The Daily Stoic - Classics Scholar Robin Waterfield on Translating Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations - Pt.2

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

On today’s episode, Ryan talks to Robin Waterfield about his new annotated translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, the art of translating ancient texts, the key Stoic concepts that Marcus writes about in Meditations, and more.Robin Waterfield is a British classical scholar, translator, and editor, specializing in Ancient Greek philosophy. He studied Classics at Manchester University and went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. He lives in Greece.This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout.Today’s episode is brought to you by Munk Pack, Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code STOIC at checkout.This episode is brought to you by Policygenius. Policygenius helps you compare top insurers in one place, and it lets you save 50% or more on life insurance. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. And when your life insurance policy is sorted out, you’ll know that your family will be protected if anything happens. Just go to policygenius.com to get started. Policygenius: when it comes to insurance, it’s nice to get it right.This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life is a 14 day course designed to teach you what you do not yet know. Sign ups are open now but close tomorrow, May 2 at 11:59 PM CST. The course will begin on May 3. Sign up now at dailystoic.com/101***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Robin Waterfield:Homepage: http://robinwaterfield.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke 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 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. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Wednesday, you listened to my first hour with the pureless Robin Waterfield on Marcus Aurelius, who he was, what made him tick why he matters. And in the second hour of the conversation, we pivot more towards the meditations itself.

How does one translate a great work like this? What are the passages that stand out? Why does Marcus matter so much? What can he teach us? What did the Stoics teach? And how did they influence Marcus? We talk about some of the differences between Robbins' translation, his new annotated edition,

some of the annotations, in fact. We also talk about the Gregory Hayes translation a little bit, and Marcus' influence as we talk about the Gregory Hayes translation a little bit and Marcus's influence as we talk about epictetus. Robin is hard at work on a translation of epictetus. Anyways, I cannot tell you how much I enjoy this conversation. I think you're really going to like this. Do you check out Robin Waterfield's Marcus Aurelius' meditations, the annotated edition. I learned a lot, even having already gone through Marcus Aurelius, all the times that I've gone through it. Every time I pick up Marcus, I get something new, and to see it from a new perspective, a new translation was extra beneficial.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you're going to enjoy it, and you're going to enjoy the book. So here we go. Here's me with Robin Waterfield. And check out his translation of Xenophon and Plutarch as well. Also, both could and I hope you enjoyed. There was a little bit of a lag. He was talking to me from Greece, so if you feel if there's some audio problems, I apologize, but I think you're really going to like this and we'll talk soon. I was thinking for the second half of this conversation. Let's really talk about the specific translation and meditations itself here. So this is book 11, number seven, a Gregory Hayes writes,

it stares you in the face, no role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now. And then you write, how clearly it strikes you that there's no other role you could play in life that would be as well suited to the practices philosophy as the one you find you now find yourself playing. I'd say you're saying this, you're in the same ballpark with each other.

Yeah, I know that's pretty much the same. Yeah. So tell me, as you dig into a writer like Marcus Aurelius, it must be strange translating something that someone was primarily creating for their own personal edification. Can you feel that in the writing? Can you feel that this wasn't made for public consumption? Talk to me about what the actual sort of original text sort of feels like as a translator. Okay, well, yes, in the first place, yes, you can very definitely feel it because, you know, there's a sense, there's a sense in which the text is somewhat elliptical, somewhat

incomplete because he's always, you know, he doesn't need to explain things to himself because he already knows what he's talking about. So it makes it quite difficult to follow his train of thought sometimes, as we've already said earlier, he's sometimes right, really, really clearly just straight away. But sometimes he's jotting things down in a fairly compressed way, sometimes in a fairly ungrammatical way, sometimes as I say in a fairly elliptical way, not spelling out everything that he means. And that's difficult for a translator because in order to do a proper translation, you

do have to understand what you're reading. This is one of the most alarming things about being a translator, especially of philosophers like I've translated a lot of Plato. I effectively have to be as clever as Plato in all the translate Plato, and that's very daunting. But you have to do that to the extent that you can. It makes that slightly difficult for one, because Plato is at least creating arguments, extended arguments, and spelling things out.

But Marcus isn't. He's writing notes to himself. In that sense, he's rather closer to Aristotle, because a lot of Aristotle's works are election notes, which when he was delivering the lectures he probably would have expanded into a more coherent and meaningful sentences and doctrines teachings. But what we have is the election notes, what we have in Marcus' case is very often, as I say, perfectly lucid and clear stretches of prose, but sometimes it's quite difficult. And sometimes he's obviously talking to himself. You'll remember that in book one, when he says something like somebody taught him to

adopt a plain style in his letter writing, because letter writing had become a very fancy art in those days like rhetoric. And he says, so he taught me to Dr. Plainsdale in my letter writing, as in his letter to my mother from Sinouessa. Now, we don't have access to the letter, you know, Marcus, that was just the reminder of Marcus to himself. And he does that quite a lot through the book. He talks about people in totally elliptical ways. He says at one point it would be crazy to expect a bad person not to behave like that.

Like what? You know, we don't know, but that's what he says. And I think one of the advices of my translation is going back to what you were saying about the haze translation is that I've left those ellipses. I haven't tried to explain them. As I say, I translate the Greek I see. I don't add to it or subtract from it. So, if Marcus is just writing to himself, why write all the things that he's learned from these other people, if they're never going to see it, and potentially nobody's ever going to see it. And obviously, as you said, he knows what he learned from Rousticus, so why write it down? Yeah, that's a good question, and I don't have a very ready answer.

