The Daily Stoic - Donald Robertson on Marcus Aurelius and Understanding Stoicism

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Ryan talks to author Donald Robertson about his new graphic novel Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, the various influences that molded Marcus Aurelius into a philosopher king, how Stoicism is about unity and love, and more.Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer. He is the author of several books and many articles on philosophy, psychotherapy, and psychological skills training, including How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch Bookshop).✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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 Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year- old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us dailystow.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wanderer'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. I was out in front of the pated porch the other day, with some of my employees, we were talking about something, and I could hear this sort of commotion inside the store and this man was like yelling at Jessica who works who works for Daily Stoke in the painted porch and I just being a road truck I could sort of see I was like, oh great this is someone yelling about the mask policy in the store and I I was like, sir, come on. If you don't wanna wear it, you don't have to shop here.

Just come on. And he storms out and he sort of confronts me. And I think I did a pretty good job controlling my temper. You know, he was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, how good you do this? He's yelling and he said, this is so stupid. And I said, your rights are, it's very stupid.

I thought that was funny. And then he's continuing to yell at me. And I just said, man, you just don't have to shop here. It's not a big deal. If it bothers you, you don't have to shop here. And he's going on about some insane pseudoscience and all the pandemic isn't real. And I said, it's all right, dude, you clearly don't read books.

Just move along. Which probably wasn't the nicest thing. I don't pretend to be a perfect stoic. There's that Jeff Bezos line that it's easier to be clever than kind. And I was certainly more clever in that situation than kind. But what I really dislike is, like, you can believe whatever you want. But don't come in and yell at some employee who it's not their decision, they have a hard job, they shouldn't have to put up with your crap. And least of all in these strange surreal times, least of all over a safety protocol. So I have a problem with bullies, and this was a very clear example

of bullying plus a temper tantrum thrown by a very old man who should have known a lot better. The point is all of this is to set up today's interview with one of my favorite people, a very sweet man, a very great writer who would never do such a thing. And we talk about this in the interview, talk about Marcus really,

he's talking about Sennaka, how they would have struggled to put these ideas into practice. It's easy to know, hey, be kind, be courteous, let it roll off your back like a water and a duck, but it's hard to do it in practice, right? It's hard to do it in practice. And Donald Robertson's amazing book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. It's actually a book that would have been 10 feet from me inside the store, one of the great books on Stoke Philosophy

published in the last couple of years. How to think like a Roman Emperor, the Stoke Philosophy of Mark's Relias. He also has a new graphic novel called Verismus, the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. And he is a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and trainer who's born in Scotland, worked as a psychotherapist in London for 20 years, then he immigrated to Canada. And now he divides his time between Greece and Canada. We both had the same book agent in Stephen Hanselman. He's a great public speaker, has a delightful accent. And I was excited to have him on the podcast for the second time to bring this full circle. It felt like I just had him on the podcast. And then it struck me

that I'd interviewed him from the closet in my wife's parents' house when we visited them in Los Angeles in the depths of the pandemic in July 2020. So two years went by just like that. And yet here we are arguing over the same things, not just that we were two years ago, but arguing over the same things that Marcus Aurelius was experiencing and shaking his head out and being frustrated with in his own time, just as we were a hundred years ago, as John Embarry, my guest, from a couple of weeks ago talks about in the great influenza, all of which is a beautiful, tragic, funny, sad, frustrating illustration of that very stoic concept of how history is the same thing happening over and over and over and over again. That's just how it is.

Got to come to terms with it. Check out how to think like a Roman Emperor. You can pick that up in the paint and porch or anywhere books are sold. Check out Donald Robertson's new graphic novel, Verismus. And you can check out his work at donaldrobertson.name or follow him on Twitter at DonJayRobertsin. Well, I was thinking we should start because I know you did this new book partly for your daughter. And thinking about how the value of stoicism when you're young is really interesting to me because the more I think about Marcus Aurelius' childhood, the more fascinated I am by it.

I was thinking about this the other day. So if you lay out Marcus Aurelius' childhood and Nero's childhood side by side, they're actually very similar, right? They both lose their father very young. They're not actually in line for the throne. And they're introduced to Stoas is a more or less in their sort of late teens by a grand stoic teacher, Rousticus for Marcus, Seneca for Nero, they both become emperor. And yet it goes very differently for each one. Yeah, that's right.

You know, honestly, I've never even thought of it that before, but you're absolutely right. And why is that? Gosh, I don't know, you, controversial, like maybe Seneca. Isn't, it wasn't as good a role model in some ways as, as genius rustic as perhaps, you know, I, that, that, it has to be said. And, you know, maybe Senica, you know, wasn't as, it didn't stick to historic principles as much as, as someone else might have.

And I see, you know, we did, we kind of for sure, but I think Senica kind of collaborated with Nero to some extent. And certainly, I don't think Senica was very popular with this story proposition. I think they saw him, like bit of a traitor, perhaps. So that could be part of it. Also what's interesting is Marcus mentions Neuro.

