The Daily Stoic - Balancing Power As An Emperor | Donald Robertson PT 1

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

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or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. or Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics.

We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I remember very vividly reading meditations for the first time and going, wow, what is this? I want

to know everything about this. And so I think the first thing I, because I remember I bought The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt along with it, which is this amazing Edmund Morris biography of Theodore Roosevelt. And I don't think I knew that philosophy that could exist, and I didn't know that biographies that could exist. So after I read Marx's Realist, I thought I'd really love to read a biography of this guy, right? I'd seen the movie Gladiator. I know that's not real, but I want to read a biography of Mark Sturlus." And I couldn't find one. There really isn't any. There's some great biographical essays, which Gregory Hayes talks about in his intro to Meditations. There's some older books. There's some little profiles of him, but there's no great, singular biography of Mark Sturlus. And I had to wait almost 20 years for a singular biography of Marcus Aurelius. And I had to wait almost 20 years

for a great biography of Marcus Aurelius, which I just read my friend Donald Robertson's book, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, just came out from Yale University Press, and it's incredible. And I told him this when I read it, we immediately started carrying it in the store. I've written a bunch of daily Stoic emails about it.

It's just awesome. And I'm so happy that he did it. And I'm glad he did it so I don't have to do it. And I can tell you about it. It's a wonderful book. We ran an excerpt of it on the podcast a couple months back, but I asked if Donald would come out. He lives in Greece, so that was no easy trip,

but he was in the United States and he came by. We had a wonderful conversation about this sort of joint fascination of ours, this man who was the most powerful man in the world. And as Matthew Arnold said in one of those essays about Marcus, that he proved himself worthy of it. What does it take to do that? How does a person do that?

And no one is better to answer that question than Donald because not only is he a great writer but he's a great thinker about Stoke philosophy. He has another book which I also love called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, The Stoke Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, two books that I have enjoyed quite a bit. And anyways, I'll just get into this episode. He has a delightful accent. I always love hearing from him. And we had such an in-depth conversation that I wanted to split it up into this episode. He has a delightful accent. I always love hearing from him. And we had such an in-depth conversation that I wanted to split it up into two episodes. We spent about two hours

kicking things around. So here is part one of my conversation with the one and only Don Robertson. He has a great substack with I'll share you on. You can follow him on Twitter, Don J. Robertson, Instagram, Donald J. Robertson, and grab Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, the Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius from the Pay to Porch or anywhere books are sold. Well, I think you've done it because my view up until now is that there was not a great biography of Marcus Aurelius. I was always a bit disappointed they didn't talk more about his philosophy

and most of the other biographies. But like, I mean, Anthony Everett, who we were talking about earlier, he has a great biography of Nero, he has Hadrian, he has Augustus, there's great biographies of Julius Caesar and there's a million about Cleopatra. There's not been, it's a weird omission that such a fascinating figure does not have a definitive biography. – It's, well, there's a lot of biographies, but they're all not entirely, I always felt

there was something lacking. Frank MacLennan's is the most famous one. But that's what, like 50 years old? Yeah, and it's an odd book because it's got really long digressions in it. Like it's much longer than it needs to be, but also he's really negative about stoicism. And you can see people get kind of disappointed by that when they read it because they're mainly reading it because they're into stoicism. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's two great biographies of Seneca, the James Rahm and the Emily Wilson, but there really isn't, like not only, yeah, there's not even great sort of historical ones, but there isn't, there's a number of really good essays on Marcus Aurelius, like just incredible essays.

There's the Matthew Arnold one, is it Brann Blanchard has a great one? There's that Ernest Renan has one. There's like great, like they'll capture him in five to 10,000 words, like an extended essay. But like a full book length treatment of one of the most fascinating figures who ever lived seems a strange, you know, omission of history.

Yeah, I'm, I kind of, I got invited to write it as well. So it wasn't really something that I was kind of planning to do. Yeah. And so I wasn't entirely sure how it would turn out when I started it. But yeah, I, you know, I was interested in the psychological angle on it and, you know, the things that appealed to me about him. What are they? Well, like I was interested in how his philosophy helped him to cope with the problems he was

facing basically. I mean, in a way it's really simple, right? Same reason that most people today are interested in him. You know, that was what I tried. I wanted to know, I didn't want to know all the kind of menu shy about what it was like being a Roman Emperor and stuff like that. I wanted to know why did this guy write the meditations? How did it help Him? What were the problems that He faced? Basically, people are interested in Marx's release because they're looking for a role model, right? Yes. Essentially. And then I think they're disappointed maybe in some of the historical accounts of them because they don't get a role model from it. Yeah. Is it, is it, I've been raving about this biography, Anne Rowe wrote a biography of Pontius Pilate.

Oh, really? Yeah. I'll give it to you in the bookstore. And you wouldn't think that would be a person who you could write a great biography of because he's a villain, but two, because there's just not that much information about him. And I always wondered if that was the trick about Marcus Aurelius too, which is we know a lot about what Marcus Aurelius thought, but the historical record about him is relatively thin,

if only because he wasn't a villain. Yeah. You know, if he had been much worse, I wonder if we would know more about him. Definitely. Like, so in the surviving Roman histories, particularly in the Historia Augusta, you know, one of the challenges is that because Marcus is a good emperor and because he's very rational and he's very temperate, he's in a sense the least exciting character in his own story and the other characters that surround him,

particularly Hadrian and Lucius Verus and to some extent of Adius Cassius are much more colorful and larger than life because they do crazy, violent, self-indulgent things. And so everyone remembers that. And Marcus is at the centre of this, acting normally and being very reasonable. Well, I'm just thinking about this right now, because he talks about it in meditations. There's this repeated effort by Marcus to convince himself that he doesn't need to do great deeds, that he doesn't need to conquer foreign lands, that he doesn't need to worry about becoming famous,

that his posthumous legacy is worthless. And so he's just kind of present and trying to do a good and balanced, as you said, temperate job in very difficult circumstances. But history is written not just by the victors, but by the hungriest and the most legacy obsessed individuals. So if Marcus had seen his life as needing to be this

monument to his achievements that if he was Julius Caesar weeping at the foot of an Alexander the Great statue, lamenting the paucity of his accomplishments, that would have propelled him to go and do things, not just wage wars, but build temples. He wasn't trying to build this impressive resume that would resound through history. And then the result is that we don't know as much about him as we do about the desperate, bad, ego maniacal figures of history.