I'll just say what everybody else says, which is that, okay, first of all, although that is our notebook one, we think that it was actually the last one to be written. Secondly, we look at, again, going back to 630, which is his praise of Antoninus Pierce. And we think that having written something like that, as a, 630 was written in the style of all the rest of the meditations, in other words, as a reminder to himself, to try to be like Antonina's peers. And I think having written that, he then got the idea of saying, oh, I should jot down what I remember, what I think I've gained from all my teachers, as a way of reviving my gratitude to them in my mind. I think that was the therapeutic aspect of Book One,

was reviving the gratitude in his mind, making them aware of what he got from them, casting his mind back and saying, oh yeah, now that's what I got from rusticus, that's what I got from diagnosis. Thank God, God for that. So spoiler alert, because you mentioned that you thought the gratitude was perhaps what he wrote last. It does really feel like though the last words in meditations, he wrote as he was as he lay dying.

So do you think I believe that? How do you think that works? Because I think he was consumptive. He talks at one point about spitting blood. He, we know he was taking medicine from his letters to fronto. His letters to fronto quite frequently. They talk about health issues and things like that. Typicalosis was a really big problem in the Asian world,

obviously, before the days of penicillin and things. You know, let alone cures in the Swiss mountains or wherever. But, so yeah, I think he was consumptive. I think he could see himself gradually getting weaker and weaker. Three years before his death, he made comedors to join Tempura, three years before his death, he made Commodus a joint emperor, which is a way of training your son up to training Commodus up to the duties required. And as you say, I mean, Book 12 as a whole, I think, was, this is why I think, this is why I believe we've got the complete set of notebooks, because Book 12 is a really, really perfect ending, as you say, from the pen of one who knows that he's dying.

But this awareness of death is throughout the meditations. The meditations as a whole were written in the last decade of his life. The written between 172 and 188 when he died. And I think throughout that period he felt himself getting worse and knew that he was dying. Do you think he was dying of the plague or do you think he was dying of this long standing illness? I think tuberculosis here. It's possible that he got weakened by the plague, of course, but he doesn't know anybody mentions it. In the film, he gets murdered by comedists,

but that didn't happen. Well, so to go back to the manuscript itself, as I got a bunch of questions about the translation too, but talk to, talk to us people who are fans of meditations, but really have no idea where this book comes from. Like how does it survive as a physical piece of writing? How do, and what do translators draw on? What are you actually translating? It's certainly not the

copy he wrote by hand. I wish. Okay, how did it survive? That is a mystery or perhaps a miracle. He died out on campaign in central Europe where he would have been put up in lodgings perhaps in a town or he might even have been, you know, in a tent in the film Dadiator he's in a tent. And the notebooks were there with him. They wouldn't be just loose paper. They'd have probably been, you know, papyrus or vellum and then sown together into book shape. But somebody preserved them, whether they did so by accidental design, we'll never know, but somebody preserved them. Could it have been comedists? Could this have been the one good act of comedists' life? You know, because he was there with his dad, so maybe he thought, oh, but I mean,

they could just have easily have got thrown out. Oh, what's this, you know, so maybe he thought, oh, but I mean, they could just have easily have got thrown out. Oh, what's this pile of packer-less trash? We'll chuck that out along with his old clothes and his worn-out boots or something like that. But somebody kept them. What happened after that is very, very difficult to tell. There are very faint traces that people were reading the book over the next centuries,

but such faint traces that we can't really be sure and we certainly can't track its root in any detail. And the first certain mention we get of it is in the sort of cusp of the 10th and 11th centuries when a chap called Aritha, a bishop of Caesarea, said that he had a Tati-Old copy, a Tati-Old manuscript copy, and he deranged for that Tati-Old copy to be transcribed into a new copy. So, and this new copy seems to have given the book a lease of life, because we start to hear about it more often after that point. And then what happens? what happens to a text is this is what happens to any ancient text more or less. If you the process of publication in early times in medieval times was that if you wanted a copy of the book, you went to a monastery where the scribes

lived and you asked for a copy to be made of such and such a book. If it was a famous book, the chances are the monastery already had a copy, some of these monasteries had and still have fabulous libraries. And so in the scriptorium where all the little monks were at their copying, somebody would have copied the text of all of you when you take it out of the book. somebody would have copied the text of all you when you take it over there now you've got the book. So popular books that happened a great deal to less popular books that have been very little to. Eventually, over the centuries, over the centuries, you come to, let's say roughly the 19th century or earlier in some cases and people start drawing up critical editions. They start looking at the manuscripts that have survived, which never agree with one another, because scribes make mistakes.

They miss out words, they miss copy words, they can't quite read words, etc, etc. So by the sort of, let's say, the 18th, 19th century, you've got scholars saying, right, let's look at, let's collate all these manuscripts and try to work back to what the original actually said. And as a result of that, you get published texts. And nowadays, in the 20th, 21st century, there are, you know, three or four groups of publishers of standard text. There's the B-Day text in France, there's the Toipen text in Germany, and there's the Oxford Classical texts in the UK and America. And those are standard texts.

And as a translator, you take whichever one of those is considered the best in the case of Marcus, it's the toigner. Well, it's actually various, but the toigner is a good one. And you translate that. But I have never, you know, with all the 30 or so volumes of translations that I've translated, I've never fully agreed entirely with any single edition. I always introduce a few improvements, or I hope them to be improvements. And that's definitely the case with markers.

