We Are All Kings Now | Why We Can’t Stop Talking About The Odyssey
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
What does the phrase “We are all kings now” mean for personal responsibility?
We are all kings now. For most of human history, somebody else, a king, a lord, a tyrant, a chief, was in charge. In ancient Rome, that was the emperor. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He could do anything he wanted. No one could tell him what to do or not to do. This was not all fun and games, of course, since this not only presented him with incredible amounts of temptation, but also an enormous amount of responsibility and stress. He had to make a lot of decisions for both himself and for other people. As we've said many times, in light of the checks and balances, Marcus Aurelius had to turn to philosophy. He had to fight to be the person philosophy tried to make him, as he said in meditations.
That's a lot to ask of a person. That's a lot to put on a person. And this is ultimately what makes the decision that the founders made 250 years ago in America so radical. They were essentially putting that on every person. What the founders were attempting was an extraordinary historical break, a nation where people were free to be in charge of themselves and where the people were responsible for their own government. It's a republic, Benjamin Franklin famously said on the final day of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787. If you can keep it. The founders themselves were under no illusion about what they were asking. Such an experiment could only work if checked by private virtue. Without citizens willing to do the private work of getting command of themselves, their impulses, their emotions, their passions, their fears, their appetites, without this, freedom would collapse into chaos.
You are the king now. The republic is in your hands. Can you keep it?
Even 2000 years ago, people were missing the point of the Odyssey. That's an argument that Seneca makes. He's saying even the smartest scholars and the biggest fans of his time were missing the point. He said that people would get in these debates about where Odysseus got lost, about whether Penelope was faithful the whole time, whether Homer was the first of the great poet, whether Achilles was older than Patroclus. Seneca said none of this matters, not even a little bit. He said, I don't care where Odysseus wandered. He says, Homer isn't telling you about Odysseus' wandering. He's showing you how to stop wandering yourself. He says, the argument isn't about whether Penelope was pure. He says, teach me what purity actually means and how to live it.
Seneca is pushing back on all those pedantic, obnoxious English teachers, those classicists for whom the geography, the timeline, the trivia is what matters. But that isn't what matters, right? The story of the Odyssey is what it's doing to you right now while you're reading it. Odysseus isn't some guy who gets lost in the Mediterranean. He's you right now getting knocked off course by something you didn't see coming. The monsters in the Odyssey are not literal monsters. They are parts of yourself. They are things out in the world that you are fighting. The sirens are the temptations you are facing in your life, the distractions, the things that are pulling you off the path that matters, that you're supposed to be on.
The storms are setbacks. Ithaca is whatever you are trying to become, whatever destination you are trying to reach. Seneca is saying that memorizing the poem and breaking it down into little pieces isn't the point. The point is, what does it teach you? How does it change you? How does it make you braver? How does it make you craftier? How does it make you more cunning? How does it get you to face what you have been avoiding? How does it make you more loyal? How does it make you more determined? How does it make you a better host and a better guest? How is it pushing you to complete your own Odyssey? That's the question Seneca says we should be asking about the Odyssey. Not what happened to Odysseus, but what is this story asking of me and am I answering?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:14
2
What does the phrase “We are all kings now” mean for personal responsibility?
0:14–5:44
3
How did the founders expect private virtue to sustain a republic?
5:44–10:29
4
Why does Seneca say we’re missing the point of the Odyssey?
10:29–15:35
5
How can the Odyssey teach you to face your own temptations and storms?
15:35–24:21
6
How were Greek myths used as teaching tools in ancient education?
24:21–24:50
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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