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

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind.

What Marcus was using this writing for, then, is for the true intended purpose of Stoicism—for getting better, for preparing himself for what life had in store. In Book Two, he opens by noting that the people he will meet in the course of the upcoming day will be surly and rude and selfish and stupid. Was this to excuse himself from good behavior? Or to justify despair? No, Marcus wrote, “no one can implicate me in ugliness,” nor could they hurt him or make him angry. He had to love people—the people. He had to be ready . . . and be good.

Indeed, one of the most common themes in Marcus’s writings was his commitment to serving others, that notion of sympatheia and a duty to act for the common good, first advanced by Zeno but carried on by Chrysippus and Posidonius in the centuries since. The phrase “common good” appears more than eighty times in Meditations, which for a Stoic makes sense but is surprising considering how nearly all of his predecessors viewed the purpose of the state. Yet here we have Marcus writing, “Whenever you have trouble getting up in the morning, remind yourself that you’ve been made by nature for the purpose of working with others.”

But he did have to remind himself of that regularly, as we all must, because it is so easy to forget.

Marcus used this private journal as a way to keep his ego in check. Fame, he wrote, was fleeting and empty. Applause and cheering were the clacking of tongues and the smacking of hands. What good was posthumous fame, he notes, when you’ll be dead and gone? And for that matter, when people in the future will be just as annoying and wrong about things as they are now?

“Words once in common use now sound archaic,” he wrote. “And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus . . . Scipio and Cato . . . Augustus . . . Hadrian and Antoninus and . . . Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend and soon oblivion covers it.” Alexander the Great and his mule driver, Marcus writes, both died and both ended up buried in the same cold ground. What good was fame or accomplishment? It didn’t hold a candle to character.

At Aquincum, the Roman camp near present-day Budapest where Marcus Aurelius visited the Second Legion and is believed to have written parts of Meditations, archaeologists have uncovered a larger-than-life limestone statue of an emperor in a toga. At first glance it looks like the head has been broken off. But a closer inspection reveals that the head was designed to be replaceable. The statue was part of a shrine for the cult of the emperor, and they wanted to be able to swap the head out each time a new one took the throne.

Knowing that he was only a placeholder helped Marcus prevent his position from going to his head. He built few monuments to himself. He didn’t mind criticism. He never abused his power.

Hadrian once got angry enough that he stabbed a secretary in the eye with a writing stylus. Of course, there were no consequences. Marcus could have taken advantage of this freedom to behave as he liked. Instead he kept his temper in check, refused to lash out at the people around him, even if they would have let him get away with it. “Why should we feel anger at the world,” he writes in Meditations, cribbing a line from a lost Euripides play, “as if the world would notice.”

It cannot be said, for all his dignity and poise, that Marcus was a perfect ruler. No leader is, nor would Marcus have expected he could be. He must be faulted for persecutions of the Christians under his reign—a stain on both him and Rusticus. Yet even here, he was considered by Tertullian, an early Christian writer who lived through the last years of his rule, to be a protector of Christians. Although he made some minor improvements in the lives of slaves, he was—like all the Stoics—incapable of questioning the institution entirely. For all his talk of being a “citizen of the world,” and his belief in a unity between all dwellers on this planet, he regarded large swaths of the world’s population as “barbarians” and fought and killed many of them. And of course, for a successor, he ultimately chose—or was forced to choose, as only the second emperor since Augustus to have a male heir—to pass the throne to his son Commodus, who turned out to be a deranged and flawed man.*

It’s unfair to compare Marcus only to his own writings, or to the impossibly high standards of his philosophy. Instead, he should also be looked at in the company of the other men (and women) who held supreme power, which Dio Cassius did well when he observed that “he ruled better than any others who had ever been in any position of power.”