There's quite a long, I mean, there's several pages of appendix at the back of my book, showing all the places where I differ from the standard text, which is the telephone story. Yeah, that's what we do. That's what we do whether it's whether it's Marcus or whether it's Lucidides or whatever. It's roughly the same process. It's just that in some cases there is a stronger manuscript tradition and therefore fewer errors. I mean just think of the manuscript tradition of the Bible. I mean, hundreds of manuscripts for every gospel and so on and so forth.

That's not the case with Marcus because of his rather tattered history. He's writing in Greek, right, to himself. Why Greek? Why not Latin? If he's in Rome? I'm curious about that. Yeah, it's another curiosity and it has a bearing on the question of whether he ever intended the book for publication. I mean, as you and I have been saying, we've got these really quite polished entries sometimes, not all of them, but some of them. Doesn't that mean he wanted others to see it? You know, that he was writing well. And yeah, you know, he was the Emperor of Rome. People spoke Latin in Rome. So what was he doing writing in Greek? I mean, if he was writing just for himself, which is what he seems to be doing,

why didn't he write in Latin? But I don't think that's, in fact, I don't think it's very much of a puzzle, Ryan, because Greek was still the language of philosophy. There weren't that many philosophers writing in Greek Seneca, of course, is a great exception. But, and also, especially since it was Sturzism, because Sturzism grew up in a Greek context, Zeno and Clienthys and Chrysipus, and all those were Greeks and the writing Greek. And they had come up with quite a lot of technical terms,

for a sentence and impulse and the command, the center and so on and so forth. And some of these terms weren't that easy to translate into Latin from Greek. So I think it was pretty natural, Marcus' philosophical reading had been in Greek. And so I think it was pretty natural for him to write his philosophical thoughts down in Greek as well.

So that one's perhaps not a puzzle. Did he ever intended for publication? I really don't think so. And one of the main factors for this is, to my way of thinking, is that an emperor depends absolutely crucially on others' opinions of him. I mean, look how many Roman emperors died because they were known to be unpleasant people, you know, they were either

forced to kill themselves or they were assassinated or something else. And here's Markus writing down his thoughts, and his thoughts are very often rude to the people around him. As I said early, he calls them liars and crooks and he free will express his impatience with them and calls them bad people and so on and so forth. He could not let other people see this. He could not let the people around him know what he actually thought of them because otherwise his position would have been in jeopardy. So no, I really really don't think it was for publication. I think the book is exactly as it appears to be an intensely private journal written to and for just himself. And this to me is one of the great appealing things about the book is that, you know, when you read Epic Titus, the you, Epic Titus is always talking to you. You must do this, you should do that, all right. But Epic Titus is you is one of his students

or a visitor to the school, or quite often it's a fictitious character that Epic Titus has, you know, made up to make a point. When Marcus says, you must do this and you should do that, he's only ever talking about himself. He's not trying to tell anybody else how to live his life. How to live their life, I should say. He's only trying to correct anybody else how to live his life. How to live their life, I should say. He's only trying to correct himself, which is a very attractive thing. And therefore, by funny, it's just a happy coincidence that when we, Marcus' unintended readers read the book, it's just a happy coincidence that we too take the you to be ourselves. We take the walk as a sane person because he was writing it for himself personally. It's

very nice. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama,

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on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. I joke that Marcus is using the Royal U, right, instead of Royal U. And by you, he means everyone or human beings, but he also means himself specifically. And it's kind of that point. I think it's true in writing and in comedy, where sometimes the more specific you are, the more universal, the truth of what you're talking about can be. Well, I think that's right. I think that's valid inside into meditations. But certainly, I don't think he was writing initially for anybody but himself. I think you was just himself. I don't think it was a universal year.

It is funny, you know, for someone who wrote so much in meditations about the worthlessness of posthumous fame, how no one was going to remember any of this. Yeah. I think enough to be gone and not remembered like all the other people that this manuscript would be preserved and survived through all these centuries and that you and I would be talking about him today. I'm not sure if it disproves what Marcus is saying

or if in fact it proves it in some way which is that if you focus on the principles or the ideas, it transcends your own puny little existence, whether you're around to enjoy it or not. Yeah. No, it's a very, very, very happy chance that we are able to say, Marcus, sorry, you were wrong on this one. We still remember you.

We're still reading your stuff. Well, so speaking of someone that does not appear in meditations, why do you think Sennaka makes no appearances in meditations? You might think there's one argument I could see where Sennaka would be the person that Marcus could learn from the most given Sennaka's proximity to power. It's, Marcus would have loved for someone like Sennaka to be in his life. I feel like,

you know what I mean? Why not? No, no, no, it's more than that, Ryan, because Marcus was very familiar with Sennaka in his youth. There are letters from Fromto to Marcus saying, you know, read less Sennaka, man. No, really. Senna Coo was clearly one of his early sterling loves. Why is that no mention of him? I have no idea. I've heard one argument that perhaps he turns against Senna Coo, or has turned off by Senna Coo, you know, and some of the compromises that Seneneca makes in proximity to power but would you agree or disagree with that well for fun enough i was almost going to say that i mean i think seneca yes mark us clearly wanted to be a practicing stale you know every minute of the day and i think he

would have been justified in thinking that seneca did compromise sometimes. Seneca went on and on and on about the importance of, you know, of not being bothered by death and of even killing yourself if necessary, but when it came to the crunch, he was clearly very reluctant to kill himself. He did, but I don't think he did so very willingly at all. So yeah, Marcus might have thought he was a less, you got a bug, a less sincere,

