The Via Stoica Podcast — A Stoic Way of Life

An Epictetus quote about the way we judge events sits painted on a ceiling beam in Michel de Montaigne's library tower, and I went to see it in person. In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, recorded at a campsite in France the day after my visit, I share what stood out about the place and the line he chose to keep overhead.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. Montaigne was not a Stoic, yet he had dozens of sayings painted on his beams, some running left to right, others right to left or upside down, so he could read them from any angle while he paced around his study.

The quote from Epictetus says that things themselves do not disturb us, only the opinions we form about them. Montaigne tested that idea on himself, and one of his essays tells of a friend whose body failed him for no physical reason, only because his mind expected it to. We look at why a man who doubted most claims to certainty kept this one in view, how modern cognitive behavioral therapy grew from the same insight, and what changes when we separate an event from the story we add on top of it.

You do not need a tower full of maxims to try this, because you can pause, look at what actually happened, and ask which parts of your distress come from the facts and which come from the colour you added.

An interview with our guide at the tower will follow in a later episode.

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What does the Roman city of Carnuntum look like today, and where did Marcus Aurelius write part of the Meditations? In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, I walk through Carnuntum in Austria with Dr. Markus Wachter, managing director of the Museum of Carnuntum, to explore the ruins, the reconstructed Roman houses, and the story of a frontier city on the Danube.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. This conversation steps outside the texts and into the place where one of the great Stoic emperors lived and worked during the Marcomannic Wars.

Carnuntum began as a winter camp under Tiberius in 6 AD and grew into the capital of Upper Pannonia, with at least 50,000 inhabitants at its height. Dr. Wachter explains why the Romans chose this spot above the Danube, how the city developed, and why archaeologists have excavated only a small part of it. We visit the baths, which still heat with Roman techniques, walk through the homes of ordinary residents, and talk about the note in the Meditations that connects part of the work to Carnuntum.

Visit Carnuntum
Website: https://www.carnuntum.at/en
Address: Roman City Visitor Center, Hauptstraße 1A, 2404 Petronell-Carnuntum, Austria
Season: Carnuntum opens from mid-March to mid-November, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with longer summer hours. Check the website for the current dates before you plan your trip.
Good to know: The day ticket covers the Roman City Quarter and the Museum Carnuntinum. The amphitheaters and the Heidentor are free to visit.

Whether you plan to go or simply love Roman history, this episode invites you to see the ancient world as a place where people lived.

Aerial footage: © RSC

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What happens when philosophy stops being something you read about and becomes something you practice together? In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, recorded in Prague, I sit down with Justin Mainous, one of the driving forces behind the Agora Network, a community built almost entirely on Socratic dialogue.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. Justin's path to philosophy started with losing his faith in university and navigating real mental health struggles largely on his own. Teaching himself cognitive behavioral techniques eventually led him back to a name he half remembered, Epictetus, and from there into a philosophy of life he still practices today.

We talk about building a community around questions rather than answers, why Justin sees his role as a mirror rather than a teacher, and dialogic thinking, the idea that focused thought lasts only seconds alone but can stretch for hours in genuine conversation.

This is a warmer, more personal conversation than usual, and a good reminder that philosophy was never meant to be a solitary pursuit.

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In June 2026, a team of papyrologists and AI researchers achieved something once thought impossible: reading an entire ancient scroll, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, from beginning to end, without ever physically opening it.

In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, I'm joined by Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist of the Vesuvius Challenge and Associate Professor of Papyrology at the University of Naples Federico II, and Maria Chiara Robustelli, a member of the Vesuvius Challenge papyrology team and postdoctoral scholar at the same university, currently preparing a critical edition of a Herculaneum scroll on the Stoics.

We talk about how they each found their way into papyrology, what Pompeii and Herculaneum actually are and how differently they were buried by the eruption, the history of the Villa dei Papiri and its library, and how the Vesuvius Challenge used X-ray imaging and machine learning to virtually unwrap scrolls no one has been able to read in nearly two thousand years.

At the heart of the conversation is PHerc. 1667: a philosophical treatise on impulse, human nature, and practical wisdom, found in a library that's almost entirely Epicurean, except for this one Stoic text. Its final surviving column names Aristocreon, the nephew and student of Chrysippus, raising the genuine possibility that this could be connected to Chrysippus himself, one of the most influential Stoic philosophers whose own writing has otherwise been lost to history.

We close, as I do with most guests, by asking about their own personal philosophy of life.

Topics covered: the Vesuvius Challenge, virtual unwrapping, Herculaneum papyri, the Villa dei Papiri, Pompeii vs Herculaneum, Philodemus, Stoic philosophy, Chrysippus, papyrology, and what it means to recover a voice from the ancient world.

Learn more about the project:
🏺 The Vesuvius Challenge: scrollprize.org📜 The PHerc. 1667 announcement: scrollprize.org/firstscroll

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Most advice about habits is really about saving you time. This episode of the Via Stoica Podcast looks at a different kind of habit entirely, the one Epictetus considered the only one that actually matters.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. We all build habits to avoid the exhaustion of deciding everything from scratch every day, from what we eat to how we start our mornings. That kind of habit is useful and worth having. But it isn't the habit the Stoics were most concerned with.