Yeah. And it helps that they're around him when I'm writing the biography, because then I can put him in a setting and describe like how he would be thinking about their behavior because he tells us in the meditations. So even if he's not doing these crazy colorful things, like the way I approached writing the biography was to look at his relationship with these more colorful characters in a little bit more detail and to do a little bit more research into Hadrian and Lucius Varius and Avidius Cassius so that I could talk a little bit

more about Marcus' social environment, if you like, and what I imagine he would be saying to himself based on the meditations. For example, you mentioned Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and that's a really good example because Marcus mentions them in the meditations, but only to say he doesn't particularly admire them or look at them as role models. He looks to philosophers more because of their spiritual or psychological achievements, like their moral achievements. Well, you, and you could argue this,

that Antoninus, who Marcus Aurelius thinks is like the greatest ever, ever, is there's basically nothing on Antoninus. I read one biography that was written in like the 1800s, I think, and it's pretty dense. Both of them are boring effectively. And because they're boring, they what's actually great about them

gets sort of thrown out with the bathwater. We just don't, because they weren't waging these wars of conquest or they weren't, you know, memorializing their greatness or ghost writing these memoirs, you know, design, like Julius Caesar, we know about Julius Caesar because he not only, you know, invades Gaul, but then he writes this book about it.

Cicero wasn't just content to be a great orator. He needed to write the first draft of history about what a great orator he was. And so, there's this kind of publication bias of history that favors the loudest, most aggrandizing individuals and then we snub the sort of quiet greatness. Yeah, that's definitely the case. I mean, Marcus is unusual. I mean, maybe we'd be much more interested in Antoninus Pius if he'd written a book like

The Meditations, you know? So you're right. He, it's like, it reminds me of that expression, no news is good news. Right? So Antoninus' reign was fantastic, the Senate thought, because nothing much happened. There weren't any major wars, like everything was really stable. And Marcus might have been remembered in the same way as a kind of two dimensional character if it wasn't for the fact that by chance we've got this amazing

window onto the soul of one of the most powerful men in history, which is, you know, it's almost mesmerizing to think about the fact that we get to peek. Yeah inside his mind Basically and see what he's thinking. Yeah, we have the innermost thoughts of like typically someone who is quiet and excuse the spotlight and Wants to focus on just being a good person and to first credit and all of these things, you know typically they're never even going to make it to a position that is so prominent that by definition you become famous. Like you're, and certainly today where these offices, you have to seek that office out and fight for it

and claw your way to the top. So Marcus is really this fluke of history in that, very rarely would the most powerful, important and famous person in the world get there by accident. And because Marcus gets there by accident, you know, we do have sort of a lone example of like what a good person in that job would feel like and do and be motivated by and think about. But there's not really that many other circumstances.

I've been writing about Harry Truman a lot. Harry Truman's like a regular guy that ends up president of the United States of America, kind of by these set of circumstances. And by the way, I've been looking for it. One of his biographers, Merle Miller, is talking to Truman about his love of ancient history.

And Truman goes back to his room and he brings back his copy of Meditations, which is covered in all these underlines and about the four virtues and all this stuff. And I've been trying lately to go like, well, where is this? I asked the Truman Library if it's there. I wanna know where this book is. That's awesome.

Because it would be cool to see. But there's not many examples like that because typically the people that end up as Caesar or general or insert prominent position, they didn't get there by accident. It was important. Marx really talks about the dangers of ambition and by definition to get those things you have to be very, very ambitious.

Well, actually you made me think of something that I would, sometimes when you're writing a biography you try and say things that are probably true historically. But then there's things that it's tempting to speculate about, right? And you think, I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I just kind of have a hunch. So, I have a hunch that Antoninus Pius was selected by Hadrian as emperor because the Senate told him, we want this guy as your successor and you've already made such a shambles of your previous. So, he appointed Lucius Verus, his father, first of all, and then that guy died

prematurely. And everybody seemed to have been panicking at that time about the succession. And then he picks this complete opposite character, like somebody who's the ideal emperor. The Senate seemed to largely adore him and see him as one of their own, like the perfect guy, safe pair of hands, perfect guy for the job. And unlikely, picking away for someone like Hadrian, I think he'd made a mess of things and the Senate had persuaded him, this is the guy that we want in power. So the reason that we get this relatively unambitious

ordinary guy is because something's gone wrong with the succession and people have stepped in and said, no, we need to kind of ground this again and put somebody in position who's trustworthy. And not just one of Hadrian's kind of crazy picks. Not a clone of Hadrian, but the opposite of Hadrian. Yeah, and I think somewhat akin

to where we are politically now, it's like he's supposed to do the equivalent of a single term. He's supposed to last only so long. And then he surprises everyone by being emperor for the next 20 years. So it's a second fluke in that Marcus gets a really long runway to train on the job instead of being thrown into it. Yeah, and that's unusual. So he's definitely,

