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

by Donald J. Robertson

When people are really struggling, they focus on their inability to cope and the feeling that the problem is spiraling out of control: “I just can’t bear this any longer!” This is a form of catastrophizing: focusing too much on the worst-case scenario and feeling overwhelmed. However, Epicurus meant that by focusing instead on the limits of your pain, whether in terms of duration or severity, you can develop a mind-set that’s more oriented toward coping and less overwhelmed by worry or negative emotions about your condition.

Marcus adds a Stoic twist to Epicurus’s saying. “Pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting, if you keep its limits in mind and do not add to it through your own imagination.”13

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.

Disease is an impediment to our body, he tells them, but not to our freedom of will unless we make it so.

pain and illness several times in the Discourses. Like Epicurus before him, he believed that complaining and chattering too much about our problems just makes them worse, and, more importantly, it harms our character. Marcus agreed that collective whining is bad for the soul: “No joining others in their wailing, no violent emotion.”16

“It’s not events that upset us but our judgments about events.”17

Even if the body, the closest companion of the mind, is “cut or burned, or festers or decays,” we can preserve our ruling faculty in a peaceful state as long as we don’t judge bodily sensations as being intrinsically good or bad.18 Marcus also calls this being “indifferent to indifferent things.”19 There’s a particularly important passage where he spells out the subtleties of Stoic psychology in this regard.20 We should keep our ruling faculty undisturbed by external things, including bodily sensations of pain and pleasure. He says this means not allowing it to unite with them but rather drawing a line around the mind, marking its boundaries, with bodily sensations on the other side, as if viewed from a distance—over there. On the other hand, when we allow ourselves to make strong value judgments about external sensations such as pain, we merge our minds with them and lose ourselves in the experience of suffering.

He stresses that you should not try to suppress the sensations, because they are natural, and you should not assign judgments to them as good or bad, helpful or harmful.

For Marcus, what matters is that we stop looking at pain and illness through the lens of harm. Those judgments originate within us. They are projected outward onto bodily sensations and other external events. It’s important to remember that whether we view something as helpful or harmful depends entirely upon our goals. Most people take for granted assumptions they have about their goals in life, so much so that they are rarely aware of them.

The Stoics want us to go through a radical upheaval in our underlying values so that our supreme goal is to live with wisdom and its accompanying virtues. They want us to treat physical pain and injuries with indifference. In fact, these misfortunes can even provide an opportunity for us to exercise greater wisdom and strength of character. Marcus tells himself: Do away with the judgment, and the notion “I have been harmed” is done away with; do away with that notion, and the harm itself is gone.21

It’s natural and reasonable for us to prefer health to sickness. Physical health provides us with more opportunity to exercise our will and influence external events in life. In itself, health is not really good or bad. It’s more like an opportunity. A foolish person may squander the advantages good health provides by indulging in his vices. A wise and good person, by contrast, may use both health and illness as opportunities to exercise virtue.

If we can learn to withhold our judgment that pain is terrible or harmful, then we can strip away its horrific mask, and it no longer appears so monstrous to us.22 We’re just left with the banal observation that our flesh is being stimulated “roughly,” as Epictetus liked to put it. It’s just a sensation. Through our judgment that it is intrinsically bad, unbearable, or catastrophic, though, we escalate the mere sensation of bodily pain into the inner turmoil of emotional suffering.

Ironically, you don’t need to try to suppress or resist unpleasant feelings as long as you abandon the belief that they are bad. If you accept them with indifference, then they do you no harm.

When your conscious mind, your ruling faculty, invests too much importance in bodily sensations, it becomes “fused and blended” with them, and it is pulled around by the body like a puppet on strings.

Epictetus stated this very succinctly: “For death or pain is not fearsome, but rather the fear of pain or death.”25

Marcus notes that the power of events to afflict us is greatly diminished if we set aside thoughts of the past and future and focus only on the present moment, the here and now, in isolation.

“view from above,” which involves picturing your current situation from high above, as part of the whole of life on Earth, or even the whole of time and space. One strategy divides events up into smaller parts, and the other imagines the whole of existence and an event’s minuscule place within it. Both strategies can help us view external events, such as pain and illness, with greater indifference.28

Think of the pain in your body as if it’s the barking of an angry dog; don’t start barking along with the dog by groaning about your own pain. It’s always within your power to consider the sensation as belonging to the body and limited to a specific location.

Stoic metaphor of the dog following the cart. A dog tethered to a moving cart can either pull on his leash and be roughly dragged along or accept his fate and run along smoothly beside the cart.

Pain becomes more painful when we struggle against it, but the burden is often lightened, paradoxically, if we can accept the sensation and relax into it or even welcome it. Struggling to suppress, control, or eliminate unpleasant feelings adds another layer to our misery and frequently backfires by making the original problem worse.

Marcus actually imagines Nature herself as a physician, like Asclepius, the god of medicine, prescribing hardships to him as if they were painful remedies.33 To take Nature’s medicine properly, we must accept our fate and respond virtuously, with courage and self-discipline, thereby improving our character. So Marcus sees voluntarily accepting hardship as a psychotherapy of the passions. We must swallow the bitter pills of Fate and accept painful feelings and other unpleasant symptoms of illness when they befall us.

Nevertheless, you can choose whether to do so roughly, struggling and fighting against it, or smoothly, through calm acceptance. Most people find that accepting pain greatly diminishes the emotional suffering it causes. Struggling with pain, trying to suppress or avoid it, consumes your time and energy, limits your behavior, and stops you from getting on with other things—so acceptance can also improve your quality of life in this respect. Moreover, in some cases, accepting our bodily sensations can allow natural habituation to take place, so that we begin to notice our pain less, and painful sensations may even begin to diminish as a result.

health. People who strongly believe that unpleasant feelings are bad and try to suppress them from their minds often become more tense and preoccupied with the very feelings they’re trying to avoid, trapping themselves in a vicious cycle. For the Stoics, pain is “indifferent” and not bad.

If you bear a fever well, you have all that belongs to a man in a fever. What is it to bear a fever well? Not to blame God or man; not to be afflicted at that which happens, to expect death well and nobly, to do what must be done: when the physician comes in, not to be frightened at what he says; nor if he says, “you are doing well,” to be overjoyed.

“What resources do you have that might help you to cope better with pain?” For example, if we’re faced with severe pain, then we will find that Nature has equipped us with the potential for endurance, and if we get into the habit of exercising that virtue, then the painful sensations will no longer have mastery over us.37 Another useful way to approach pain is to ask ourselves how someone experiencing the same kind of pain or illness we’re facing might cope with it more admirably (modeling virtue). What would we praise other people for doing in the same situation? Consider then to what extent we can do the same by emulating those strengths or virtues.

“Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.”42

According to the Stoics, our initial reaction to pain or illness may be natural and reasonable, but amplifying or perpetuating our suffering by complaining about it over time is unnatural and unreasonable.

Marcus had learned how to suffer properly and thereby to suffer less,

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

The Stoic-minded archer’s true goal should be to fire his bow skillfully, insofar as doing so is within his power. Paradoxically, though, he’s indifferent to whether or not his arrow actually hits the target. He controls his aim but not the arrow’s flight. So he does the best he can and accepts whatever happens next. The target—perhaps an animal he’s hunting—could move unexpectedly.

Marcus makes it clear that his internal goal is to live with virtue, particularly wisdom and justice, but his external aim, his preferred outcome, is the common welfare of mankind (not just of his Roman subjects, incidentally). Although the outcome is ultimately indifferent to Stoics, it’s precisely the action of pursuing the common good that constitutes the virtue of justice. Indeed, whether you succeed or fail in your attempts to benefit others, you may still be perfectly virtuous as long as your efforts are sincere. It’s your intentions that count, both morally and psychologically. Nevertheless, you must aim them at an appropriate outcome. For instance, acting in accord with justice means preferring to achieve, Fate willing, an external outcome that is both fair and beneficial for humankind.

The wise man, in other words, desires to act virtuously with wisdom and justice in the social sphere, insofar as he’s practically able to do so. He simultaneously accepts, though, that the outcome of his actions is not under his direct control. There’s no guarantee that he’ll succeed in benefiting his fellow citizens, but he does his best anyway. In a sense, the Stoic gets to have his cake and eat it: to retain his emotional detachment while nevertheless taking action in the world.

Nothing is entirely under your control, except your own volition.

Stoics treat their own judgments and actions as the only thing truly good or bad.

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 Stoics defined fear as the expectation that something bad is going to happen,

Fear is essentially a future-focused emotion, so it’s natural that we should counter it by addressing our thoughts concerning the future. Inoculating ourselves against stress and anxiety through the Stoic premeditation of adversity is one of the most useful techniques for building general emotional resilience, which is what psychologists call the long-term ability to endure stressful situations without becoming overwhelmed by them.

two concise but fundamental Stoic principles:11 1. Everything that we see is changing and will soon be gone, and we should bear in mind how many things have already changed over time, like the waters of streams flowing ceaselessly past—an idea that we can call the contemplation of impermanence. 2. External things cannot touch the soul, but our disturbances all arise from within. Marcus means that things don’t upset us, but our value judgments about them do. However, we can regain our composure by separating our values from external events using the strategy we’ve called cognitive distancing.

The universe is change: life is opinion.

COGNITIVE DISTANCING FOR ANXIETY

DECATASTROPHIZING AND THE CONTEMPLATION OF IMPERMANENCE

words, you can help yourself develop a philosophical attitude toward adversity by asking, “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?”

anger is a form of desire: “a desire for revenge on one who seems to have done an injustice inappropriately,” according to Diogenes Laertius.

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.

Socrates was the first to call the idea that death is terrible a mask to frighten small children.

Fear of death does us more harm than death itself because it turns us into cowards, whereas death merely returns us to Nature. The wise and good enjoy life, without a doubt, but nevertheless are unafraid of dying. Surely we are never fully alive as long as we fear the end? Indeed, to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave.

To practice death in advance is to practice freedom and to prepare oneself to let go of life gracefully.

Each stage of man has its own ending or demise—childhood, adolescence, prime, and old age.

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.