How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

by Donald J. Robertson

He used to say, “Money won’t bring you happiness,” and he really believed that. He showed me that there are more important things in life and that true wealth comes from being contented with whatever you have rather than desiring to have more and more.

If ancient philosophers were veritable warriors of the mind, their modern counterparts had become more like librarians of the mind, more interested in collating and organizing ideas than putting philosophy to work on a daily basis as a psychological practice.

Upon graduating, I began studying and training in psychotherapy because learning to help others seemed to offer me a route to self-improvement that I could relate to my studies in philosophy. It was a time of transition for the therapy field: Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic approaches were slowly giving way to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which has since become the dominant form of evidence-based practice in psychotherapy. CBT was closer to the philosophical practice I was looking for because it encourages us to apply reason to our emotions.

As a psychotherapist, I spotted immediately that most of the philosophical or spiritual exercises he identified could be compared to psychological exercises found in modern psychotherapy. It very soon became evident to me that Stoicism was, in fact, the school of ancient Western philosophy with the most explicitly therapeutic orientation and the largest armamentarium, or toolbox, of psychological techniques at its disposal.

Marcus Aurelius was the last famous Stoic of the ancient world. However, the story of Stoicism began almost five hundred years prior to his death, with a shipwreck.

For Stoics, virtue is still the only true good—the Cynics were right about that—but it’s also natural to prefer health to sickness, wealth to poverty, friends to enemies, and so on, within reasonable bounds. External advantages such as wealth may create more opportunities but in themselves they simply don’t have the kind of value that can ever define a good life.

The Stoics were prolific writers, but probably less than 1 percent of their writings survive today. The most influential texts we have today come from the three famous Roman Stoics of the Imperial era: Seneca’s various letters and essays, Epictetus’s Discourses and Handbook, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

In addition to believing that humans are essentially thinking creatures capable of reason, the Stoics also believed that human nature is inherently social. They started from the premise that under normal conditions we typically have a bond of “natural affection” toward our children.

the wise man extends moral consideration to all rational creatures and views them, in a sense, as his brothers and sisters. That’s why the Stoics described their ideal as cosmopolitanism, or being “citizens of the universe”—a phrase attributed both to Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. Stoic ethics involves cultivating this natural affection toward other people in accord with virtues like justice, fairness, and kindness.

Another popular misconception today is that Stoics are unemotional. The ancient Stoics themselves consistently denied this, saying that their ideal was not to be like a man of iron or to have a heart of stone. In fact, they distinguished between three types of emotion: good, bad, and indifferent. They had names for many different types of good passion (eupatheiai), a term encompassing both desires and emotions,

Rhetoric is a form of entertainment, pleasant to hear; philosophy is a moral and psychological therapy, often painful to hear because it forces us to admit our own faults in order to remedy them—sometimes the truth hurts. Epictetus’s own teacher, the Stoic Musonius Rufus, used to tell his students, “If you have leisure to praise me, I am speaking to no purpose.” Hence, the philosopher’s school, said Epictetus, is a doctor’s clinic: you should not go there expecting pleasure but rather pain.

Marcus would have learned that the Stoics believed there was a relationship between the sincere love of wisdom and greater emotional resilience. Their philosophy contained within itself a moral and psychological therapy (therapeia) for minds troubled by anger, fear, sadness, and unhealthy desires. They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions).

To say that Apollonius taught Marcus Stoic philosophy is therefore also to say that he trained Marcus to develop mental resilience through an ancient form of psychological therapy and self-improvement sometimes described as the Stoic “therapy of the passions.” An important aspect of this training would have involved Apollonius showing Marcus how to maintain his equanimity by deliberately using language in the special therapeutic manner described by the Stoics.

people who confuse “Stoicism” with “stoicism” (i.e., having a stiff upper lip) often think that it’s about suppressing feelings like anxiety, which they view as bad, harmful, or shameful. That’s not only bad psychology, it’s also totally in conflict with Stoic philosophy, which teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent: neither good nor bad. What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.

This is important.

the Stoics consider lying a form of impiety—when a man lies, he alienates himself from Nature.

“Distancing” refers to the ability to view one’s own thoughts (or beliefs) as constructions of “reality” rather than as reality itself.

However, there are also many other cognitive distancing techniques used in modern CBT, such as these: • Writing down your thoughts concisely when they occur and viewing them on paper • Writing them on a whiteboard and looking at them “over there”—literally from a distance • Prefixing them with a phrase like “Right now, I notice that I am thinking…” • Referring to them in the third person, for example, “Donald is thinking…,” as if you’re studying the thoughts and beliefs of someone else

Important!

Evaluating in a detached manner the pros and cons of holding a certain opinion • Using a counter or a tally to monitor with detached curiosity the frequency of certain thoughts • Shifting perspective and imagining a range of alternative ways of looking at the same situation so that your initial viewpoint becomes less fixed and rigid. For example, “How might I feel about crashing my car if I were like Marcus Aurelius?” “If this happened to my daughter, how would I advise her to cope?” “How will I think about this, looking back on events, ten or twenty years from now?”

the Stoics had many specific techniques for anger management. One of them is to wait until our feelings have naturally abated and then calmly consider what someone wise would do in a similar situation. Marcus also learned from Rusticus how to be reconciled with others as soon as they were willing to make amends.

In typically blunt fashion he told them that sheep don’t vomit up grass to show the shepherds how much they’ve eaten but rather digest their food inwardly and produce good wool and milk outwardly.

If the real goal for Stoics is wisdom, then sometimes just blurting out the truth isn’t enough. We have to put more effort into communicating with others effectively.

Being observed can help us develop greater self-awareness and correct our behavior, especially if we’re in the presence of someone we admire, such as a trusted mentor. Even in the absence of your own Rusticus, however, just imagining that you’re being observed by someone wise and benevolent can potentially have similar benefits, especially if you pretend that your innermost thoughts and feelings are somehow visible to them.

Writing down your ideas about what makes another person admirable, mulling them over, and revising them gives you an opportunity to process them. With practice, you will be able to visualize the character traits you’re describing more easily.

In addition to asking ourselves what qualities the ideal wise person might have, we can ask what qualities we might hope to possess in the distant future. For instance, what sort of person would you hope to be after having trained

in Stoicism for ten or twenty years? At one point, Marcus seems to be describing the long-term goals of the Stoic therapy process he went through with Rusticus. He says that in the mind of one who has been chastened and thoroughly purified there is no festering sore beneath the surface, and nothing that would not bear examination or would hide from the light. There is no longer anything servile or phony about someone who has achieved this, he adds, and they are neither dependent on others nor alienated from them.25 Those are both therapy goals for Stoics and the goals of life.

Regarding the morning meditation, Galen says that as soon as you rise from bed and begin considering each of the tasks ahead, you should ask yourself two questions: 1. What would the consequences be if you acted as a slave to your passions? 2. How would your day differ if you acted more rationally, exhibiting wisdom and self-discipline?

You can ask yourself these three very simple questions: 1. What did you do badly? Did you allow yourself to be ruled by irrational fears or unhealthy desires? Did you act badly or allow yourself to indulge in irrational thoughts?

Evening Meditation

2. What did you do well? Did you make progress by acting wisely? Praise yourself and reinforce what you want to repeat. 3. What could you do differently? Did you omit any opportunities to exercise virtue or strength of character? How could you have handled things better?

This regimen will make you more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can also foster self-awareness by questioning yourself regularly throughout the day in the way the Stoics describe.

The Stoics employed the Socratic method of questioning, the elenchus, which exposes contradictions in the beliefs of the person being questioned—a bit like the cross-examination of a witness in a court of law.

This sort of Socratic questioning forms part of an approach called “values clarification,” which has been around since the 1970s but has recently gone through a resurgence of popularity among therapists and researchers.

