Episode 2: How 21 Historic People Used Stoicism to Live a Better Life

<p>We think we are reading the Stoics. We are reading what survived — and what survived was chosen, copied, smuggled, edited and rescued by people who were almost always in serious trouble at the time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Every one of them changed it on the way.</p><p><br /></p><p>🎥 <a href="https://www.patreon.com/GrandpaHuxley/posts/custom-episode-3-169039152?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&amp;utm_source=copyLink&amp;utm_campaign=postshare_fan&amp;utm_content=web_share" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Commission your own custom Grandpa Huxley vid here.⁠</a>👋 Support me <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/033yM59LUygL9RZp8ndqeU?si=wg6Ehly-QlyEbpFlFYRNtA" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here on Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/61586192199061/support/?surface=permalink_subscribe_url&amp;entrypoint_surface=comet_permalink" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠on Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠</a>, or <a href="https://www.patreon.com/cw/GrandpaHuxley/membership" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠on Patreon⁠⁠</a></p><p>😴 <a href="https://getsom.com?ref=478" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Get Som Sleep 10% off here</a> or with code GRANDPAHUXLEY.</p><p><br /></p><p>A Roman senator who wrote a book about how a better man had died, and was then handed the same evening himself — and whose own account breaks off mid-sentence, because the only manuscript we have simply stops. A Flemish scholar who wrote the age's great book on never changing your mind, while changing his religion four times, and who rebuilt the philosophy in daylight and printed the receipts. An English earl who filled a notebook for exactly one reader — himself — and which nobody else read for a hundred and eighty-seven years. A daughter of the most famous Stoic who ever lived, of whom one paragraph survives, in an abridgment of an abridgment. A Lord Chancellor in the Tower who borrowed a single sentence of Seneca to steady another man's fear, and who had helped burn six men before he got there. A senator who left no book at all, and whose words reached us only because a former slave repeated them in a classroom in another country, a generation later. And a man in a cell in Pavia whose book became the one the next thousand years read.</p><p><br /></p><p>Two thousand years, seven pairs of hands, and a chain that is still being repaired — including this June, in Naples, by a machine that learned to see ink.</p><p><b