Epictetus taught that the real work is training your response to impressions, not your morning routine. His method was simple and demanding: since bad habits form through repeatedly giving in to an impulse, you fight them the same way, by deliberately practicing the opposite, on purpose, again and again, until it becomes second nature. This episode also looks at how to tell whether a habit still genuinely fits you, or whether it's something you inherited without ever choosing it, and why a habit that breaks the moment your circumstances change was never built well in the first place.

Because the habit that actually shapes your character isn't the one that saves you five minutes each morning. It's the pause you train yourself to take before you react.

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On the Ides of March, 44 BC, sixty men took part in a single act: killing a tyrant. In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast we ask a question that still matters two thousand years later. Were all sixty acting virtuously, or were some of them doing the exact same thing for entirely different reasons?

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. The Stoics were clear that virtue never lives in the visible act itself. It lives in the judgment behind it, in what they called prohairesis, the reasoned choice that belongs to you and no one else.

Two people can do the identical thing, reach out to a friend, stay quiet in an argument, walk away from a fight, and only one of them is acting from genuine character. The other might be doing it for approval, out of fear, or to avoid feeling guilty. From the outside, both actions look exactly the same. Only the person doing them ever really knows which one they did. This episode also looks at a simple, practical question worth sitting with before any decision, big or small: would I still do this if no one else would ever know? And it explores why this isn't just a private matter, since a society built on the right actions for the wrong reasons rarely holds together for long.

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Does your legacy actually matter, and what if you left nothing behind at all? In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast we look honestly at why so many of us build our lives around being remembered, and what the Stoics actually thought about that impulse.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. Only twelve people have ever walked on the moon, and their footprints will likely outlast almost everything else humans have ever built, yet ask someone to name the seventh person to do it. That gap between permanence and memory says more about legacy than most of what gets written about it.

This episode looks at the strange case of Marcus Aurelius, whose private journal was never meant for publication, and yet two thousand years later it remains one of the most read books in the world. He could not have controlled that, could not have predicted it, and never got to witness it. His actual legacy came from doing the work in front of him, not from chasing how he would be remembered. We also look at what happens when people build a career around legacy directly, from famous musicians and actors whose personal choices ended up defining how they are remembered, to the quieter ways all of us attach our sense of worth to something that will outlast us.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth. You will not be there to see your legacy. So the only honest question left is what you do with today.

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Are you relevant enough, and relevant to whom exactly? In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast we look at why this question comes up so often during moments of change, and what Stoic philosophy actually says about the value we attach to being needed.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. Relevance always exists in relation to someone or something else, at a particular moment, which means it was never a fixed thing to hold onto in the first place.

Twelve people have ever walked on the moon, and their footprints will likely outlast almost everything else humans have built, yet ask someone to name the seventh person to do it. That gap between permanence and memory says a great deal about what we are really chasing when we chase relevance. The fear of becoming irrelevant is rarely about relevance itself. It is grief for something that mattered, a role that shifted, a relationship that changed shape, a chapter that ended without warning. This episode also looks at Hierocles and the Stoic idea of concentric circles, and why the people closest to you may deserve more of your attention than the audience you imagine is watching.

The question worth sitting with by the end is simple. What does relevance actually mean to you, and who do you really want to be relevant for.

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Family, friends, colleagues, and strangers on a screen all try to sway how you think and act. In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast we look honestly at how influencable we really are, and what it takes to trust your own judgment instead.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. If the previous episode was about what we put out into the world, this one is about what we let in, and how easily that shapes the direction of our lives.

Influence is not new, and it is not only found online. Family, teachers, partners, and friends have always had ways of nudging us toward what they believe is right, often with the best intentions and sometimes without either of us noticing. The moments that carry the most risk are rarely the ones that upset us. They are the ones that inspire and motivate us so strongly that we stop questioning them altogether. The Stoics called our capacity to choose our own judgments prohairesis, the one thing that always remains ours, no matter how loud or convincing the voices around us become.

This episode explores what it actually looks like to receive information without surrendering your direction to it, and why the pause before you are swept along matters more than the source of the pull itself.

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Do you really need to share that opinion? In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast we look at what drives the impulse to comment, react, and weigh in online, and what Stoic philosophy says about examining that impulse before we act on it.

Welcome to the Via Stoica Podcast, the podcast on Stoicism. This episode is not about whether you are allowed to have opinions. It is about what you do with them and why you feel the need to share them at all.

Social media rewards reaction. Every post, every event, every scroll seems to demand a response, and the algorithm feeds on the comments and replies that follow. Underneath that pressure sits something older than any platform, the quiet pull to be relevant, to be heard, to matter in the moment. The Stoics called the practice of pausing before adding judgment to an impression the discipline of assent, and it applies just as much to a reply typed in anger as it does to any other reaction. Most opinions shared online skip that step entirely.

This episode also looks at what changes when you start asking a harder question before you speak: what does this opinion actually reveal about you, your values, and what you are really seeking in that moment?

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viastoica.comYouTube: @viastoicaProduced by: Badmic.com