Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Freedom. Ambition. Diet. Frustration. Exercise. Anxiety. Grief. These are concerns we recognize as central to the shape and scope of contemporary American life, especially life in the Bay Area. At times they seem so overwhelming as to be unique to our present moment—but they are not. In fact, much of ancient philosophy was committed to addressing and alleviating them. Ancient Athens and imperial Rome were in many ways quite similar to 21st century America. Antiquity was a world that included slaves and immigrants, plutocrats and exiles, political strife and crushing poverty. Beginning in the 4th century B.C., philosophers began to develop teachings and schools that addressed the freedom life promised and the constraints under which it unfolded. The names of two of these schools—the Stoics and the Epicureans—have so endured as to have entered the common lexicon. Along the way, however, they have lost much of their original force: We now tend to equate Stoicism with a kind of John Wayne-inflected, flat-bellied