📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 153.

“A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.”
— Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1713)

In the brutal winter of 1777, the Continental Army was dying at Valley Forge.

Not in battle. In the cold, the hunger, the disease. Men with no shoes, no blankets, no reason left to believe the war could be won. Desertion was constant. The cause looked finished.

And in the middle of that, George Washington did something strange.

He had a play performed for his men.

The play was Cato—Joseph Addison’s tragedy about Cato the Younger, the Roman senator who stood against Caesar’s tyranny and would not bend. It was Washington’s favorite play. He quoted it throughout his life. And he chose that winter, of all winters, to put it before his freezing, starving soldiers—because he believed the play’s message was the very thing that might keep them in the field.

That message was Stoic virtue. [...]

---

🖇️ Stay Connected:

Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations

---

🦉 Additional Resources:

Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archive
Listen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts