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Fall asleep to the complete Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the Roman world, and he spent his nights writing private notes to himself about how little any of it mattered. The Meditations, composed in Greek during military campaigns on the Danube frontier, was never intended for publication. It is a philosophical journal, a record of one man’s attempt to hold himself to the demands of Stoic virtue while governing an empire in crisis.

This three-hour episode presents Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy as a serious philosophical system, not a collection of motivational quotes. We trace his life from education under the finest teachers in Rome through frontier warfare and the devastation of the Antonine Plague. We explore the full Stoic system he inherited: its physics, its epistemology, and its ethics, which declared virtue the only genuine good and everything else indifferent.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

(0:00:00) The Emperor Who Wrote to Himself

(0:16:27) The Frontier and the Plague

(0:32:53) The Stoic Inheritance

(0:48:33) The Universe as a Living Whole

(1:03:32) Virtue as the Only Good

(1:18:07) Impressions, Assent, and Perception

(1:32:58) Death, Impermanence, and the View from Above

(1:48:44) Anger, Grief, and the Stoic Passions

(2:04:40) The Social Animal and Duty to Others

(2:20:02) What Remains

Books Mentioned:

Meditations: A New Translation, Gregory Hays: https://amzn.to/4rkl8j0

The Inner Citadel: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Pierre Hadot: https://amzn.to/4buiPpV

Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, Epictetus (Robin Hard): https://amzn.to/4sQe7ZN

Marcus Aurelius: A Biography, Anthony Birley: https://amzn.to/47xMhZN

The Therapy of Desire, Martha C. Nussbaum: https://amzn.to/46NPSml

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.

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