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

by Donald J. Robertson

To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave.

The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly.

This is important, because people who confuse “Stoicism” with “stoicism” (i.e., having a stiff upper lip) often think that it’s about suppressing feelings like anxiety, which they view as bad, harmful, or shameful. That’s not only bad psychology, it’s also totally in conflict with Stoic philosophy, which teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent: neither good nor bad. What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.

It involves a “learning cycle” with a beginning, middle, and end, which then repeats each day. In the morning you prepare for the day ahead; throughout the day you try to live consistently in accord with your values; and in the evening you review your progress and prepare to repeat the cycle again the next day.

Wickedness can be had in abundance easily: smooth is the road and very nigh she dwells. But in front of virtue the gods immortal have put sweat: long and steep is the path to her and rough at first; but when you reach the top, then at length the road is easy, hard though it was.

The Greek word for joy (chara) is closely related to that for gratitude (charis).

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. Similar “divide-and-conquer” techniques are employed in modern cognitive therapy to overcome problematic desires and emotions. We may as well borrow the term used by the early twentieth-century psychotherapist Charles Baudouin, who was influenced by Stoicism, to describe this psychological technique: “depreciation by analysis.”16 That means breaking any problem down into small chunks that seem less emotionally powerful or overwhelming.

Epictetus told his Stoic students to imagine they’re guests at a banquet being handed a sharing plate, not greedily holding on to it and scoffing the lot but politely taking an appropriate share and then handing the rest along. That’s how Stoics think about life in general: they aim to be grateful for external things without becoming overly attached to them.

“One exaggerates, imagines, anticipates affliction,” wrote Seneca. For a long time, I have told my discouraged patients and have repeated to myself, “Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.”

Life is warfare and a sojourn in a foreign land. Our reputation after life is nothing but oblivion. What is it then that will guide man? One thing alone: philosophy, the love of wisdom. 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.