Spencer Claven is with us today. He is one of the editors of the Claremont Review of Books and the features editor of the American Mind.

He also hosts the Young Heretics podcast. the Claremont Review of Books, and the features editor of the American Mind.

He also hosts the Young Heretics Podcast.

I'm going to interrupt quickly.

How do people get to the Young Heritage's podcast, Spencer?

It's available wherever fine podcasts are sold, so Apple, Spotify, anywhere else that you get your podcasts. So today, he has a forward to a handy new edition from Regnery of writings by three Stoics, Marcus Aurelius,

Epictetus, and Seneca.

That is our topic for the next 30 minutes.

Welcome, Mr. Clavin.

It's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

This volume also contains actually an introduction by Russell Kirk, who says that the Stoics

gave the more thoughtful Romans at the time a sane version of freedom and civic order, in spite of all the decadence

going around them, and the spiritual collapse. Spencer, is that where we are today?

It's certainly close. I mean, once you start drawing comparisons between the kind of environment in which Stoicism most flourished and our moment, there's really more and more there, the closer you look in.

In my foreword, I start out by talking about the Hellenistic era, which is when Stoicism got its start, started to come into prominence. And that, like

ours, was a time of political fracture, inability to reach a cultural consensus. There had been

a sort of heyday in Athens not long before when it felt as if perhaps this was the intellectual

center of the world and maybe even was going to attain some kind of political dominance

over the Mediterranean. That fell apart in the Peloponnesian War and at the same time,

so did the unity of philosophy that really had kind of started to take shape from first through

Socrates and then Plato and Aristotle. There's kind of this through line and then there's this

splintering of the world that's really nicely mirrored between both people's philosophy and the

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