I suppose in a sense you could say that Marcus really becomes, on the one hand, he seems unwilling to assume office. He sounds like he wanted to be more of a scholar, but he then becomes essentially a career politician, unwillingly. And not only that, I guess another thing when you're writing a biography is you notice little details that people tend to get slightly confused about or are slightly wrong. So we think about Marcus is becoming emperor when he assumes the title Augustus and he exceeds to the throne. But the position of Roman emperor is composed of multiple titles and powers. So it's not really exactly what we would think of today as an emperor. And many of those powers, some of those powers can be shared and they can be assumed at different times. Marcus gets most of those powers and titles 13 years earlier while he's still serving

as Caesar along. So he's almost like a co-emperor or a deputy emperor to Antoninus Pius for 13 years before he actually becomes fully-fledged emperor himself. And as soon as he does it, he appoints his own co-emperor. Well, I noticed that in the book. That's an interesting point that you made because, yeah, it feels totally unprecedented that Marcus would name Lucius Ferris, who's not really his stepbrother or brother. It's a very tenuous relationship that they have. they very easily could have been seen as rivals. You know, there's a stoic teacher who advises Octavian, you know, there cannot be too many Caesars and he kills what is actually,

you know, his blood relation. And so it feels very unprecedented that Marcus, the first thing that Marcus Rulis does with absolute power is he gives half of it away. But you're right, actually no, the precedent is he watched Antoninus do that with him for two decades. Yeah, absolutely. And he wants to, maybe he also wants to make sure

that when he eventually dies, this younger man has had plenty of experience to step into the position. Because Lucius is younger than him. Yeah. And actually in some ways, Lucius Verus, I think was perceived as, so the family trees of Roman aristocrats are like spaghetti junction, right? They're confusing. So Lucius Verus in some ways is kind of like Marcus's son. He says adoptive brother, but he's 10 years younger than him, but he marries Marcus's daughter. And Marcus also, when they become emperor, gives him the name Verus, which is Marcus's family name, which is something you would do when you adopt somebody as a son.

So he's kind of ambiguous. He's his brother, but he also looks somewhat like a son to him. And I think that kind of feeds into the perception of him as being a kind of a deputy co-emperor. It was clear that Marcus is the senior emperor and his name always come, Marcus's name always comes first on inscriptions. It was clear, although on paper they're both co-emperors that Marcus is the senior one and Lucius is his junior. But what it would remind Romans of this idea of having the co-emperor is that they have

two consuls in the Senate. When it was a republic, there was two heads of state. Yeah. And so the idea is that they could veto each other to prevent somewhat to prevent autocracy. Yeah. I'm not clear to what extent the co-emperors would have power to limit each other's power, but certainly I think the perception is that it's there to prevent It's probably just better for the soul that there's not one, but two. It's not good for anyone to be the most powerful person

in the world. That Cold War scholar saying there has to be a countervailing power. It's not good to have a unipolar world. You need two superpowers that, or ideally ideally more that sort of check each other or balance each other. It's not good to have the full weight of anything on someone's shoulders. I'm not even just talking about for good governance. I'm just saying like it's probably bad for you. Yeah.

Like it's better to be part of a team or a duo. Yeah. And Marcus seems clear about that in the meditations. It's obviously, it's a concern that he has about himself, but you can also, I mean, if you're doing a deep dive into interpreting someone's words, you could think, so these things that he says about himself being Caesarified, that must also apply to Lucius Verus. Sure, or Antoninus.

Yeah, Antoninus, right? The other people around him, he must have similar concerns about, but Lucius Verus seems like an unlikely pick because he wasn't particularly good in the role as far as we know. Marcus seems to have wanted him to deal with the military and to think that he was, the perception was that he was younger and he's into sports and stuff. He maybe had some kind of vague military connection. And so he thought, you can be my representative with military, but he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing that. That is, that is a, we'll balance all over, but I do, if Marcus has a flaw, it's, it's weirdly, it's his passivity and acceptance

of flawed people in rules that they are obviously unqualified for. Like there's something to be said about trying to get the best out of people, not expecting perfection of people, playing the hand you're dealt. But there is this kind of remarkable Resignation to

Well, let's hope it works out with this person and and there is fundamentally something kind of irresponsible about that To to willingly let someone who's unqualified or flawed or whatever Handle something upon which lives of many, many people depend. That's definitely one of the most puzzling things about him. You know, and I'm tempted to I feel like there's more to it than we can be aware of somehow. Like it seems like there's got to be more going on there. Definitely, like I think his biggest mistake was appointing Avidius Cassius as the governor of Syria because that could, should, looks like it would indeed

end, lead to a civil war. Basically, the beginning of a civil war. And it was obvious, like in retrospect, that that was a risk when he did that. The Romans had a policy against appointing somebody as a governor in their own place of birth. They didn't normally do that. In fact, even when they recruited foreign troops as auxiliary units, they would usually send them to the other side of the empire so that they wouldn't just rebel. Pete So, there's no conflicting loyalties? Paul Yeah, so there's no conflict of interest. And so, he appoints Ophiades Cassius as governor of Syria, which is where he was born. And he's clearly a guy of... He's very blue-blooded. He's a descendant of Herod the Great. He's a distant descendant

of Augustus. He's got all of, you know, he would definitely have been perceived as a potential monarch. And in the East, that was particularly dangerous. It was easy for someone to kind of get into a position of being a ruler like a king if they were in command of an army. And so it seems obvious that this guy is going to be threatening to break away and that's exactly what happens. So it's puzzling why Marcus, I think my only guess is that he felt he didn't have any choice somehow. The initial mistake was sending him there at all to be a general in command. The best that I can make out is his reasoning there was that he was a strict disciplinarian and he was,

he had the biggest reputation for that in the army. And the Syrian legions were so dissolute allegedly, if we can believe the history of Augusta, it kind of, you know, maybe exaggerates that a bit, but it says like these, these troops were in terrible shape, they were undisciplined. So he sends the most notorious disciplinarian in the army to go and try and sort them out. But as soon as he makes that decision, it's a slippery slope and he's bound to seize power and that's exactly what happens. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Francopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in

