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

by Donald J. Robertson

Wisdom therefore consists in grasping external things objectively, as indifferent in this regard. Sometimes the Stoics describe this as staying with our initial impression of things before we impose value judgments. Epictetus gives many examples, such as when someone’s ship is lost at sea, we should say only “the ship is lost” and not add value judgments or complaints like “Why me? This is awful!”26 When someone bathes rather hastily, we should not react with disgust or even imply that he washed himself badly, but say only that he bathed quickly. When someone drinks a lot of wine, we should not say that he has done something terrible, only that he drank a lot of wine.27 Marcus follows Epictetus’s guidance when he says, for instance, that he should tell himself someone has insulted him in a matter-of-fact way, but not add the value judgment that it has done him any harm.28 If you stick with the facts and don’t unnecessarily extrapolate from them, you will put paid to many anxieties in life.

For instance, you can help yourself gain cognitive distance just by speaking to (“apostrophizing”) your thoughts and feelings, saying something like, “You are just a feeling and not really the thing you claim to represent,” as Epictetus in the Handbook advised his students to do.

When you strongly judge something to be good or bad, you also commit yourself to saying that you want to obtain or avoid it. But if something is outside your control, then it’s simply irrational to demand that you should obtain or avoid it. It’s a contradiction to believe both that you must do something and also that it’s not within your power to do so.

What’s required first is a more general openness to criticism: we should give everyone we meet permission to tell us what our faults are, according to Galen, and resolve not to be angry with any of them.

Marcus also talks about the importance of breaking things down into their components and reflecting on each part in isolation. The idea is that when we analyze something in terms of its elements and focus on each in turn, asking ourselves whether it alone is enough to overwhelm us, the whole experience will tend to seem more bearable.

In other words, do not respond any further to the feelings of desire. You can certainly come back to those feelings later if you need to. Take a time-out instead of acting on the desire.

One of the techniques Marcus employs most frequently in The Meditations is to ask himself what virtue or resource Nature has given him to cope with a particular situation.

“I am not angry with you,” he says to the painful feeling, because he does not perceive it as bad or harmful. It enters the mind in the age-old manner, through sensation, a natural physiological process that humans share with animals. 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.

He says, for example, that we should ask of each present difficulty, “What is there in this that is unbearable or beyond endurance?”

Diogenes the Cynic reputedly taught that we should treat painful sensations like wild dogs. They will bite and tear at our heels the more we try to flee in panic but will often back down if we have the courage to turn and face them calmly.

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

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.

We don’t control our initial reaction, perhaps, but we do control how we respond to it: it’s not what happens first that matters but what you do next.

Throughout The Meditations, Marcus frequently expresses this in another way, by reminding himself to leave the wrong with the wrongdoer: “Does another do me wrong? That’s his business, not mine.” He who does wrong does wrong against himself; he who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he harms only himself, he says. The wrongdoer damages his own character; you shouldn’t join him in his misery by making the value judgment that he has offended and harmed you too.

Like Cato’s archer, a Stoic should aim at the target (of benefiting others) but be satisfied if he has acted with kindness, and willing to accept both success and failure with equanimity.

Indeed, to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave.