Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

It is obvious in retrospect that Marcus used the pages of his journal to calm himself, to quiet his active mind, to get to the place of apatheia (the absence of passions). The word galene—calmness or stillness—appears eight times in his writings. There are metaphors about rivers and the ocean, the stars and beautiful observations about nature. The process of sitting down, with a stylus and wax tablet or papyrus and ink, was deeply therapeutic for him. He would have loved to have spent all his time philosophizing, but that was not to be, so the few minutes he stole in his tent on campaign, or even in his seat in the Colosseum as the gladiators fought below, he savored as opportunities for reflection.

Also in these pages he was steeling himself against the blows that fate seemed to so regularly target him for. “Life is warfare and a journey far from home,” he writes. It was literally true. Some twelve years of his life would be spent at the empire’s northern border along the Danube River, fighting long, brutal wars. Dio Cassius describes the scene of Marcus returning to Rome after one long absence. As he addressed the people, he made a reference to how long he’d been forced to be away. “Eight!” the people cried lovingly. “Eight!” as they held up four fingers on each hand. He had been gone for eight years. The weight of this hit in the moment, and so too must have the adoration of the crowd, even though Marcus often told himself how worthless this was. As a token of his gratitude and beneficence, he would distribute to them eight hundred sesterces apiece, the largest gift from the emperor to the people ever given. He did not stop there. On his return, he forgave countless debts owed to the emperor’s private treasury, actually burning the documents in the Forum so they could not ever be recovered.

Marcus may have lived humbly, but no one could say he was not generous to others. In fact, his policies as emperor perfectly adhered to the principles he jotted down one day in his diary: “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”

How exhausting it must have been to be so self-disciplined. Yet there are no complaints in Meditations, no private lamentations or blame-shifting. When Marcus dreamt of escaping his burdens, thought of the beach or the mountains or time in his library with beloved books, he reminded himself that he didn’t need a vacation to recover. He didn’t need to travel to relax. “For nowhere can you find a more peaceful and less busy retreat than in your own soul,” he wrote. “Treat yourself often to this retreat and be renewed.”

As we said, Marcus’s early years were defined by loss, and so were his later ones. There would be one blow after another. In 149, he lost newborn twin boys. In 151, he lost his firstborn daughter, Domitia Faustina. In 152, another son, Tiberius Aelius Antoninus, died in infancy. That same year, Marcus’s sister Cornificia died. Shortly after, Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, died. In 158, another son, whose name is unknown, died. In 161, he lost his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius. In 165, another son, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus (twin brother of Commodus), died. In 169, he lost his son Verus, a sweet boy, during what was supposed to be routine surgery, whom he had hoped would rule alongside Commodus, as he had ruled with his own brother. That same year he lost that brother—his co-emperor—Lucius Verus. He would lose his wife of thirty-five years not long after.

Of Marcus’s boys, five died before he did. Three of his daughters as well. No parent should outlive their children. To lose eight of them? So young? It staggers the mind. “Unfair” does not even come close. It’s grotesque.

How easily this could shatter a person, how easily and understandably it might cause them to toss away everything they ever believed, to hate a world that could be so cruel. Yet somehow we have Marcus Aurelius writing, after all these twists of fate, a note that captures the essence of leadership and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.

—It’s unfortunate that this has happened.

No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.

Marcus held Antoninus, his adoptive father, up as his example always. He was particularly inspired, he said, by “the way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance—without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.” “Accept it without arrogance,” Marcus would write later in Meditations about the ups and downs, the blessings and curses of life, “and let it go with indifference.”

Is there a better encapsulation of that idea of “preferred indifferents” that Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Aristo had argued about all those years ago?