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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoke,

365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steven Hanselman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis Relius,

Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

The Old Way is not always better. As Caesar and the Triumvirate tried to corrupt and change Rome's republic to accommodate their needs,

it was Cato who stood strong against them. Almost entirely alone, Cato resisted. He filibustered to block their laws.

As they offered in both the carrot and the stick, he rejected both, insisting on living by the Old Way as the ways of his ancestors.

It was a noble fight, just as there have been noble fights before and since by Patriots and pastors alike,

who sought to protect core values from a cascade of decadence.

In fact, you could argue that this is the core fight of Stoic philosophy,

the battle waged by Thracias and Musonius against Nero of Marcus against the decline and fall in his times.

And yet it is important that we don't overstate its importance or allow it to lead us astray.

It is ironic, for instance, that just as Cato fought for the Old Way's,

it was his own great grandfather, Cato the Elder, who tried to have the early Stoic philosophers thrown out of Rome two generations before for corrupting those same Old Way's.

Cato does look admirable fighting to resist the tyranny of Caesar, yet it's also undeniable that the liberty he was trying to protect consisted of even worse tyranny over Rome slaves.

We must be careful as we pursue this philosophy not to become reactionary conservatives and not to accept without question the status quo.

The founding fathers didn't compare to the royalists in colonial America.

It was the Stoic inspired George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who were overturning centuries of the Old Way.

Later, it would be a stain on the Percy family, those great southern Stoics, that they could not question the racist structures and beliefs of their long traditions.

There's no question that when we flash forward to the future that we will find ourselves looking back at our own recent present this way,

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