Why wouldn’t you take advice from someone just because they’re an emperor? Why would their social status be more important than their intelligence or wisdom? The Stoics taught that we should judge people based on their character, not their position in life, and listen to them on that basis neither writing them off nor treating them as authority figures for arbitrary reasons. Also, you’ve got the poem you mention by Kipling back to front — it’s actually considered by most readers to be more obviously inspired by Stoicism (capital S), the Greek philosophy, not the modern concept of “stoicism” the stiff upper lip coping style. (Kipling had a horse named after Marcus Aurelius, incidentally.)
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