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And what's the psychology of a terrorist? Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts and access our bonus shorthand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple podcasts or the Wondry app. Yeah, it's a pattern in Marcus's life, right? There are these things that he didn't have a choice about. And those end up being catastrophic failures

a couple of times, Lucius Ferris being one, Vides Casius being one, Comedis being the final and most egregious of them. And if it happens enough times, I feel like it stops being... Like, it stops being something life is doing to you and something you are doing. And so, yeah, I wonder, I make up that,

this idea of tolerant with others, strict with yourself, that you gotta make it work, that when you're in the ring with someone and they gouge you, you don't take it personally. You just want, like there was fundamentally in him, I think an inability to make hard personnel decisions. And there's a kindness in that. Like, it's hard when you don't want to be the person that fires someone, you don't want to be the judge, jury, and executioner in some cases. I think Marcus struggles, I mean,

you could even argue the persecutions with the Christians that you talk about as being somewhat overstated. But there was, and maybe he's even using lusitosis as an excuse, an inability to go, hey, I'm the most powerful man in the world. If I'm not going to draw the line here, if anyone has power over this situation, it's me. And he seemed somewhat reluctant to do that. And a lot of his big, well, if it could have gone otherwise, moments in his life come down to kind of some version of that. Now, I think the difference that springs to mind

from a modern CEO would be that Marcus wouldn't just be sacking somebody or replacing them in a role. Like he'd probably, actually for most of these people we're talking about, he'd probably have to exile them or more likely have them killed. Yes. Yeah, you can't just politely tell your son he doesn't get to be the emperor. Yeah, you just hang out and, you know, like, wait wings for also. So people would have rallied around him probably and tried to use him, exploit him as a potential ruler, maybe to fragment the empire.

But in Avidius Cassius's case, that's what happened anyway. That happened. And then, and then that, you know, that strangely that ends. There's another thing I'd speculate about actually, I've maybe just touched on it a little bit in the book. There's one case, there's, I think it's the history of Augusta that says, Marcus was not as straightforward as people assume. And it kind of implies that he was more cunning. And he put on this kind of veneer of simplicity and straightforwardness and his dealings with other people. And I kind of wondered what that was alluding to. And I think it's possible that the story that we get is that Avidius Cassius was just bumped off by two of his senior officers. And then they put his head in a bag and just kind of leisurely stroll out

of Syria with this guy's emperors head in a sack to present it to Marcus. Nobody stops them which seems kind of completely implausible. Like actually, I think that it sounds- And it sets up the theatrics of Marcus. I can't see this is horrible. Don't have it. It is a really it seems like propaganda. And I can be sure but it certainly looks more like a coordinated coup that was organized to overthrow a video's cassis whether other people just did that. Because they knew that Marcus would look favorably on them and pardon them and so on or whether Marcus was involved in planning it perhaps, I don't know but certainly Marcus was

criticized for being too lenient to Avidius Cassius's family, particularly his daughter and son-in-law. And so it's tempting. It's a guy called Druncianus. And it's tempting. How would those guys get out of Syria with his head in a bag unless a general or whoever was now in power allowed them to do it? And it may have been his son-in-law and that might be why Marcus allowed him to retain most of his fortune and didn't prosecute him and so on. I think what you're pointing to is that

you can't be the emperor and be a kindly old man. There is fundamentally some Machiavellian aspect to it. I think of this all the time, like Warren Buffett presents himself as this nice frugal philosopher, but you don't become the richest man in the world without also being a shark. And I suspect that as much as Antoninus teaches Marcus

about being good and as much as Marcus strives not to be Caesarified and died purple, ultimately he's sitting there with a choice going, do I let a civil war go on, let hundreds of thousands of people die, let the empire be torn in half, or do I order a coordinated assassination on a person who is trying to overthrow my reign

and murder my family? At some point he probably gets, you know, he says, what if there's brambles in the path go around, you're not living in Plato's Republic. He probably does have to make the hard decisions that heads of state have to make. And I think you touch on one of the other motives that people are often unaware of in my experience,

which is, but the most historians, most classicists seem to be aware of when they're talking about Marcus, which is the big fear of the Senate in particular is civil war. Like more than any frontier war, cause you just send the legions to go and fight in Parthia or Germania. It's so far away, yeah.

Right, but if there's a civil war, like well, Julius Caesar, when he had his civil war, occupied Rome, and it was evacuated. It got right to the heart of the empire. And so the Senate are terrified of the empire fragmenting. The Romans have experienced many civil wars in the past, and they don't want that to happen again. And one of the main things that could cause that is if there are multiple rivals to the

throne. So there's a lot of pressure from the Senate to bump off, get rid of potential contenders for the throne. And so, you know, the real puzzle, for example, with Commodus is in a sense, why did Marcus choose to have so many children? Because he's then stuck having to choose one of them to be his successor and he doesn't know if he's gonna be any good or not unless he was just very pious and thought I trust the gods to give me a son that's gonna be a good... No, look, you raise another good point. That's kind of another thing where he's like, I hope it works out, you know, and that's when you're the leader,

you can't just hope it works out because other people bear the consequences of your leniency or your hopefulness or your whatever. And yeah, when you look at Marcus as a leader, there does seem to be a bit of, he certainly grows into the role, certainly learns that he has to make hard decisions and does, I think, a remarkable job, especially when you, what's that Biden

line about, don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to my predecessor. When you compare him to the people who came before and after him, he's an incredible emperor. But when you look at just his reign, it does feel like there are moments where firmness or harshness or more pragmatic decisions were required. I do think in the stoic history, there are similar examples. I talk a lot about that moment in Cato's life where Cato is approached by Pompey to make a marriage alliance. And he says, I will not be bought.

And what happens is Pompey aligns with Caesar instead and brings about the destruction of the Republic that Cato then dramatically and selflessly gives his life in martyrdom to. Like Cato might not have had to kill himself if he'd just been able to stomach a marriage alliance. To compromise more. Yeah. Now I think to evaluate what happens with Marcus and Commodus.