less sincere, stoic than Marcus himself has bound to be. He might have thought that, but I mean, we're just guessing here. You brought up a phrase that landed with me and I noted it the first time that I read it because I hadn't seen it appear in the other translations. And so, I don't know if you know,

but I did a book called The Daily Stoic and I worked as it happened, a lucky circumstance, my agent, Steven, Steven Hanselman is also a translator of Greek and Latin. So we were able to work together where we did some of our original translations. It's one passage a day. But I really loved your rendition

and I won't pretend to know the actual Greek for it. But you render it as command center. I think we rendered it as a ruling reason. But I thought command center was the perfect way to capture it, and it strikes me as almost a sort of a military metaphor that Marcus, as a general, probably would have been fond of. It's the stoic term for the rational faculty, seen as the faculty that processes information and generates action. So yeah, I think the

military side of it is important. The Greek is hegemonicon, commanding something, leading, you know, it's just a new to adjective, the commanding bit, the ruling bit, the leading bit. I was tempted actually quite a long while, but this was too whimsical to the first draft of the translation, it wasn't command-centric, it was the navigator, because I felt it was this faculty within one that steers you through life, sometimes even without you necessarily knowing that it's doing so. You know that experience when you look back over your life and you see, you know, you've just met your wife, let's say your future wife, and you look back and you say, God, if I

hadn't gone to kindergarten and met so and so and then done this and then and you see this whole pattern of your life that you weren't aware of but without that pattern, it wouldn't have got you to the point of meeting your future wife. So, impressed by that kind of thing, I was tempted to translate Hegemonic on as navigator but then I decided in the end it was probably forcing too much into it, which wasn't necessarily true to Marcus's intentions or not just Marcus's intentions because it's a standard steered, not just Marcus's terms. So I dropped the navigator, it's slightly reluctant, but as I say, I tried to translate

as literally as possible. I like the idea of command center because it kind of implies that there's this sort of like headquarters Back behind you that you have to run things by you mentioned like a wife I kind of my wife fills that role in my life where it's like somebody's asking me to do something They're asking me what I think and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna run that by my wife, right? Like I'm not gonna I'm not We all do that. She's our primary brain. Yes. Well, no, and the primary brain is sort of what Marcus is talking about,

not, not immediate emotional reaction, but the smarter, more dispassionate, wiser person over there, who's going to, who's going to look at it with a tad more perspective. Yeah, that's also an aspect of the command center show. So what does the logos mean? This is something people ask me about the logos and then they also ask, what does it mean to live in accordance with nature? Sort of two big stoic phrases that appear in Marcus Aurelis that are difficult, I think, to wrap our heads around.

Goodness, big questions. Okay, Logos. Very, very difficult word for a translator because it means word, speech, argument, reason, rationalityity ratio, proportion, the single word logos means all of these things. It's also in the Bible, right? Yeah, but I was, I told you, but again, in an earlier draft of the book, there was a footnote to saying that I felt that, you know, the opening verse of John was quite a stoic thing. In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God. And I felt this was really quite a stoic thing because God for the stoics was just rationality, is the cosmic reason with the capital R. But I was persuaded out of that, at least I was persuaded to drop the footnote. But yeah, Logos for the Stokes is chiefly the rational

faculty. It is the, but it's also, it segues into this meaning of measure and proportion and ratio because it's also what coheres the world and makes it a comprehensible place. The fact that it's guided by reason is what makes it comprehensible to us, by our reason. So it has both the sort of the active and the passive senses at the same time, very difficult to translate. What does living in a chord with nature mean? Well. translate. What does living in a chord with nature mean? Well, first of all, it's deliberately ambiguous between living in a chord with nature, with the capital N, I, you know, the world

around us and the universe, and nature with a small N, my own personal human nature, and it's deliberately ambiguous because for a stoke those two things are actually the same. My nature is a small part of nature with a capital N. My nature as the essence of my nature as a human being is rationality. Everything else I share with lower creatures and even with plants. But the only thing that makes me distinctively human is my rationality and that I share with lower creatures and even with plants. But the only thing that makes me distinctively human is my rationality, and that I share with the gods, or that I share with nature with the capital N. So to live in a chord with nature,

in the first place means living rationally. Doing everything in the stoic, rational fashion because that is living in a accord with the universal will, because the universal will is a rational will. But secondly, living in accordance with nature also means what we've touched on earlier, accepting whatever hand you're dealt, because it is nature, or God, or use, or the universe, these are all synonyms for Astolic Light Marcus. It is nature that has given you these events. And so you must accept them so that to accept them is to live in a cold with nature. And you know there's something I had an insight while doing the translation, which was based on, have you read Carlos Castanader's books? No. Right, there's one of his, you know who I mean.

He was this guy who pretended to have met a Yaki Indian, who gave him lots of powerful drugs and insights into the world and so on and so forth. And there's a chapter in one of his early books, which is called having to believe where his teacher, the Yaki Indian Don Juan, teach persuades him that every situation he finds himself in has been created, as Castaneda puts it, has been created by his personal power for himself alone. And Castaneda found that as a result of doing this exercise, as a result of going through life, trying to see the world in that way, that every situation he was in had been created for himself alone, made the world very, very meaningful.

