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

by Donald J. Robertson

Plato said anyone seeking to understand human affairs should gaze down upon all earthly things this way, as though from a high watchtower.

The universe is a single living being, with a single body and a single consciousness. Every individual mind a tiny particle of one great mind. Each living creature like a limb or organ of one great body, working together, whether they realize it or not, to bring about events in accord with one great impulse. Everything in the universe so intricately woven together, forming a single fabric and chain of events. Whereas I once saw each fragmentary part and with some effort imagined the whole, my sight is now transformed. Having let go of fear and desire forever, I can see only the whole to which every part belongs, and this appears more real to me than anything else.

First we must follow the guidance of our own higher nature, submitting ourselves to reason’s dictates. Second, we must deal wisely and dispassionately with whatever universal Nature sends to be our fate, whether pleasure or pain, praise or censure, life or death.

To contemplate the unwavering purity and simplicity of the stars in this way is to cleanse our mind of earthly dross and set it free.

Extending itself, sunlight touches objects and illuminates them without being weakened or defiled. It rests where it falls, caressing objects and exposing their features, neither deflected like the wind nor absorbed like the rain. Indeed, the mind of the wise man is itself like a heavenly sphere radiating the purest sunlight. It falls gracefully upon things, illuminating them without becoming entangled or degraded by them. For what does not welcome the light condemns itself to darkness. In the mind of one who has been purified, though, nothing is veiled or hidden.

Reason adapts itself to any obstacle if it’s allowed to, finding the right virtue with which to respond.

We have been given a duty of sorts to take care of this paltry body with its unruly feelings, but only our intellect is genuinely our own.

And philosophy consists in this: for a man to preserve that inner genius or divine spark within him from violence and injuries, and above all from harmful pains or pleasures; 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. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this, their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common to them all, why should it be feared by any man? Is this not according to Nature? But nothing that is according to Nature can be evil.