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

by Donald J. Robertson

Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives. However, for Socrates and the Stoics, a good death didn’t so much mean a pleasant or peaceful death as one faced with wisdom and virtue. Knowing that not everyone sees a certain situation as catastrophic should make us more aware that the “awfulness” of it derives from our own thinking, our value judgments, and our way of responding rather than the thing itself. Awfulness (badness) is not a physical property. As Aristotle said, fire burns just the same in Greece as in Persia, but men’s judgments about what’s good or bad vary from one place to another. Marcus therefore compares our opinions to beams of sunlight shining on external objects, not unlike Beck’s analogy of looking at the world through tinted glasses. By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind.