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

by Donald J. Robertson

Marcus Aurelius was known for his physical frailty, due to chronic health problems, but he was also known for his exceptional resilience.

Indeed, although he suffered from recurring health problems, he managed to live longer than most of his contemporaries.

The Meditations isn’t our only insight into Marcus’s thinking, though. In the early nineteenth century, the Italian scholar Angelo Mai uncovered a treasure trove of ancient letters between the Latin rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto and several other notable individuals, including his student Marcus Aurelius. We can’t date the individual letters precisely, but they appear to span the whole period of Marcus and Fronto’s friendship, until the latter’s death around 167 AD at the height of the Antonine Plague.

Their correspondence is remarkable for several reasons. For the first time, scholars could peek into Marcus’s private life and witness his true personality. Far from the popular caricature of a Stoic as someone coldly austere, Marcus shows remarkable warmth and affection toward Fronto and his family. His style of writing is casual and good-humored.

earlier in The Meditations, Marcus paraphrased the same quote from Epicurus as follows: “On pain: if it is unbearable, it carries us off, if it persists, it can be endured.”12 The point is that chronic pain beyond our ability to endure would have killed us, so the fact we’re still standing proves that we’re capable of enduring much worse. Although this can be hard for some people to accept, participants in my online courses who have suffered for many years with chronic pain have reported that this Epicurean maxim has been a great help to them,

Marcus meant that pain is tolerable if we remember that our attitude toward it is what really determines how upset we become. It’s not our pains or illnesses that upset us but our judgments about them, as the Stoics would put it. This is one of the main therapeutic tools in the armamentarium of Stoic pain management.

Marcus also noted that most other forms of physical discomfort can be dealt with in essentially the same manner. He compares coping with pain to coping with difficulty eating and drowsiness, two problems we know he suffered from personally. He also mentions oppressive heat,

When faced with any of these discomforts, Marcus would simply warn himself, “You are giving way to pain.”14 Then he’d apply the same coping skills, whether he was struggling in a blizzard along the Danube or suffering fatigue from riding for days from his base at Aquileia in northern Italy to the legionary fortr...

We’ve already introduced this Stoic technique, which I’ve called cognitive distancing. It requires learning to withhold value judgments from unpleasant feelings, viewing them as morally indifferent, neither good nor bad in themselves, and ultimately harmless. This takes practice, of course, and an understanding of the underlying concepts.

Therapists today help their clients objectify pain in this way by attributing an arbitrary shape or color to it, such as a black circle. This technique, called “physicalizing” the feeling, can help you picture it in your mind’s eye, from a detached perspective, at a particular location in the body. You might even think of yourself as looking at physical pain or another symptom of illness through a glass window, separating the body from the mind, or imagining the pain as temporarily outside of the body on the other side of the room.

In addition to viewing unpleasant sensations as limited spatially to the affected part of the body, Marcus frequently reminds himself to consider their duration and to view them as limited in both time and space. He employs this strategy with externals in general but particularly with painful sensations and symptoms of illness.

This approach is one of Marcus’s favorite strategies for encouraging an attitude of Stoic indifference. Viewing things as changeable, like a flowing river, can help weaken our emotional attachment to them. Sometimes he goes further and reminds himself of his own transience—his mortality. We will achieve indifference to painful feelings, he says, if we remember that the demands they place on our attention will only be for a limited time, because life is short and will soon be at an end.

for the Stoics, the supreme goal was to remain composed and exercise wisdom even in the face of great danger, whatever the outcome. Marcus tells himself to always remember when he starts to feel frustrated with events that “this is not a misfortune, but rather to bear it nobly is good fortune.”

One of the most important Stoic techniques that he employed was called acting “with a reserve clause” (hupexhairesis), a technical term that he mentions at least five times in The Meditations.

In essence, it means undertaking any action while calmly accepting that the outcome isn’t entirely under your control.

It implies that one is taking action while excluding something: assumptions regarding the eventual outcome, particularly any expectations of success. We say “reserve clause,” incidentally, because our expectations are reserved for what is within our sphere of control. We’re pursuing an external result “with the reservation” that the outcome is not entirely up to us. “Do what you must, let happen what may,” as the saying goes.

The technique of exposing yourself to stressful situations repeatedly in small doses so that you build up a more general resistance to emotional disturbance is known in behavioral psychology as “stress inoculation.” It’s like inoculating yourself against a virus, and it’s similar to what we’ve come to think of as resilience building. Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” The clearest example of this prospective meditation strategy in The Meditations comes when Marcus describes part of his morning routine—preparing himself for the day ahead by anticipating various obstacles.

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.8 It’s easy to see how this passage might relate to his life as emperor.

