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

Caesar. Octavian. Tiberius. Claudius. Nero. Trajan. Vespasian. Domitian.

The list of flawed and broken kings was long, stretching back not just past Rome but to the kings of Zeno and Cleanthes’s time. Just as the Christians had prayed for a savior, so too had the Stoics hoped that one day a leader cut from their own cloth would be born, one who could redeem the empire from decay and corruption.

This star, born April 26, 121, was named Marcus Catilius Severus Annius Verus, and for all impossible expectations and responsibilities, he would manage, to paraphrase his great admirer Matthew Arnold, to prove himself worthy of all of it.

The early days of the boy who would become Marcus Aurelius were defined by both loss and promise. His father, Verus, died when he was three. He was raised by both his grandfathers, who doted on him, and who clearly showed him off at court. Even at an early age, he developed a reputation for honesty. The emperor Hadrian, who would have known young Marcus through his early academic accomplishments, sensing his potential, began to keep an eye on him. His nickname for Marcus, whom he liked to go hunting with, was “Verissimus”—a play on his name Verus—the truest one.

What could it have been that Hadrian first noticed? What could have given him the sense that the boy might be destined for great things? Marcus was clearly smart, from a good family, handsome, hardworking. But there would have been plenty of that in Rome, and there have been plenty of “true” teenagers. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good heads of state.

By the time Marcus was ten or eleven, he had already taken to philosophy, dressing the part in humble, rough clothing and living with sober and restrained habits, even sleeping on the ground to toughen himself up. Marcus would write later about the character traits he tried to define himself by, which he called “epithets for yourself.” They were “Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.” Hadrian, who never had a son and had begun to think about choosing a successor (just as he had been selected himself by the heirless emperor Trajan), must have sensed the commitment to those ideas in Marcus from boyhood on. He must have seen, as they hunted wild boar together, some combination of courage and calmness, compassion and firmness. He must have seen something in his soul that Marcus likely could not even see himself, because by Marcus’s seventeenth birthday, Hadrian had begun planning something extraordinary.

He was going to make Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome.

We don’t know much about Hadrian’s stated reasons, but we know about the plan he settled on. On February 25, 138, Hadrian adopted an able and trustworthy fifty-year-old administrator named Antoninus Pius on the condition that he in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius. Tutors were selected. A course of successive offices laid out. Even after Marcus became a member of the imperial family, we’re told, he still went to the residences of his philosophy teachers for instruction, though he could have just as easily demanded they come to him. He continued to live as if his means and his status had not irrevocably improved.

By the time Hadrian died a few months later, destiny was set. Marcus Aurelius was to be groomed for a position that only fifteen people had ever held in Rome—he was to wear the purple, he was to be made Caesar.

It was not an altogether dissimilar path to the one that Nero’s mother had charted for her boy. Would the results be different?

Unlike most princes, Marcus did not yearn for power. We’re told that when he learned he had officially been adopted by Hadrian, he was greatly saddened rather than overjoyed. Perhaps that’s because he would have rather been a writer or a philosopher. There was an earnestness to his reticence. One ancient historian notes that Marcus was dismayed at having to leave his mother’s house for the royal palace. When asked by someone why he was downcast about such an incredible bounty of fortune, he listed all the evil things that kings had done.

Reservations are not the same thing as cowardice. The most confident leaders—the best ones—often are worried that they won’t do a good enough job. They go into the job knowing it will not be an easy one. But they do proceed. And Marcus, around this time, would dream a dream that he had shoulders made of ivory. To him it was a sign: He could do this.

At age nineteen, Marcus Aurelius was consul, the highest office in the land. At age twenty-four, he held it again. In 161, at age forty, he was made emperor. The same position held by Nero and Domitian and Vespasian and so many other monsters.