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. This doesn't make you weak.

We want our leaders to be strong.

We want our heroes to be tough.

We don't want them breaking down constantly.

We don't want them whining.

We certainly don't want them to be powerless over their emotions.

In fact, often when we call someone a good stoic, we are implying that they don't do these

things, that they have grown out or beyond such things, that they are paragons of that

virtue of discipline. Yet, as we've talked about recently, Marcus Aurelius would certainly fail that test.

We have multiple stories about him crying, like a surprising amount of stories about him crying.

Does that mean he was weak, that he was pathetic, that he was not in command of himself?

No, not at all. It means he was human. It also means he was pathetic, that he was not in command of himself? No, not at all. It means he was human.

It also means he wasn't repressed or all too worried about how he would look. Frank O'Connor,

the biographer of the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, would note that Ireland's great hero was not above or beyond tears.

If I had recorded all the occasions when he wept,

I should have given the impression that he was hysterical, O'Connor writes.

He wasn't.

...