So we mentioned earlier that he's got this problem. People say, couldn't he just adopt a son? But then what's Commida going to do? Yeah. Something has to happen in a dark room. Yeah. He's going to die. It's a death sentence, basically. And the other thing I think we need to consider is who would be the alternative? So the other, we know, because he sees power. Vidius Cassius would be one of the main rivals. So what would the Roman Empire have been like if Marcus had appointed, adopted a Vidious Cassius would be one of the main rivals. So what would the Roman Empire have been like if Marcus had adopted a Viteous Cassius, say, and appointed him as his successor? Our sources perhaps aren't very reliable regarding his life, but they paint a picture of someone

who's much more of a military hawk, much more aggressive, you know, executing large numbers of enemy tribesmen, maybe committing genocide, you know, so it would have been a more violent reign, probably. That's the And no given, right? No guarantee. So you're essentially stuck with the impossible choice Do I bet on a stranger or do I hope that my son, like do I bet on my own flesh and blood and hope that I can make this a success? I mean, that's an impossible choice for a parent to make. Now, he did do something else. Like we're told there's a guy called Pompeianus who is Marcus's most senior general. Not only that, but Marcus has him marry his daughter Lucilla, who is kind of Augusta twice over, because she is the widow of Lucius Verus. So she was previously married to an emperor and she's the daughter of an

emperor. So Pompeianus is kind of overlooked sometimes, but first of all, he's his most senior military commander. And secondly, he's like a, you know, a hair's breadth away from being emperor in the sense that he's married to Lucilla. Sure. And he's with Marcus. He accompanies him all of the time, you know, in his military campaigns. We see him in sculpture depicted by Marcus's side, and we're told that Marcus invited him to become Caesar. We're also told that Marcus appointed him as a mentor to Commodus, like almost like a sort of godfather or something like that, or to supervise him and kind of keep him in line. But he refused,

he declined. Now we don't know why. So there's some report about him having failing eyesight later. So he may have had health problems. There's some comments about him being unpopular because he was too foreign. He was Syrian as well. And I think there would also be a rivalry with Ovidius Cassius. These are the two most senior generals. They both happen to be Syrian. One of them is equestrian. So he's from a lower class. He's not, he's been promoted like a number of people. Marcus operated a more meritocratic regime, partly because of the plague and the war. He lost a lot of nobles that were in senior positions

and he replaced them with people from slightly lower down the ladder. But that caused some friction with nobles like Avidius Cassius who must have thought, hang on a minute, you've essentially promoted this guy above me. And I'm related to Augustus, I'm a descendant of Eastern monarchy,

like this guy is nobody and he's married your daughter. It's obvious that you're positioning him to become some sort of potential successor. And so I think that's another thing that would have driven out of a kind of indignation, Avidius Cassius would have been driven to revolt. So it's puzzling, maybe Pompeianus thought it's going to cause civil war, I'm not going to be accepted as the ruler of Rome because I'm not.

Maybe like Marcus, he knew it was a terrible job. You know, I think I'm thinking about all these horrible decisions that you're talking about and these horrible moments that are, and when I read the story, maybe it's true or not, with it, Marcus, when he's told he's gonna be king, he breaks down in tears because he thinks of all the bad kings.

I think he's thinking of this, you know, as a student of history, he knew that it's a job nobody makes it out alive of, right? It's a job that works on your soul, that makes you, that's very far from the black and whiteness of virtue, and you're gonna have to make impossible moral decisions. And, you know, maybe that's why he wasn't attracted to it.

Probably would have made him a great emperor as Marcus did. But I suspect there's some truism in history that the people you, the worst people to have in power are the people who desperately want to be in power. And the best people are the people you really have to draft into it because the wanting it and the needing it and the thinking you deserve it is the most dangerous thing. Yeah, the kind of egotism and narcissism maybe that drives a lot of people to pursue power. There's another bit of trivia that might interest you about that, which is Marcus is usually

depicted with two generals by his side. Another one is Pertinax, who is a close friend of Pompeianus. And Pertinax succeeds Commodus as emperor. And he came from a much lower class. He's another example of Marcus's meritocracy because his father was actually a slave. So he's the son of a freed man in Roman society. So we have this extraordinary situation. You could even compare it to the American presidency in a sense of how much social mobility is there when the Roman Empire, maybe in a sense, does more. Because this guy, whose father was a slave, ends up becoming emperor,

but he only lasts a few months because the Praetorians turn on him and assassinate him, maybe because they've been corrupted by Commodus. But again, this guy, Pompeianus doesn't become emperor, but his sidekick ends up out of kind of desperation in a way because they need to replace Commodus with somebody. What you're saying though about, you know, where we could look...so this question about whether power corrupts and how Marcus might have perceived that. Marcus is basing a lot of his decisions on reading Epictetus, right? So let's pick up Epictetus, flick through it.

What might Epictetus say about this? Epictetus clearly thinks that power corrupts. He says, you can't ride two horses at the same time at one point, like you can't serve two masters. You have to decide whether you want to pursue a life of virtue or is your number one goal to be in politics. And he kind of, the way he phrases it, he says, basically, you're not going to be a very good politician.

