The Daily Stoic
The Low Road Will Always Dog You | Why Marcus Aurelius Didn’t Become Nero
26 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What choice do we have when faced with difficult people?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The low road will always dog you. That passage from Marcus Aurelius about how the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way, do you know what he was actually talking about specifically?
It wasn't overcoming an injury or a layoff or financial collapse. It wasn't about a reversal on the battlefield. It was talking about difficult people. It was saying that frustrating, infuriating, thoughtless people They are opportunities.
When someone is a jerk to you, it's an opportunity to practice virtue and how you respond and not being a jerk back by forgiving them, by standing up for yourself, by empathizing with what they're going through. Of course, when someone is being difficult, you're tempted to give it right back. You're tempted to go, oh, this is how we're behaving these days.
This is what passes for acceptable behavior. But you shouldn't. On a recent episode of the podcast, we were talking with the novelist Maria Semple, who has this amazing book called Go Gentle, which is about a Stoic philosopher. She signed a bunch of copies. We have them in the Painted Porch. It was an Oprah Book Club pick.
One of the things she shared was a reminder that she relies on when she's dealing with difficult people.
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Chapter 2: How can difficult interactions be viewed as opportunities?
Let me play it for you real fast.
a quote that I think I made up that's one of my favorite quotes is the low road will always dog you. Like that basically the high road, you can go to sleep feeling good about yourself. The low road, you might 10 years from now being like walking down the street and going, why did I have to be like cutting to that person in that situation for no reason? And so I think just on a
practical level it makes sense to just be virtuous and be the person you want to be because then it's like not clogging up your brain with like regret and okay who's the person i want to be
Mark Stabilis actually reminds himself of this in Meditations, in addition to that famous passage. He says, the best revenge is to not be like that. He was saying that he had no choice about what was done to him, that somebody else took the low road, but he could choose how he responded. He could choose to take the high road. He could choose not to be consumed by anger or a desire.
He could choose not to be implicated in their ugliness, which is how he opens that famous passage in book two. He could choose to be the person that he wanted to be. Whenever someone does something to us, minor or major, we always have this choice. We can decide not to be like the people who did us wrong. We can choose the high road. And we should, because the low road always dogs you.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Maria Semple provide about dealing with challenges?
So I'll just say it's interesting what a cautionary tale Nero is. And it's true. He doesn't have a father. He has this overpowering mother. And he knows that he's sort of exempt from the rules, that he's, you know, different, special, you know, has all these privileges, of course it wasn't going to turn out well. We can say that.
We look at Nero's, the facts of Nero's life, even with Seneca's influence, and we're like, yeah, it was always going to go this way. That's what makes Marcus Aurelius so remarkable, right? It doesn't go well for... Seneca, doesn't go well for Commodus, Marcus Aurelius' son, why is it different for Marcus? That to me is the ultimate question, right?
Marcus does not become a Nero despite being born into privilege, being marked for power at a young age, being surrounded by status and ambition and flattery and all the temptations that deform and derange someone, right? That would stain them purple, as Marcus says in meditations. Somehow he gets the power and it doesn't break him. Weirdly, it makes him better.
And I wanted to talk to someone who might be able to help us answer what happened there. William O. Stevens is a philosopher, a professor, emeritus of philosophy at Crichton University. And he's one of the leading scholars on Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Stoic ethics. And he's written this great new biography of Marcus Aurelius. It's called Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher King.
And so in today's episode, which is going to be a short one, I asked him about Marcus's boyhood, the death of his father, what Hadrian might have seen in him, you know, how dangerous it can be for a young person to tell them or for them to believe they're destined for greatness, how not to be corrupted by those expectations. And, and, um,
You know, this remarkable life that's shaped by philosophy. You can grab copies of William's latest book, Marx's Realist Philosopher King, anywhere books are sold. And you can learn more about his work at williamostephens.com. And if you want to do a deep dive into meditations, we have a great guide on that as well. I'll link to that in the show notes.
I thought we could talk about Marcus's boyhood, which I find fascinating, right? Because on paper, and we have so many stories and myths about this. In fact, it's kind of every, it's every parent's nightmare. Like when you raise a kid amongst privilege and an expectation of power or success or wealth or access, Like, more often than not, it goes terribly wrong.
Certainly it goes wrong in, say, Nero's case or Prince Andrew's case. How does it go right in Marcus's case?
It's easy to speculate and hard to be confident about how one speculates. So let's contrast Marcus's boyhood with that of, say, Commodus, right? So the thing that jumps out to me about Marcus, of course, is that his biological father died when he was quite young. And that didn't make him an orphan because, you know, he still had his mother.
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Chapter 4: Why is Marcus Aurelius considered a remarkable figure?
He wasn't a philosopher. You know, we don't have like Seneca's letters, right? We don't have Seneca writing, you know, to Lucilius in Marcus's case. We don't have any of those texts. We just have the Frato correspondence. But yeah, during his lifetime, He didn't have time to write philosophical tracks. Seneca was in a much better position than he was.
And Epictetus, like Socrates, wasn't writing philosophy at all, so far as we can tell, right? It's Arian who took down Epictetus' discourses. So Marcus didn't have time to write treatises.
Well, it is interesting with Marcus, we so often go to that idea from Plato about being the philosopher king. But when I think of Marcus, I thought about this when I was reading your book, there's the line from Musonius Rufus, who said that every king should be a philosopher, but every philosopher should be a kingly person. And I think that's the interesting idea there that
it sort of works in two directions, that it's about having the ideas and then it's about having the character. And also, as you said, the presence, the gravitas, the seriousness, the ability to lead and the authority to lead that we seem to think like, oh, we just like our leaders to be a bit more philosophical.
But we'd also, I think, be better off if our philosophers had a bit more of that sort of practical seriousness and sense of duty and responsibility.
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