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

Later, when due to the ravages of the plague and those endless wars, Rome’s treasury was exhausted, and Marcus Aurelius was once again faced with a choice of doing things the easy way or the hard way. He could have levied high taxes, he could have looted the provinces, he could have kicked the can down the road, running up bills his successors would have to deal with. Instead, Dio Cassius tells us, Marcus “took all the imperial ornaments to the Forum and sold them for gold. When the barbarian uprising had been put down, he returned the purchase price to those who voluntarily brought back the imperial possessions, but used no compulsion in the case of those who were unwilling to do so.” Even though as emperor he technically had unfettered control over Rome’s budget, he never acted as such. “As for us,” he once said to the Senate about his family, “we are so far from possessing anything of our own that even the house in which we live is yours.”

Finally, toward the end of his life, when Avidius Cassius, his most trusted general, turned on him, attempting a coup, Marcus Aurelius was faced with another test of all the things he believed when it came to honor, honesty, compassion, generosity, and dignity. He had every right to be angry.

Incredibly, Marcus decided the attempted coup was an opportunity. They could, he said to his soldiers, go out and “settle this affair well and show to all mankind there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.” It was a chance “to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.” An assassin would soon enough take down Avidius, hoping almost certainly to impress himself to Marcus, and in the process revealing just how different a plane Marcus Aurelius was operating on. As Dio Cassius writes, Marcus “was so greatly grieved at the death of Cassius that he could not bring himself even to look at the severed head of his enemy, but before the murderers drew near gave orders that it should be buried.” He proceeded to treat each of Avidius’s collaborators with leniency, including several senators who had actively endorsed this attempted coup. “I implore you, the senate, to keep my reign unstained by the blood of any senator,” Marcus later appealed to those who wanted vengeance on his behalf. “May it never happen.”

His dictum in life and in leadership was simple and straightforward: “Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” No better expression or embodiment of Stoicism is found in his line (and his living of that line) than: “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.”

Yet there is, in studying Marcus’s life, an impression that he was somehow different, made of special stock that made his many difficult decisions easier. The common perception of Stoicism only compounds this—that somehow the Stoics were beyond pain, beyond material desire, beyond bodily desires.

But Marcus would not have accepted this explanation, for it sells short the training and the struggle he experienced as he worked to get better. “Alone of the emperors,” the historian Herodian would write of Marcus Aurelius, “he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.”

And underneath this learning and character, he was still a human being.

We know that Marcus Aurelius was brought to tears like one, that he felt the same pain and losses and frustrations that everyone feels. We’re told quite vividly by the Historia Augusta that Marcus wept when he was told that his favorite tutor had passed away. We know that he cried one day in court, when he was overseeing a case and the attorney mentioned the countless souls who perished in the plague still ravaging Rome.

We can imagine Marcus cried many other times. This was a man who was betrayed by one of his most trusted generals. This was a man who one day lost his wife of thirty-five years. This was a man who lost eight children, including all but one of his sons.

Marcus didn’t weep because he was weak. He didn’t weep because he was un-Stoic. He cried because he was human. Because these very painful experiences made him sad. “Neither philosophy nor empire,” Antoninus said sympathetically as he let his son sob, “takes away natural feeling.”

So Marcus Aurelius must have lost his temper on occasion, or he never would have had cause to write in his Meditations—which was never intended for publication—about the need to keep it under control. We know that he lusted, we know that he feared, we know that he fantasized about his rivals disappearing.