Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

They will shove this in your face.

He had to compromise from the start.

Seneca had no love for emperors, but Nero was his way back from exile, his chance to be at the center of things once again, having been unjustly

exiled by Claudius in 41 AD. So Seneca swallowed some of his true feelings to advise and to teach

Nero, and how did the emperor reward him for this commitment?

By shoving the moral compromise in Seneca's face constantly.

Seneca had to watch as Nero fixed the Olympics so he could award himself the prize.

He had to help Nero give a speech after Nero killed his own mother. He stood aside as

members of the ruling class were forced onto the stage, humiliated in performance, even sent into

the arena to fight wild beasts. It's a problem as old as time. Just ask Plato, who found himself

in the same position with the tyrant in his time.

Those that first ask us to bend our principles a little will ultimately return to ask for more and more.

They will ultimately require us to contort ourselves into utterly unrecognizable positions.

We think we're being pragmatic. In actuality,

we're being humiliated. Moral compromise is never a single act. Creates a precedent than another

and another. As James Rom shows in dying every day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, we have some

signed copies at the painted porch, and in Plato and the tyrant, and in his interviews on the Daily Stoic, this is how good

men and women end up being trapped. Not all at once, but step by step. And actually, James

Rom's book on Seneca was a book that changed my life. I read it

during the sort of fall of American Apparel, and it opened my eyes to some of my own moral

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