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

by Donald J. Robertson

He tells himself to dye his mind with the wisdom of philosophical precepts handed down from his Stoic teachers. Marcus Aurelius, indeed, viewed himself as a Stoic first and an emperor second.

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.

Stoic ethics involves cultivating this natural affection toward other people in accord with virtues like justice, fairness, and kindness. Although this social dimension of Stoicism is often overlooked today, it’s one of the main themes

The Meditations. Marcus touches on topics such as the virtues of justice and kindness, natural affection, the brotherhood of man, and ethical cosmopolitanism on virtually every page.

Also, when people talk about being stoic or having a stiff upper lip, they often mean just suppressing their feelings, which is actually known to be quite unhealthy. So it’s important to be very clear that’s not what Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics recommended. Stoic philosophy teaches us instead to transform unhealthy emotions into healthy ones.

We do so by using reason to challenge the value judgments and other beliefs on which they’re based, much as we do in modern rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

For Stoics, this honesty and simplicity of language requires two main things: conciseness and objectivity.

Students of Stoicism benefited from the wisdom of their teachers by treating them both as models, whose behavior they sought to emulate, and mentors, to whose advice they could listen.

Epictetus likewise told his students repeatedly that they should not speak about philosophy lightly, like the Sophists, but rather show its fruits in their

very character and actions. In typically blunt fashion he told them that sheep don’t vomit up grass to show the shepherds how much they’ve eaten but rather digest their food inwardly and produce good wool and milk outwardly.5

Indeed, those who assume that they have the fewest flaws are often the ones most deeply flawed in the eyes of others. This is illustrated by one of Aesop’s fables, which says that each of us is born with two sacks suspended from our neck: one filled with the faults of others that hangs within our view and one hidden behind our back filled with our own faults. We see the flaws of others quite clearly, in other words, but we have a blind spot for our own.

We should therefore make the effort to acquire an older and wiser friend: one renowned for honesty and plain speaking, who has mastered the same passions with which we need help, who can properly identify our vices and tell us frankly where we’re going astray

in life. What Galen is describing sounds somewhat like the relationship between a modern-day counselor or psychotherapist and their client. However, a better comparison would probably be with the mentoring or “sponsorship” provided by recovering drug or alcohol addicts to those who are in recovery and struggling with similar habits—the help of a more experienced fellow patient, as Seneca puts it.

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.

He says that we should imagine someone asking “What’s going on right now in your mind?” without warning and that we should be able to answer truthfully without feeling the need to blush. Marcus says he wants his soul to be naked and simple, more visible even than the body that surrounds it. Elsewhere he goes even further and, like a Cynic, says we should never crave anything in life that requires walls or curtains.

If we wish to improve ourselves, Galen says that we must never relax our vigilance, not even for a single hour. How on earth do we do that? He explains that Zeno of Citium taught that “we should act carefully in all things—just as if we were going to answer for it to our teachers shortly thereafter.”16 That’s a rather clever mind trick that turns Stoic mentoring into a kind of mindfulness practice. Imagining that we’re being observed helps us to pay more attention to our own character and behavior. A Stoic-in-training, like the young Marcus, would have been advised always to exercise self-awareness by monitoring his own thoughts, actions, and feelings, perhaps as if his mentor, Rusticus, were continually observing him.

life, you can still envision that you’re being observed by a wise and supportive friend. If you read about Marcus Aurelius enough, for instance, you may experiment by imagining that he’s your companion as you perform some challenging task or

face a difficult situation. How would you behave differently just knowing he was by your side? What do you think he might say about your behavior? If he could read your mind, how would he comment on your thoughts and feelings? You can pick your

own mentor, of course, but you g...

Over the years, with more experience, we should develop more self-awareness and become able to

spot our own errors without needing the help of a mentor. Moreover, we gradually learn to weaken passions such as anger through disciplined practice and checking their expression at an early stage. Doing this frequently will eventually make us less prone to experiencing such feelings in the first place.

At one point, Marcus seems to be describing the long-term goals of the Stoic therapy process he went through with Rusticus. He says that in the mind of one who has been chastened and thoroughly purified there is no festering sore beneath the surface, and nothing that would not bear examination or would hide from the light.

He likewise tells himself on awakening that he is rising to fulfill his potential for wisdom and not just to be a puppet of bodily sensations, swayed by pleasant feelings or turned aside by discomfort.

Everything in Stoicism ultimately refers back to the goal of grasping the true nature of the good and living accordingly.

The Stoics believed that entertainment, sex, food, and even alcohol have their place in life—they’re neither good nor bad in themselves. However, when pursued excessively, they can

become unhealthy. So the wise man sets reasonable limits on his desires, and he exercises the virtue of moderation: “Nothing in excess.” When doing what feels pleasurable becomes more important than doing what’s actually good for us or our loved ones, though, that’s a recipe for disaster. There’s a world of difference between healthy pleasures and unhealthy ones.

The Stoics emphasize gratitude, but they also accept that there’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure in healthy experiences, as long as it’s not carried to excess.

Sometimes, though, not doing something, the very act of overcoming a bad habit, might be considered a virtue, something to be valued for its own sake. 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.

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.

Although he was in poor health, Epicurus didn’t complain or dwell on his symptoms. In fact, he used his illness as an opportunity to converse in a dispassionate manner about how the mind can remain contented while the body suffers terrible pain and discomfort.

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.

“Pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting, if you keep its limits in mind and do not add to it through your own imagination.”

Everyday tolerance of minor physical discomforts can help us build lasting psychological resilience, in other words. You could call this a form of stress inoculation: you learn to build up resistance to a bigger problem by voluntarily exposing yourself repeatedly to something similar, albeit in smaller doses or a milder form.

We should keep our ruling faculty undisturbed by external things, including bodily sensations of pain and pleasure.

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.

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.

Indeed, 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.

Marcus consistently reminds himself to view pain and pleasure as belonging to the parts of the body where they’re located—in other words, to think of the smallness of the sensation in contrast with the expansiveness of his observing consciousness.

Therapists today help their clients objectify pain in this way by attributing an arbitrary shape or color to it, such as a black circle. This technique, called “physicalizing” the feeling, can help you picture it in your mind’s eye, from a detached perspective, at a particular location in the body.

Viewing things as changeable, like a flowing river, can help weaken our emotional attachment to them.

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.

The paradox of accepting discomfort is that it often leads to less suffering. 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.

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.

When we have a reason to endure something, it becomes easier. As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

The burden of physical pain or illness is light when we look at it objectively, without “drawing concentric circles” around it, which multiply our suffering by adding layers of fear and worry.

We say “reserve clause,” incidentally, because our expectations are reserved for what is within our sphere of control.

Marcus uses the analogy of a blazing fire to describe the wise man acting with the reserve clause. Imagine a fire so intense that its flames naturally consume everything cast upon them. Likewise, the mind of the Sage, acting with the reserve clause, adapts itself, without hesitation, to whatever befalls him.

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.

Marcus returns, in particular, to the analogy of a mountain retreat several times. He reminds himself that it makes no difference where he is or what he’s doing; the time left for him in life is short, and he should therefore learn to “live as though on a mountaintop,” regardless of his circumstances. In fact, everything that troubles us here is just as it would be on a hilltop, by the seashore, or anywhere else—what matters is how we choose to view it.10