What’s ultimately the most important thing in life to you? • What do you really want your life to stand for or represent? • What do you want to be remembered for after you’re dead? • What sort of person do you most want to be in life? • What sort of character do you want to have? • What would you want written on your tombstone?

Another useful values clarification technique for students of Stoicism involves making two short lists in side-by-side columns headed “Desired” and “Admired”: 1. Desired. The things you most desire for yourself in life 2. Admired. The qualities you find most praiseworthy and admirable in other people

The Stoics believed that entertainment, sex, food, and even alcohol have their place in life—they’re neither good nor bad in themselves. However, when pursued excessively, they can become unhealthy. So the wise man sets reasonable limits on his desires, and he exercises the virtue of moderation: “Nothing in excess.”

Just because Marcus saw the “pleasures” that ensnared Lucius as empty and superficial doesn’t mean there was no joy in his own life. We shouldn’t be fooled by the gravity of The Meditations, which consists of semiformal exercises, into thinking that the author had a gloomy personality. His private letters prove that Marcus was a good-humored and surprisingly affectionate man who spent his youth enjoying a wide variety of sports and hobbies. He liked painting, boxing, wrestling, running, fowling, and boar hunting, and the Historia Augusta adds that he was very skilled at playing various ball games.

There are two more key points about Stoic joy worth emphasizing: 1. The Stoics tended to view joy not as the goal of life, which is wisdom, but as a by-product of it, so they believed that trying to pursue it directly might lead us down the wrong path if it’s sought at the expense of wisdom. 2. Joy in the Stoic sense is fundamentally active rather than passive; it comes from perceiving the virtuous quality of our own deeds, the things we do, whereas bodily pleasures arise from experiences that happen to us, even if they’re a consequence of actions like eating, drinking, or having sex.

Marcus therefore says that it’s not in feelings but in actions that your supreme good resides.10 The wise man’s sense of delight comes from one thing alone: acting consistently in accord with virtue.11 Nevertheless, Marcus does elsewhere mention two additional sources of joy. Together these correspond with the three core relationships that Stoic ethics encompassed: our self, other people, and the world as a whole.

The Stoics emphasize gratitude, but they also accept that there’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure in healthy experiences, as long as it’s not carried to excess. As mentioned earlier, they certainly didn’t think that pleasurable experiences were a bad thing. Rather, pleasure, and its sources, is morally “indifferent,” neither good nor bad. In other words, the Stoics weren’t killjoys.

STEPS FOR CHANGING DESIRES So how do you get rid of unhealthy desires and learn to experience greater fulfillment in life, like the Stoics describe?

Nobody has ever had the words “I wish I’d watched more television” or “I wish I’d spent more time on Facebook” engraved on their tombstone. If these empty and passive pleasures provide no lasting sense of fulfillment or satisfaction, the Stoics would caution us against spending too much time on them.

So you should carefully evaluate your habits and desires in terms of the bigger picture: how much do these pursuits actually contribute to your long-term happiness or sense of fulfillment in life?

1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit.

1. Planning new activities that are consistent with your core values. 2. Contemplating the qualities you admire in other people. 3. Practicing gratitude for the things you already have in life.

ADD HEALTHIER SOURCES OF JOY

In addition to replacing unhealthy habits with more intrinsically valuable activities, you can schedule beneficial activities every day.

Contemplating the virtues of people who are close to you may have the added benefit of helping to improve your relationship with them. Also, how does thinking about the qualities you admire in others affect you, and how might you learn and benefit from this experience?

The wise man is grateful for the gifts life has given him, but he also reminds himself that they are merely on loan—everything changes and nothing lasts forever.

That’s how Stoics think about life in general: they aim to be grateful for external things without becoming overly attached to them.

remember that for Stoics ordinary pleasure and pain aren’t good or bad but merely indifferent. Their main concern is to avoid becoming hedonistic by placing too much value on physical pleasures, indulging in them, and craving them excessively.

Write down the long-term pros and cons of indulging in the habit versus overcoming it.