On the worth of comedy and tragedy

An Ancient Greek tragedy being performed in a grand open-air theater in ancient Athens, generated by DALL-E.

We tend to think of Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher-king, and in a sense he was, though the ancient Romans were allergic to the word “king” and preferred Imperator, which technically just meant supreme commander of the troops, the equivalent of a modern American President being hailed as “commander-in-chief.”

Emperors ever since the first one, Octavian Augustus, the adopted son of Julius C...