Today the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America. 157 years ago, two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and nearly ninety years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Union Army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery. “The people of Texas are informed that,” ordered a Union General, “in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

There’s no question—that military order deserves celebration. It asserted “absolute equality” and began the liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Marcus Aurelius would write in Meditations that his Stoic role models taught him to “conceive of a society of equal laws, governed by equality of statue and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.”

It’s as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson but it was a long way from Epictetus’ experience that’s for sure. This kind of freedom would have been something inconceivable to the early Stoics who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it. Like Jefferson’s writings, Marcus Aurelius’s passage was just that. An idea. Not a reality.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the critical distinction between words and deeds. “In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776,” he said, “but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere.” Or as the Latin expression goes, acta non verba. Deeds not words.

It’s wonderful to celebrate these principles from the Stoics and the Founders. It’s wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth. But we have to remember that beautiful language pales in comparison to beautiful acts. We have to turn these words, these ideas into deeds. We can’t just talk about them, we have to be about them. And not living up to them or doing something about them—as was the case with slavery in Rome and America—is ugly. Marcus knew this but fell short…damning himself with his own words in Meditations, that “you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also.”

Make sure you’re not guilty of the same.

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