This is a film about stoicism and why you need more of it in your life, because, as people seldom tell you, but we will quietly.
Stoicism was a philosophy that flourished for four hundred and eighty years in ancient Greece and Rome and was popular with everyone from slaves to the aristocracy because, unlike so much philosophy, it was helpful, helpful when we panic, want to give up, despair, and rage at existence.
We still honor this philosophy whenever we think of someone as brave and, without perhaps quite knowing why, call them stoic.
There are two great philosophers of Stoicism.
The first is the Roman writer and tutor to Nero, Seneca.
He lived between AD four and AD sixty-five.
That's right, tutor to Nero, the infamous dictator who slept with his own mother, raped young boys, and, just because he felt like it, asked his old tutor, Seneca, to commit suicide in front of his own family.
And our other guide to Stoicism is the kind and magnanimous Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, AD one two one to one eighty, who was forced to spend most of his reign on the edges of the empire fighting off invincible Germanic hordes, but found time to write one of the greatest works of philosophy, the Meditations, in his tent at night.
There are two problems Stoicism can help us with in particular.
The first is anxiety.