Like if your number one goal, like, cause you're going to have to compromise sometimes and you're going to find yourself in situations where you're going to do, be doing things that aren't in accord with virtue. You're probably not going to last that long in the kind of cutthroat world of politics because there are other people competing with you who are willing to do anything to succeed. So he said, you know, if you want to be a philosopher, you need to be all in and make it a number one priority. Marcus is immersed in this stuff, like buying into it, reading it, whether we agree with it or not,

like that's what's got in his head. And then he finds himself in the position of emperor, like which Epictetus views as a poison chalice. Remember those stories and fables that would capture your imagination and you couldn't wait to see how they would unfold? And now when you read them as an adult you think some of these old tales could use a fresh spin. We have a perfect podcast to bring you the stories you remember, remix and reimagine for the kids in your life today. Join me, DJ Fu, and my trusty turntable, Baby Scratch, as we spin up new tales in the new kids and family podcast,

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in the Wondry app or Wondry Kids Plus in Apple Podcast. Once Upon a Beat. Maybe it's the American or the English understanding of slavery that I think skews our perception of Epictetus when we say he was a slave, right? Because we think they're working in a field somewhere, right? There's some laborer. Epictetus is a slave working for one of Nero's highest ranking ministers, secretaries, executives, right? And Epictetus wasn't out back, right? Epictetus was in the court of Nero. He would have seen probably even Seneca at work. He sees what is happening in the emperor's palace. And then later when he leaves, I mean, he basically teaches a generation of the sons of wealthy Romans, so he would have met

their parents. And then most famously, I mean, Hadrian drops in on one of his classes or he gets to meet Hadrian. So Epictetus was not just an astute thinker about the human condition, but has a ringside seat to power and what it does to people and how ambition degrades and corrupts. And so that's really reflected in his writing in a way that would have resonated to Marcus.

Well, I'm gonna speculate about something else that you've said, which is, what did Epictetus do as a slave? And you're right. You know, the lives of many slaves in the Roman Empire were possibly worse than the lives of slaves working in plantations. If you worked in a mine or something like, you know, your life expectancy was negligible and your quality of life was atrocious. But because the difference from the transatlantic slave trade was that in Greek and Roman society, people were capturing slaves from other competing civilizations.

So you might capture someone who's a school teacher or an engineer, right? And often teachers for that reason, like, and people that found high positions in government were former slaves because they spoke the language and were educated in the technology that was available and so on. So that, you know, and slaves had vastly different values in Greek and Roman society depending on the resume, essentially. And so Epictetus would be an expensive slave. And I think he mentions having written letters to Roman officials, if I remember rightly, in Greek.

And his owner was Nero's Greek secretary. So I suspect that Epictetus was some sort of scribe or something like that in the household of the emperor possibly, or in working for his Greek secretary. Yeah, I mean, Epictetus' master is the one who kills Nero, who's so close to Nero, when Nero wants to commit suicide, it's he who delivers the mortal blow. Well, I'll give you another bit of trivia about him. Epiphronotus is his name. I know the name. Don't even bother. But he's also implicated in Seneca's death because he's the guy that initially

notifies Nero that there's a Piso conspiracy against him that leads to this political purge that culminates in Seneca being executed. So Epictetus, you know, it's possibly he knew Seneca. He's very close to all this stuff going on. You know, his owner was the guy who instigated the purge that led to Seneca's execution. So Epictetus would definitely have had a lot of opinions about Seneca. Another thing people always ask about is how come they never mentioned Seneca's name. No Stoic mentions Seneca's name, like, based, not just Marcus and Epictetus. No, no, no Stoics post Seneca's name, based not just Marcus and Epictetus.

No Stoics post Seneca mentioned his name. Yeah. Like no one mentions his name. And so that puzzles people. It may be because there's this odd convention that classicists often mention that authors writing in Greek in the Roman world don't tend to cite or mention authors that

write in Latin, although I believe Marcus does once or twice. Marcus had definitely read Seneca because Fronto, we have this correspondence between Marcus and Fronto, and Fronto is Marcus's Latin retortutor. And Fronto mentions Seneca several times in a really sniffy way. He's incredible. And at one point, he's really insulting about Seneca several times in a really sniffy way. He's incredible. And at one point, he's really insulting about Seneca. He says something that only a retorition could say. It's what the kids today would call a sick burn, right? He says something Marcus would never have said.

So we only see... What's the burn? We don't see what Marcus says. We only see Fronto's comment, which is, he says, looking for valuable sayings in the writings of Seneca would be like grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer, looking for silver coin, a handful of silver coins in the filth. Right? So very vivid. You're like, wow, how long did you spend thinking that? You see why he's a reddit teacher. Yeah, like that's a memorable insult, right? And I get what you're saying.

We as readers of Seneca might think, no way, like Seneca's writings are amazing, you know, the letters to Lucilius, but I suspect that they're reading something else. Now, you know, they may be reading speeches by Seneca and they, we have things like, you know, other odd writing, we have Seneca's plays, which seem very different, you know, from- His natural history is not great. Yeah. But he also writes that thing called the pumpkinification of Claudius, which is a weird satire, which also seems very un-stoic, and kind of doesn't reflect well on Seneca because he started off sucking up to Claudius and then after he dies, he ridicules him. But

we also have on clemency, which is this speech or letter that he writes praising Nero, portraying him as a philosopher king, saying his hands are untainted by blood, but also trying to encourage him towards clemency. And I suspect that he's reading stuff like that. So they go, well, there's good bits in this. But then the gist of the whole thing is praise, heaping praise on Nero. Like, and saying he's got this potential to be a philosopher king saying that he's, you know, guiltless of any, after he's clearly just at his little brother assassinated and, you know, and just not long after that has his mother clubbed to death. So I think these guys, I mean, Marcus mentions Nero in passing. Epictetus clearly can't stand Nero. Like he's described him

as a kind of wild animal. Like they, I suspect Marcus had mixed feelings about Seneca because it sounds like Fronto thinks Marcus likes Seneca and he's arguing with him about it because he doesn't like him. But I think Epictetus would have said, look, Seneca compromised too much. He's a guy, because Epictetus is, draws a kind of hard line. He's like, never flatter tyrants. Never, never compromise, you know, on anything, on your principles on anything. And, you know, if you asked him, what do you think of Seneca? I think we can get, especially if he read on clemency, that's a good thought experiment. What would Epictetus have thought of on clemency?