This, surely, is exactly what a stoic would get, if he was living in accordance with nature, I, accepting every situation in the belief that the God's use, the universe, the cosmic reason, had created that situation for him. Because this is, you know, Marcus is very clear that on a scale from outright atheism there are no gods to there are gods but they have nothing to do with human beings, to there are gods and they care for us personally. He's absolutely in line with that last one. There are gods and they care for us personally. So every situation he finds himself in has been created for him by the benign universe. And that must have made, you know, if you could hold that awareness as you went through life, that would really, that awareness as you went through life, that would really, really have a make everything profound, everything meaningful. It's a wonderful, stoic insight, I think.

Yeah, my sort of understanding of the logos and then also living in accordance with nature is this idea that something is sort of pulling us, not overtly in the sense of predetermination that everything is chosen for us because we can reject where we're being pulled, but that there is some sort of rhythm, almost maybe like a like a Gulf Stream, that we can choose to get on or get off, and that this is the sort of the force or the direction of the universe, and it's much more powerful and significant and was here before us and will be here after us. That's kind of how I think about it. Yeah, and the being drawn or pulled along, metaphor is again a properly stoic one. They have this nice image. Do you remember of a two dogs being pulled by a cart and

One is going with the flow and so he's trotting along happily behind the cart and the other ones digging his heels And then but he's still being dragged along. It doesn't make any difference the cart is still pulling him along Yeah, it's just he's just he's having a horrible time You know that's supposed to the happy trotting dawn. So let's be happy trotting dogs. I I love that You know that that metaphor is beautiful is the happy trotting dawn. So let's be happy trotting dawns. I love that. You know, that metaphor is beautiful. I do, I think one of the things that struck me most with meditations as I've gone through it, is just some of the turns of phrases that Marcus has,

you know, where he describes bread breaking open at the top, where he describes the flex of foam on a boris mouth, where he describes the flex of foam on a boris mouth, where he describes the brow of the lion. He seems to have a thing for figs and all of their beautiful figs and olives. He seems to have spent a lot of time walking the fields, looking at fruit, where he talks about the grain bending

under its own weight. It's pretty unbelievable to see such brilliant writing never intended for public consumption. He really does fronto proud, I guess we could say. Yeah, I had his education in general. Again, I do address this in the introduction when I'm talking about whether he intended the book for publication. I mean, the fact that some of the entries are so beautifully written, doesn't I mean he was, you know, taking care? But I mean, you're a writer, I'm a writer. We know that sometimes sentences just come out well the first time or sometimes we just polish them up for our own satisfaction. If we're writing an email to somebody, it doesn't need to be polished, but it's nicer to make it polished, you know. That's just

what we do. And I'm sure that's what Marcus was doing. It doesn't mean to be polished, but it's nicer to make it polished, you know? That's just what we do. And I'm sure that's what Marcus was doing. It doesn't mean he intended it for publication, but he was gifted and he was following his gift. Well, he clearly loves literature, right? What I'm always amazed by when you read Marcus or any of the ancients, is the ease with which they allude to or directly quote, what we now consider the sort of the classics,

whether it's euripides or any of the great playwrights and poets of the past, they seem to have a pretty good memory for great lines from art and literature and they use it to make their points. And again, it's incredible that Marcus is doing this to himself just because he loves the power of language. Yeah, yeah. One must remember that first of all, people's memories were a lot better in those days.

Secondly, there was a lot less literature around to absorb. And thirdly, I mean, look at the shelves behind me. And thirdly, there were plenty of handbooks around with what we would call commonplace books, books which collected nice pithy sayings and circulated them, and Mark has probably had got hold of some of those in his youth and childhood as well. Although I suspect also this comes from the way that they engage with texts. So for instance, I think everyone should read your meditations, but I would also suggest that they read it more than one time, and then I would suggest that they read other translations

as well. Senika talks about lingering on the works of the master thinkers. What I take from the way Marcus casually references these texts, that doesn't come from having watched the play one time. Clearly, he watched it and read it and talked about it in the same way that, you know, I can quote from the movie Gladiator because I've seen it 30 times or whatever, right? And that, that when you engage with the text on multiple occasions, each time, even though it remains the same,

you get something new about it. And we were talking about this earlier, I noticed different things from the plague or from about children. As you age and experience things and events in the world are occurring, it changes your perspective on a book that you might have already read 15 times. Yeah. No, I think that's a good exercise for somebody who's taking meditations seriously, yes, to read, reread, and then dip into a sample, a different translation.

What passages strike you? What are the lines that have stayed with you most from your time with Marcus? It's, I don't know, it's a bit difficult to pick. I mean, I could open the book at random and find something that had struck me forcefully at the time. I think I was asked recently what my favorite single bit was, and it's 12, three.

Yeah. So I read it out. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's. It's just it's it's it's it's it's it's this he 12-3 consists of two short sentences and then a really long sentence and I find this really long sentence really impressive because it's not just that it's exemplary philosophy it's also It's not just that it's exemplary philosophy, it's also really, really good writing. You have to be absolutely in control of your thinking and in control of your writing to be able to write a sentence like this. It goes as follows.

