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.

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This is freedom. Epictetus would have shuddered at the cliche that knowledge is power,

especially if he heard it uttered by some aristocrat or wealthy Roman, which sadly far too many philosophers have been. Born into slavery,

Epictetus spent 30 years in bondage and walked with a limp for the rest of his life,

courtesy of a sadistic owner. Having known real powerlessness, he would not have been glib

about language. He would not have been glib about power

or privilege. But that is not to say he did not believe deep in his soul in the power of wisdom.

At the time in Rome, many people believed that only freedmen could be educated. In fact,

Epectita said, it was the opposite. Only the educated

were free. Wisdom, then, is freedom. Someone who doesn't know what's what is a slave to impulses,

ignorance, and illusions, even if they possess incredible worldly power and wealth. Epictetus saw this daily

in the moral disorder of Nero's court, where his master served as a high-ranking secretary.

There were many things he could not legally do, but he directed his own education within those

limits, and in the process, freed himself from the self-imposed slavery he saw

in the ambitious millionaires and schemers around him. The things he learned, the wisdom he

acquired, no one could take this away from him, was the one thing that was exclusively his,

and indeed it was the most priceless and powerful thing in the world.

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