He would have ripped it up. He would have thought this guy's playing with the devil. He's kind of getting into bed with a sociopath. And this is the opposite of what Stoicism should be teaching. There's also someone that Seneca never mentions. He never mentions Masonius Rufus. Although he's a bit younger than him, but he was the most famous Stoic teacher of the period and Seneca doesn't acknowledge him. I think they were probably saw themselves as, although they were fellow Stoics and so

they're cousins in a sense, I think they would have been aligned with different factions politically and philosophically within Stoicism. Certainly the Stoic opposition, like with Smithsonian Rufus mentored and it was led by Trissier, like I think we'd have seen Seneca as a political opponent. Yeah. And then in Cassius Dio, there's this curious remark where he claims that Thracea, the head of the Stoic opposition, said of the people who collaborated with Nero, let their names never be mentioned again, except to explain that although they compromised and collaborated with Nero, they ended up being executed anyway, the same as the people

that opposed him. So you didn't even save your own skin by sucking up to Nero. Now, we don't know for sure, but I think anyone reading that and thinking about it, the first name that comes to mind is has to be Seneca. Like Seneca would clearly have been the most obvious example. He was Nero's right hand man. So I guess what I'm suggesting is that one of the leading stoics from a previous generation was famed for having condemned Seneca to a damnatio memoriae, like I had to say, let's strike his name out from history and just not mention it again, which is something the Romans were known for doing to people that they criticized. And that might explain why Epictetus and Marcus don't mention Seneca, because certainly you'd think Epictetus would have, could easily

use Seneca as an example to illustrate a lot of the things he's saying to his students about not compromising with tyrants and how it's a slippery slope and you can't serve two masters and you know all of this stuff kind of you could almost put in brackets after it, you know, see Seneca for an exact country example. There is this politics is serving many masters by definition, right? You have multiple constituencies. And so there is something I think a little bit in Epictetus, as much as I like him, that's closer to the sort of origin of stoicism, the sort of cynic tradition, the, I mean, look, he doesn't, the first chance he gets, he leaves Rome

and he lives out far away, right? And we can't fault a person who is enslaved and exiled and experiences the worst of the system for not believing in the system and participating in it. But Seneca, I go back and forth. Sometimes I'm very sympathetic. Sometimes I'm utterly disgusted. And I think in that way, he's actually someone we have to talk about because he so embodies the contradictions, the temptations, the imperfect nature of reality that we all struggle with, you know, but there's something about Epictetus

that's very pure that says, don't get your hands dirty, step away from it, virtue is the only thing that matters. And that's great as far as it works for the individual, but I think many other Stoic thinkers and and and philosophers before and since go hey you know when you withdraw it doesn't it doesn't change anything all it does is seed that role or place to someone else who's almost certainly less philosophical less virtuous less principled like your I think Pericles says something like, your disengagement is only possible by the increased engagement from someone else. And that part, I think many of the later Roman stokes

struggle with this idea of like, well, here's what's philosophical, here's what's virtuous, here's what's pure. And then here's the real world with its imperfect problems and solutions. And the decision to be the pen and ink philosopher on this side and the philosopher politician participant on this side as Marcus tries to be and Seneca tries to be, it's just fraught with morally vexing decisions. Yeah, we're never going to resolve, like, because it's always been a tension that runs

famously in a way, runs through the history of philosophy. And I always, it reminds me in the Eastern tradition, in Buddhism, you have these two major schools of Buddhism called the Hinayana and the Mahayana. And the earliest form of Buddhism has this monastic ideal that involves retreating completely from the world a bit like a cynic philosopher. Or an Epicurean. Yeah. And then over time people thought, well, that seems like there's something wrong with this.

You know, surely the ideal should be to benefit the rest of mankind as well. And so reconciling the benefits of withdrawing from society with the kind of meaninglessness of that in a way unless you're contributing to the greater good on the commonwealth for mankind has always been...I think the stories are kind of aware of that though. Like you even, you get this tension to some extent in Epictetus. It can be explained in a way...by the way, let me just digress for a moment and say that what we're describing, these different factions, we have a source that says there were three schools of Stoicism by the Roman period and they were represented by followers of the

last three scholars of Stoicism. And we don't know what the difference was between them, but- And what are those names for people? They are, one of them is Diogenes of Babylon, I think. One's Antipater of Tarsus. Another one's Panatius of Rhodes. And so I think the followers of Panatius are the Middle Stoics who follow Poseidonius as well, and they incorporate bits of Aristotle and Plato. Seneca and Cicero look like they're probably more aligned with that. And interestingly,

the other ones are both writing Latin, right? So maybe that the language has something to do with it as well. This is the more kind of modernized in a way, like, you know, version, more kind of Latinized version of Stoicism. And then there must be, one of the others must be more old school by comparison. Seneca gives us a list of his favorite philosophers at one point, and he lists Socrates and the founders of Stoicism. And he also lists Plato, but he doesn't list Diogenes the Cynic, interestingly. Whereas definitely, if you ask Depictetus, who are your top three favorite philosophers, he would say Socrates and maybe he says Zeno and Chrysippus. He'd definitely say Diogenes the Cynic. So I think there's

this more urban version of Stoicism where they are more into Plato and Aristotle and Roman senators are quite into it. And then there's this more hardcore old school version. Fundamentalist stoicism. Fundamental stoicism. Like in Epictetus is clearly... Now, the weird thing is that Marcus Aurelius ends up being into the more hardcore fundamentalist, cynic oriented version of stoicism. But yeah, definitely that's something that I think they struggled with. So in Epictetus, I think this is something that people ask me a lot about, so maybe it's worth mentioning. He seems to be aware that we have to, this, there's a passage where he talks about, he talks with bulls quite a lot, interestingly.

And he says, how does the bull know that it can kill a lion? I didn't know that bulls could kill lions actually, but apparently they can't, they toss them on their horns. Yeah, I guess a water buffalo or something would have some adaptations for fighting off a lion. Yeah, they can fight off lion if they're strong enough. They throw them up in the air and they'll make a, mess them up pretty badly.