It follows that if you separate from yourself, that is, from your mind, all that other people do or say, all that you yourself have done or said, all that disturbs your peace of mind as looming in the future, all the properties of the body that encases you or of the spirit that is embedded in it that are not subject to your volition, and all that swirls around you driven by the whirlwind of the external world until your mind has been released from the bonds of fate and lives purified, untrammeled, on its own, doing what is right, willingly accepting everything that happens and speaking the truth. If, I say, you detach your command centre from what

has become attached to it as a result of its being attracted by bodily feelings, and from all that is to come and all that is gone and make yourself, in a pedicelies' words, a rounded sphere, rejoicing and encircling solitude and train yourself to live the only life you have that is in the present moment. You'll be able to pass what remains of your life up until your death with a mind that is tranquil in itself, kind to others and at peace with your guardian spirit. I mean, that's brilliant. I would be delighted if I was able to write that longer sentence, because I'm not so confident I break my sentences up. We all do, you know.

But to write a long, complex periodic sentence like that, that's great. A lot of skill. complex periodic sentence like that. That's great. A lot of skill. No, and I noted your annotation that you said a long periodic sentence that occupies most of this entry is something of a two or a four. So I thought you were totally right. And I think it encapsulates what we were just talking about. First off, the casual mention of a impetacles, you know, off the top of his head. I love. And I actually, I've always loved this meditation. And I, in some way, sort of built a few years ago, I wrote a book called Stillness is the Key about this idea of stillness because the Hayes translation, which I love, he breaks it up with some paragraphs, but he renders it as, if you can cut free

of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future in the past, and can make yourself, as impetically, says, a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness and concentrate on living what can be lived, what can be lived, which means the present, then you can spend the time you have left in tranquility and in kindness and at peace with the spirit within you. To me, that's what we're all trying to do. We're trying to, in the midst of the chaos of the world and the distraction and our responsibilities and all the things we don't control, get to a place of stillness so we can do what we

need to be done or what needs to be done. And I would hope to also have some happiness and peace and fulfillment in this life. Yeah. Ate d'Axea. Yes, yes. One of the sections I like, this is one I've come to a lot because I think it's got a mix of biographical and philosophical. This is when I've come to a lot because I think it's got a mix of biographical and philosophical. This is 630. He says, beware of becoming caesorified, dyed and purple. It does happen. I just love

the idea of like, you know, because Lord Acton's rule about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. You know, here you have somebody talking about it 2,000 years ago, and then perhaps the only exception to that rule in any sort of serious historical example, it's pretty remarkable that he was specifically talking to himself about that very idea. Yeah, but I think this is also why he talks a lot about celebrity and fame. He what you know, which seems to us a relatively trivial thing to talk about, but in a Roman context it wasn't because all these Roman noble families were obsessed with fame, not necessarily individual fame, but the fame of their families.

They wanted, you know, their families to remain important generation after generation. But Marcus in particular, as Emperor, he, you know, historians were going to write his reign up. He was necessarily going to be, going to be famous. And that's why, that's why he keeps lingering on this, otherwise as a say, fairly trivial thing. And there was, you know, he was the most powerful person in the world. Of course, there, of course, there must have been a temptation to become Césarified. There must have been a temptation when he was being irritated by somebody he considered an idiot in his court to slap that person down and said, get out, go to exile

on the honor of Diara or something, but he didn't, as far as we know, or not much. Yeah, isn't there a story about Hadrian stabbing one of his attendants in the eye with a pen for for bothering him and you know, Marcus had that power, but manages to resist him. Yeah, exactly. What struck me about fame and Marcus was, this is maybe late 2019, I was in Budapest, and so I went up to a Quinn come to see the camp there, and where Marcus may have written a chunk of meditations, we're not sure. But they had in this museum, they had a statue, it was sort of a big statue, with no head on it. And what the description said was that this,

that they'd come to believe was a statue from the cult of the emperor, but the Romans were very practical, and they were saying that with each new emperor, they would just put a new head on the body of the statue. And to me that encapsulated exactly what Marcus is talking about, which is he knows that he's very famous and very important and very powerful for now. And he reminds himself over and over again that this will not last, that he can't take it with him when he dies. And very soon, he will be immediately replaced and forgotten. And I think he had this sense that what mattered

was what he did right now, and more importantly, what he didn't do right now. And so I think that's where the restraint comes in, sort of believing that just because he could do something, just because he could get away with something, just because he could become seasurified he could get away with something, just because he could become seasorified and no one would be able to stop him, didn't mean that it was the right thing to do

and that this was to destroy his reputation and his credibility. Yeah. That was a very common sculptural practice, by the way. It wasn't just emperors, I mean, generals. Generals were portrayed with a queer ass and a short cloak and stocky figure. And again, they just made the body and then, you know, individualized ahead to put on it so that it looked like Fred and not Joe.

No, to me, that's such a perfect metaphor for this stoic idea that history is the same thing happening over and over again. Yes, very nice. People are exactly the same. And, you know, that none of this, you know, none of this, it's not that it doesn't matter, but that none of it is as important or as unprecedented as you want to delude yourself into thinking that it is.

