* It should be said that Byrd could have used a lesson in the Stoic virtue of justice and fairness earlier in life, for in the early 1940s he joined the Ku Klux Klan. Though maybe he did later get the message, repeatedly apologizing for this sin and actively supporting the efforts of the NAACP.
* His grandson, Sextus, would be a philosophy teacher of Marcus Aurelius.
* The Stoics were very early on equality between the sexes. Three centuries earlier, Cleanthes had written a book titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman.
* Modern Greece actually kept leftist political agitators in Gyara from 1948 to 1974. For all the passage of time, people don’t change that much.
* Given the dates of his exile, this is mostly likely Aristobulus of Chalcis, husband of Salome.
* The dye Zeno’s family traded in was made by slaves in backbreaking conditions. Seneca owned slaves, and so did Marcus Aurelius. Though to be fair, Epictetus himself, at least from his writings, was fine to openly discuss slavery and never questioned its fairness or morality.
* Thomas Jefferson would later incorporate Epictetus’s rule into the “Canon of Conduct” he wrote for his son, saying, “Take things always by their smooth handle.”
* Almost unbelievably, Justin’s bones would be discovered in a church safe in Baltimore in the 1960s, and finally buried in the 1980s.
* Gregory Hays, one of Marcus Aurelius’s best translators, writes, “If he had to be identified with a particular school, [Stoicism] is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would not have been ‘Stoicism’ but simply ‘philosophy.’”
* Lucius was the son of an earlier chosen heir of Hadrian who had died before he could succeed the emperor.
* For those times when he did fall short, Marcus had this advice: “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep on going back to it.”
* There is not room here to discuss the complicated and disappointing life of Commodus, but if you have seen the movie Gladiator, you have a surprisingly accurate picture of the man. Why was Commodus the way he was? No one can say, but the loss of so many brothers and sisters must explain some of it, and certainly much of Marcus and Faustina’s responsibility for it.
* Lentils were then seen as a food eaten only by poor people. Undoubtedly, Crates was attempting to challenge the snobbish identity of Zeno’s upper-class upbringing.
* One thirty-nine-line poem from Cleanthes survives in its entirety. You can see it at https://dailystoic.com/cleanthespoem/.