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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom and temperance.

And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time.

And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, everyone, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I have raved about the works of James Rom, many times his book, dying every day, a biography of Seneca, incredible.

And I've had him on the podcast before, so check that out. But is translation of Seneca for Princeton University presses ancient wisdom series how to die is just the best. It is the ultimate collection of Seneca's musings on the shortness of life.

Seneca talked about death so much, it feels almost a 300 page book, but it's just fire, just all of it is so good. And that's why we have this episode. Seneca believed, you know, that life is a journey toward death, but he also was saying that death is happening right now.

And even as you listen to this, this time, you spent you cannot get back. And so we have to practice death. We have to be aware of death. We can't let time slip by. And we have to even as Seneca finds we have to go out well.

It's the final act of our life and how are we going to do that. So today's episode is an excerpt from the audio book of that ancient wisdom series how to die translated by James Rom. Thank you to the folks at Tantor Media, hybrid audio, which are both a division of recorded books.

They were nice enough to share this with us so you can get a sample of it. If you want to check out the book, you can get an Amazon, on a book, anywhere books are sold. But really I love this series of books. I'm a big fan. I recommend reading the Stokes in multiple translations. And I've read all of Seneca's works, but to be able to go back and see James Rom, who's such a wise sort of student and and biographer of Seneca pick the things that really jumped out to him.

And I'm going to render them in his own translations. It's just a rare treat. Again, I recommend you listen to my interview with James, read dying every day and check this out. We're going to focus on the fear of death. We're going to focus on becoming part of the whole.

And there's just a lot here. Check this out. Seneca's how to die from Princeton University press translated by James Rom. Of course, the audio book brought to us from Tantor Media, who has it happens also published the audio books of a few of my books.

Anyways, let's get right into it.

2. Have No Fear

By the time Seneca began his magnum opus, the moral epistles in AD 63, he had been writing ethical treatises for more than a quarter of a century.

His earliest surviving works from the early 40s AD are consolations designed to offer comfort to friends or relations, including his own mother, who were mourning the death or absence of a loved one.

In the consolation to Marquia, from which the following passage and several others in this volume are taken, Seneca addresses a mother grieving for the loss of a teen aged son.

Consider that the dead are afflicted by no wills, and that those things that render the underworld a source of terror are mere fables.

No shadows loom over the dead, nor prisons, nor rivers blazing with fire, nor the waters of oblivion.

There are no trials, no defendants, no tyrants reigning a second time in that place of unchained freedom.

The poets have devised these things for sport, and have troubled our minds with empty terrors.

Death is the undoing of all our sorrows, an end beyond which our ills cannot go.

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