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. None of us are perfect.

It's clear that comidus was no chip off the old block.

Marcus Reelius' son, the man he reluctantly made emperor in his place,

all four of his immediate predecessors, not having had a male heir,

was impulsive and fragile,

cruel, and bloodthirsty. We don't know exactly what comedists was like, but Joaquin Phoenix seems

to have gotten close to his essence, the movie Gladiator. Was Marcus Aurelius a bad father then?

How did he not manage to pass on his stoicism, to say nothing of his kindness and sense of

responsibility to his son? We don't know, and it does make some people doubt whether Marcus

Uralius was as great of a man as we'd like to think he was. Yet because of our focus on the

men of history, we often miss an equally compelling example of

Marcus Aurelius' parenting in the power of his example.

In the year 212 AD, his daughter, Cornificia, was sentenced to death by the Emperor

Cala Calla on what appears to be spurious charges.

Here, the historians tell us, a child of Marcus showed herself to be equal,

not just to his example, a decado and his daughter, Portia. Her last words, the writer Horace

White Parsons and Lucy Larkham explained in the Atlantic in 1888, were my poor unhappy soul

...