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

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

We owe it all to them.

What put it in motion?

What created it?

How did it happen that a man found himself holding

absolute power and not only wasn't corrupted by it, but stayed actively working on himself,

trying to get better, always? Marcus Aurelius, the man we experience in meditations, was a remarkable person,

a historical unicorn, an exception that proves the rule. Sure, we can credit stoicism and philosophy

for this, but the true source, the most essential influence in his life, something much earlier, something he was

exposed to in literally his earliest days. Donald Robertson, Marcus Aurelius' greatest biographer,

explained that the whole concept of writing the meditations is about following through

on this thing Marcus remembers his mother

saying when he was younger, which is to work on his character, to improve his mind and not just

his external behavior. Something his mother said to him when he was younger, one of the greatest

men to ever live, the most enduring

work of philosophy that history has ever seen, and it was his mother that inspired it.

In his own words and meditations, Marcus thanks his mother for her reverence for the divine,

her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong, he said, but even to conceive of doing

it and the simple way she lived. What a beautiful sentiment that is to think about today,

on Mother's Day. May we all be blessed with a mother like that, someone who loved us, who taught us, who

modeled for us what the good life was.

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