Well, yeah, eternal recurrence and storcism, but also the insight which Marcus has, not original to him, but that fame is given you by other people. It's not something you've necessarily done for yourself. It tells you more about other people than it does about yourself. I've noticed a lot of similarities between some of the things Marcus writes about and then the the sort of the insights of ecclesiastes. Is that some eternal recurrence or is there any chance that one could have been influenced by the other? I don't know, Ecclesiastes. You know, vanity, all is vanity. Yeah, vanity, vanity, all is vanity. But there is an external recurrence in Ecclesiastes, is that? No, no, I'm saying, is that an example of eternal recurrence and that the same thought

is independently appearing in the influence? No, it's not because to a steric it's telling the recurrence is exactly the same. In a billion years time, there will be a Ryan Holiday and a Robin Waterfield having exactly this conversation. That's steric it's telling recurrence. It's not just, it's not, it's not, same act as different roles. It's same act as same roles. See, I'd always taken it to mean it was sort of the more things change, the more they stay

the same, you know, neuro, Trump, you know, you know, uh, uh, yeah, that's some aspect of it. Mark has talked about the sameness of things in that respect, but I'm talking about the strict doctrine of eternal recurrence. That is absolute identity. Yeah. So one of the things I love to, you actually got explicit about, I mean, you can't read meditations and not be struck with death as a theme, how often it occurs. And you note that I'd once noted that I think his gratitude section takes up roughly 10% of the entire text, but you note that

10% of the text refers explicitly or implicitly to death in some way, the memento mori of stoicism. Yeah. Well, it was a hot topic. I mean, as you know, it was central to Epicureian philosophy as well, was consolation in the face of death. And the Sturks were doing it, and others had done it in their own ways. But those two Hellenistic schools were the particular ones. To the Epicurians, they said, death is nothing to ask.

Because to Epicurians, the only source of distress was sense experience. by definition once you're dead there's no sense experience so nothing to fear there. It stands from Socrates of course. At the end of Plato's apology he says, I don't know what death is there's two possibilities and neither of them is very frightening. It's either total oblivion, that, nothing wrong with that, or I get the chance to go and ask questions of interesting people like Agamemnon and so on and so forth, and that sounds good too. So yeah, that was the origin of the tradition that don't worry about death, but it clearly was, I mean, it's still, it's still worried to people. I think I heard some confusion. Had to people not want to be dead or are they fried of dying? They might be dead. They fear dying rather than being dead, but I don't know.

I think we fear, you know, whether death is painful, but I think, when I think about death, it's primarily rooted in my attachment to the things I have now. There's the great Epicurian thing about how, yes, when you die, you'll never get another running hug from one of your children. And when you think about that, it's very sad. And then he says, but you will be dead so you won't care. But I think primarily what we fear when it comes to death is the cessation of life that we're attached to what we have,

what we do, the things we want to do. And we feel like death is the enemy of that. Yeah. It reminds me of a Woody Allen joke, very good joke, I think, where he was asked, he says, you know, what do you think about life? Is it a veil of tears? What do you think about it? He says, well, I think about it like these two women having dinner in the cat skills, and once there's the other, the food here is awful, and the other one says, yes, and there's never enough of it. I love that. I love that. So that's that's what the audience take on life as well which I think is pretty good. But what's interesting about Marcus is the role that that death plays in Marcus

is that he seems to use it kind of as a spur, right? He says, you know, you could leave life right now that again, I'm quoting Hayes for memory, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. You know, he says, concentrate on this as if it's the last thing you're doing in your life. He seemed to use death as a reminder, not to take time for granted, not to waste time, not to waste energy on things that he didn't control. Absolutely, to seize the moment. And he can solve himself in several ways about it. I mean, he sees death as a perfectly natural process. Everything that is born is going to die, so there's nothing long can do about that. And even as a good process, because he says it's necessary for the perpetuation and renewal of the universe that the elements of which I am made are recycled into other things, a tree or a horse or something

like that. So he approaches death from a number of different angles, but all of them are designed ultimately to to consult himself in the face of death. And as you say, to sharpen his attention to the present moment. One of the interesting criticisms that stoicism has gotten, I feel like every reporter that's writing a piece about the popularization of stoicism when they interview me, they seem to go, well, isn't stoicism just about resignation? Isn't it just about the preservation of the status quo? So is it somehow either irrelevant today or is it somehow offensive to believe in Stoicism

given all the injustice in the world that needs to be changed? I've always found that strange because I feel like if Marcus was resigned to the status quo or resigned to anything, why would he have shown up for work every day? Which, you know, we know he takes from Antoninus a real imperative and obligation to public

service. And that strikes me as a through line through all the Stoics. If the Stoics were resigned, why would they have participated in politics? So it spent so much of their finite amount of time on this planet being political. No, no, no, they weren't just resigned, they were, they were, I mean, they were, how you interacted with the world in the right way. They did believe that events were predetermined.

They believed that every event was part of a huge causal chain of events stretching back to the very beginning of the universe. But that didn't mean that you could just be lazy. It didn't mean that there was absolutely nothing for you to do. The analogy they used was a cylinder has the capacity to roll, but it still takes somebody to push it to start it rolling. So, you know, an event is an event. It is what it is. But it's still, we still have the capacity to interact with it in our own different ways, depending as the sound or moral character. So it's not like it's not lazy determinism at all that they

were in tune. Yeah, and you know, when I look at the history of stoicism post-Marcus, it really is particularly, you know, starting in about the 18th century, I see stoicism, you know, inspiring the founders of America during the American Revolution. I see it, you know, a translator of Epictetus, who I'm sure you used work you looked at when you just did your recent translation, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, you know, is a leads a black regiment of troops in the US Civil War. You know, so the idea of the Stoics

as being sort of resigned or not involved, even at the forefront of political change, strikes me as a mischaracterization of the role they play. Well, no, I mean, you talked earlier about a stoic, I can't remember who it was, killing somebody. No, they were, I mean, the ancient stoics were very active politically, and they were quite prepared to carry out assassinations

or regime changes, or whatever it took if they felt it was the right thing to do. There's plenty of history of that. But let me go back to you were raising this, you were voicing an objection that you get other people saying to you about state resignation. So let me put this in a way which disturbed me recently. So we had a very important, you guys, had a very important election last year. You could choose, he who shall remain nameless or you could choose Joe Biden. I'm following Stephen Colbert on that.

