to the trappings of wealth and power.

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