WORRY POSTPONEMENT

Great concept

The steps to follow in worry postponement build upon the general framework that should be familiar to you by now: 1. Self-monitoring: Be constantly on the lookout for early warning signs of worry, such as frowning or fidgeting in certain ways—this awareness alone will often derail the habit of worrying.

2. If you are unable to address your anxiety immediately using Stoic techniques, postpone thinking about it until your feelings have abated naturally, returning to the problem at a specified “worry time” of your choosing. 3. Let go of the thoughts without trying to actively suppress them—instead, just tell yourself you’re setting them aside temporarily to come back to them later at a specified time and place. Cognitive distancing techniques can be helpful in this regard. You can also write down a word or two on a piece of paper to remind yourself of the thing you’re worried about, then fold it up and put it in your pocket to address later.

6. Use cognitive distancing by telling yourself “It’s not things that upset me but my judgments about them.” You can also decatastrophize by describing the feared event in objective terms, without emotive language or value judgments. Remind yourself of its temporary nature by asking “What next?” and considering how things will move on over time.

The patience and gentleness Antoninus showed as a ruler were among the most important virtues Marcus learned. Indeed, Marcus was famous for remaining calm in the face of provocation. Nevertheless, he had to practice and train himself to overcome his feelings of anger.

With what are you discontented? The wickedness of men? Take this conclusion to heart, that rational creatures have been made for one another; that forbearance is part of justice; that wrongdoing is involuntary; and think how many before now, after passing their lives in implacable enmity, suspicion, hatred, and at daggers drawn with one another, have been laid out and burnt to ashes—think of this, I say, and at last stop your fretting.24

However, the strategy Marcus leans on most heavily when coping with anger is the first gift from Apollo and his Muses: he reminds himself to view others as his kinsmen, brothers, or sisters, and that Nature meant for people to work together. We should view even our enemies as part of our family. It’s our duty to learn how to live in harmony with them so that our life can go smoothly, even if they try to oppose us.

Cassius had earned a reputation for being cruel, changeable, and untrustworthy—and in the end his own men gave him the same callous treatment that he had shown them over the years. History proved that his authoritarian approach ultimately backfired. By contrast, Marcus was known for his constancy and sincerity, and when his legions in Cappadocia repaid him in kind with their steadfast loyalty, his victory was secured.

I once set my heart on my own little sparrows. I called them my chicks in their nest: thirteen boys and girls, given to me by Faustina. Now only Commodus and four of the girls are left, wearing grave faces and weeping for me. The rest were taken before their time, long ago now. At first I grieved terribly, but the Stoics taught me how to both love my children and endure when Nature reclaimed them.

Child mortality was very common even for the children of the most powerful man of Earth. It was only in the modern age with the creation and use of vaccines that the death of children stopped being common.

The wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.

Death comes knocking at the king’s palace and the beggar’s shack alike.

Alexander the Great and his mule driver both reduced to dust, made equals at last by death.

Asked why he wasn’t rejoicing at the annihilation of Carthage, great Scipio wept and prophesied that one day even Rome herself will fall. Every era of history teaches us the same lesson: nothing lasts forever.

The Stoics taught me to look death square in the eye, to tell myself with merciless honesty each day “I am a mortal,” all the while remaining in good cheer.

Fear of death does us more harm than death itself because it turns us into cowards, whereas death merely returns us to Nature.

death is nothing, the mere absence of experience. It’s no worse than sleep. Moreover, death is a release from all pain, a boundary beyond which our sufferings cannot go. It returns us to that state of peacefulness in which we lay before we were even born. I was dead for countless eons before my birth, and it did not vex me then. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care—as the Epicureans say.

Thanks be to the gods that I was encouraged to make a habit of picturing the whole cosmos thus, and contemplating the immensity of both time and space. I learned to set each particular thing in life against the whole substance of the universe in my mind’s eye and see it as far less than a fig seed, and measure it against the whole of time as nothing more than the turn of a screw. For what is impossible to see with mortal eyes is nevertheless possible to grasp with the intellect.

From this cosmic perspective, in truth, to rail against the universe in fury over all the troubles in history would be like weeping over a cut on my smallest finger.

what does not welcome the light condemns itself to darkness.

When we cut our ties to the past and the future and center ourselves in the present moment, we set our soul free from external things, leaving it to invest itself wholly in fulfilling its own nature.

never to do anything either without purpose, or falsely, or hypocritically, regardless of the actions or inaction of others; to contentedly embrace all things that happen to him, as coming from the same source from whom he came himself, and above all things, with humility and calm cheerfulness, to anticipate death as being nothing else but the dissolution of those elements of which every living being is composed.