He doesn't, he for months now he hasn't used the name. And somebody asked me, what would Markers say? And the answer, as you know as well as I, is it doesn't matter who's elected. Because beyond casting, I mean, you do what you can, you cast your vote, but other than that, it's beyond your control. It's no longer up to you. That's the famous stork phrase, what is up to us, what is up to you. But beyond casting a vote, the result of the election is not up to you. It's therefore an indifferent, something that is neither good nor bad, and something that shouldn't contribute,

shouldn't contribute either way to your happiness or your misery. So, you know, that would have been what Marcus and Epic Teeters would have said. It doesn't matter who gets elected. And that disturbed me because to me it mattered a great deal who got elected. Well, yeah, look, it's complicated, right? It's complicated. So I would say first of voting is a preferred and different, right? Voting allows us to express our preference. We have a minus fuel impact, but you know, perhaps it does. And this it's funny, right? And this is where that that resignation is troublesome because I talked to lots of people who say

why vote? It doesn't matter. You know, this was an election that was decided by, you know, a few thousand votes in a few states that was decided by, you know, a few thousand votes in a few states that could potentially shape the course of the future of humanity. But I do feel like the Stoics would say, it doesn't matter in terms of what you then do as a human being, right? So Marcus isn't saying it doesn't matter whether you have a good ruler or a bad ruler.

Of course, the state should have a good ruler. But if you have a bad ruler, you're, the state should have a good ruler, but if you have a bad ruler, you're still obligated to hold up and live by the same four virtues of stoicism. So, I had an interesting opportunity in 2016, who shall not be named someone in the administration offered me a job. I was offered a job as a spokesperson for one of the cabinet members. And I had to sit and think about, you know, yes, I don't control who's president. I don't control who is the cabinet member, but I do decide whether I'm going to be in service of that administration or not. And I think where the Stoics are tricky is, did Seneca make the right

choice working on the inside, trying to contain Nero, or was Thrasia and the Stoic opposition who ultimately plot against Nero, who was more Stoic? I don't know what the answer is. Yeah. Well, it's this slight paradox, isn't it? As we were saying, a lot of the ancient Stokes were politically active and did regime changes and things like that. But at the same time, I think the pure Stoic view would have been, it doesn't matter, it's indifferent. But in a sense, yeah, it's difficult.

When we've took the Roman Stoics, who are the ones whose texts survive, Sen Seneca and Epic-Titus and Marcus, and a little bit of Misernius Rufus, they were less rigid, I think, than the old Stoics. They were prepared to call preferred indifference good, even though in strict Stoic terms they're not good. They allowed that looser use of the term good and so on and so forth. So I think, yeah, we're talking about the Roman Sturks, we're probably on the right lines, but whether Chrysipus and Xeno, you know, they probably would have said, it doesn't matter.

But Marcus would have said, no, yes, but for Joe. Well, I think that's the interesting evolution of the Sturks, and I did this book, Lies of the Stoics, also with Steve, which is that, I think Xeno and Clientes and Cresipus, I think we're a lot closer to the cynics, sort of, or actually closer to the high philosophy we were talking about, which is detached from life. And I think as Greece is absorbed into Rome and then Rome comes to rule the world, the Stoics realize, and Marcus says this in Meditations, he says, you don't live in Plato's Republic. You know, he should have said you don't live in Zeno's Republic either. You know, you live in the real world, you've got to make real decisions. And so this is where I think a certain kind of pragmatism

enters the stoic toolkit. And I think it's better for it. You know, Senica, Senica maybe takes it to its extreme and perhaps it's into the realm of hypocrisy, but it is an important flavor of stoicism, the pragmatic stoic. Yeah, I think you're right. I'm sure you're right. Well, look, I loved the book. I now have this somewhat unenviable task. So when I read a book,

I take notes, and then I have to transfer all these notes to note cards. So I have these little note cards, and then at the top, I have the Toeic virtues. So I sort of mark which one each is going for. My hand is already pained in anticipation of having to go through your addition because you know it's what it's it's about 300 pages and I'm pretty sure I marked every single page. So I'm gonna have to go through and do quite a bit of writing having finished your wonderful translation. Oh good. It's very nice to know that you're taking it seriously. I am. Can you think of any other elements that we haven't touched on with the StoEx that we should conclude with? I think we've done a pretty good sweep. I think so too. I'm just trying to flip

through to see if there's any quotes that I wanted to conclude with because I really did. Let's conclude with 754 if you want to read it. I like this one. I gravly voice. I've been doing a lot of dusty work out in the field and got dusty by throw. It's always better in a British accent, so I'm gonna have you read it. Wherever you find yourself, it's within your power at every moment to be reverently content with your present circumstances, to behave with justice towards the people

who are presently around you, and to manage your present impressions so that nothing slips into your mind that you haven't adequately grasped. I love it. Our newest course, Daily Stokes, Stoicism 101, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. You can sign up now, just go to dailystowuck.com slash 101. You're going to be able to benefit from my synthesis of all this information over the years.

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We think it's going to be one of our best. I hope to have you join me. Just go to dailystowick.com slash me. Just go to daily stoic.com slash 101 that's daily stoke.com slash 101 or just click the link in the show notes and I'm excited to talk to you soon. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.