So Epictetus apparently knows this and he says, how is it possible that some bulls know, again, the calves, like the heifers can't defend themselves against lions, but the strongest bull in the herd can fight off lions, how does it know that? And I think he's implying that it comes from trial and error and the only way it can know is through testing itself and experience. Like in the analogy I think that the Stoics and other philosophers always have at the

back of their mind is wrestling and Pankratian. So he'd say, how do you know which sparring partner to pick? If it's someone that's much younger and weaker and less experienced than you, you're not going to learn anything. But if it's someone that's much bigger and stronger and more skilled than you, you're just going to get humiliated and you're probably not going to learn anything. He's going to beat you within a second and it's going to be kind of demoralizing. So really you want to find somebody who's slightly better than you, and that you kind of stand a chance

of potentially beating, you can learn something. You've got to kind of pick your battles, as it were. He says, if there's too much smoke in your house, you should get out, but if there's a little bit of smoke, maybe you could put up with it. And I think this is a similar kind of analogy. So I think what Epictetus might say is you need to pick your career in a similar way. If you think that you have the integrity, the wisdom, the composure to get into politics and keep your cool, then maybe the gods have put you in that position. Maybe you are the right guy for the job. But most of you guys,

who students, aren't up to this. Like, you know, you're novices when it comes to stoicism. And some of you might be better off retreating from society for a while in order to cultivate your virtue. So like choosing a career is like choosing a sparring partner. Because it's going to challenge you and tempt you and put you in vexing moral positions and it has the potential to bring out the best in you, but also the worst in you. And you meet guys like that in different careers. You meet people that seem to be able to maintain their composure and their integrity, even

in a business where there's a lot of corruption or a lot of temptation. And then you meet other people who wouldn't last five minutes, who are smart, who are educated and competent, but are easily overwhelmed by the stress. They want approval too badly or their moral compass isn't clear enough. Yeah. So I think Epictetus is saying, look, I can't tell you, other people can't tell you.

You need to become a good student of your own psyche. You need to learn to know yourself like the bulls in the herd and figure out, you know, are you just like a little calf that's going to get eaten alive by the lions? You know, are you the big alpha bull in the herd that can toss the lions on its horns and isn't scared of them? Right. Are you meant for the scholar's life or the soldier's life? Yeah. Right. Are you meant for the the scholars life or the soldiers life? Yeah, are you are you meant to be in the arena or are you you know a spectator or a critic or or what? Have you you you've got a you've got to know and and I think Seneca

You know, he says like he pities the person who hasn't been in the ring Yeah hasn't been bloodied and bruised and knocked out because they don't know what they're capable of now We could argue that Seneca gets in the ring with more than he could handle. But also, I think we have to acknowledge and respect the fact that he was so in the mix, in the room where it happened, that I don't know, I don't know, and I can't imagine many people that were tested the way that he was tested. And whether you or I or they would do better in those situations. I mean, the incredible, like Seneca would probably say, do you know what I prevented Nero from doing? Do you know how much worse he could have been? He could probably say, if what I was really after was my own power and my own enrichment,

like what you think I was compensated for is a fraction of what I could. He's like, do you think if all I cared about was money or power, you think I was writing these plays or reading these books? So I think Seneca would probably see himself as having been quite heroic in all of it. Now, how much of that is what he has to tell

himself to sleep at night. You know, when you compare it to a Thrasio or an Agrippinist some of these other stoics who really did kind of put it all on the line, I think they stand up better. But Seneca was put in Shakespearean level dilemmas. And some cases I think he really did well and in other cases, you know, we hold him up as an example of what not to do. Well, that's a good segue into a completely different perspective on the whole thing, which is what, you know, when you're writing a biography about someone like Marcus Aurelius, one of the questions that I asked myself is what can we tell about his character by looking at the content of the meditations? Like, what's he worried about in the meditations? And then also, you know, there's another simple question,

which the Romans, I think, ask themselves more than we do, but it's a useful question to ask, which is what don't they mention? Like he doesn't mention Seneca. The dog that doesn't bark. Yeah. Who doesn't he mention? What's missing from this? Marcus says a lot about his relationships with other people. He says a lot about justice. He says a lot about anger. Yes. He says a lot about not being alienate. So he's really concerned with interpersonal conflict, it seems to me. He has that entire section 1118, where he lists 10 different strategies for coping with anger. Right? So this is clearly something and it's not surprising, like given his position.

Do you think Marcus really has had an anger problem? Yeah. I mean, we can't know for sure, but it certainly comes across that way. I'll tell you something that might shock you actually, and I really don't say this lightly. So as someone who has a background in therapy, I used to teach therapists. I'd stand and speak at conferences and for weeks on end, I'd speak to rooms full of psychologists and therapists and life coaches. If I said to them, and I'd do this sort of thing all the time, I'd get like a whiteboard and I'd say, how many cognitive strategies can you

guys think of for coping with anger? Distinct strategies, not just different versions of the same thing, right? I think an individual, I'd be impressed if they come up with like three or four. I think the group collectively might come up with, if they're 20 or 30 people, they'd come up with like five or six or something. I don't think they would come up with 10, right? Marcus not only has a list of 10 distinct cognitive strategies, most of which are pretty viable in modern therapy, but he keeps returning to selections from that list throughout the book. So it's clearly not something he's just kind of copied down. He's memorized this and he's using it repeatedly. So he has, maybe this is overstating in a way, but to be blunt about it, he has potentially

the level of knowledge and understanding of coping with anger that I would expect from a therapist. Why would you know 10? Even as a client, you'd normally learn two or three self-help techniques and focus on the things that work, but normally you'd only know that many distinct techniques if actually you're teaching them to other people. He must have learned them from someone who was an expert on coping with anger.

But his knowledge of this is surprisingly extensive. As a therapist, it seems surprisingly in-depth and extensive to me. is surprisingly in-depth and extensive to me. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. you