He kind of uses him as an example of a degenerate, an tyrant basically. And also another weird bit of trivia for you is the Lucius Varis, if I remember rightly, had the same birthday as Neuro. Oh, yeah, it actually. And so people, what that tells us is that Romans were inevitably of thought that there was some kind of comparison between them, the historians think is worth mentioning that, you know, but they didn't think he was as bad as Nehru, and but they were both kind of wanted to be celebrities.

And away they were kind of preoccupied with their appearance. Well, I think one, one, one potential difference long before Asanaka is the mother. Marcus writes quite beautifully about his mother at the beginning of meditation. It's here. Actually, let me grab it because people might like it. He says some very beautiful things about his mother. We should we should riff on this here. Let me grab it. This is Gregory Hayes. He says, my mother, her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong, but to even conceive of doing it in the simple way she lived,

not in the least like the rich. I don't think Nero would have written that about his mother. Yeah, I mean, maybe not in the least like a grippina, you know, perhaps. Like, she was Marcus, his mother was an entrabuch we knew more about her, but from the little that we know, she seems to have had the big influence on him, and she seems to have been a really interesting woman. She grew up in the same household as her oldies Atticus, who is the preeminent softest of the period, which is kind of intriguing, because she was obviously to some extent, a hellentify, like she wrote in Greek and must have been pretty well created with Greek literature and was free and new. Although, actually, we don't know whether she really got on with her with these aticus,

because a lot of people find them quite a dislikable guy, but there's a weird connection. The more you study Marcus' life,, more interesting the meditation becomes because, you know, that suddenly this, all the scenery starts appearing around him, yeah, and this constellation of people that, you know, allows to read more between the lines and the, and the meditations. Yeah, I heard a historian once say about George Washington that you, the more you study the man, the more you like him, or the more impressive he turns out to be. And I think that holds true for Marcus Aurelis. It's been rare that I've ever discovered something about Marcus that I didn't know, and I learned a lot from your first book, for instance. But, and then I've been reading Henry Sedgwick wrote this little biography of Marcus Aurelis

that I'm reading right now, sort of lost, or forgotten biography. Every time I read a new perspective on Marx, I end up respecting or admiring him more. There really hasn't been anything that I've come away with and gone, that was disappointing. Whereas Seneca is kind of the opposite.

The more you study Seneca, the more complicated it is. Yeah, yeah, the more you study said, the more you dig into Seneca, like the more problematic, Yeah, the more you study said, the more you dig into Senekal, like the more the more problematic, like he becomes Senekal. He's, I mean, honestly, in a sense, I mean, I guess this is a question of terminology. Normally, when we say solfist, and we're talking about class class quantity, we're really talking about Greek thinkers, but there were Latin orators and retrition

very similar to the surface. And so you can kind of talk about Latin surface of frontal. For example, it is a bit like a surface. He's kind of a Latin surface. Sennake is borderline Latin surface, like in a sense, it's not really clear to what extent he actually lived. And also because we can't see him, right? Yeah. Sometimes you would, you would know a philosopher if you walked past one in the street or you, you know, you can then knew them personally. It was obvious that they were really living like a philosopher. But I think with Sennaka people probably got the opposite impression. You know,

he had those hundreds of Mahogany tables or whatever it was. And, you know, these huge estates and things. And, you know, he was always hobbed no being with society and stuff. So I think the people that were at a write-in probably thought, like, you know, there's a big gap between what you put in your writings and what your life is actually like. And I was, I really think, Sennaka, one of the things I take from his writings is that, even if I try to suspend judgment

about what's up personally, he was, like, it seems to me he's putting quite a lot there for his ratings into constructing his public image. He doesn't really say much about his, like in the letters to the Silias, for example, in his other ratings. You wouldn't really imagine that he was a new or right-hand man. Well, he puts, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't talk about that, and he doesn't really give any ends about his opulent well, apparently. There's a lot of that he leaves out and all the to construct a kind of different image of himself.

Well, so, so for, for people who are listening who are not as familiar with the terms, is that kind of how you would distinguish between a sophist and a stoic or a sophist and a philosopher? Sort of one is interested in theory and ideas and beautiful language and the other is about sort of the code of ethics and practices? And this is a really cool question, right? How do you spot a solfist? Is like a really good question. Because Socrates says in one of the platonic dialogues, you guys sound just like philosophers sometimes.

I think it's new if you do missy says something like that. And Epic teetus, if I remember rightly, there's a passage where Epic teetus says something along those lines as well. So sometimes a solfist could look just like a philosopher. For instance, Herodic Atticus used to quote epictetus to people. So he was really good at quoting epictetus apparently. He knew the discourse is really well.

So he would sound like a surface. But was he doing it because he really agreed with epictetus? Or because he thought it was impressive and it was all show. We get around the applause, it made him look intelligent. The office used to compete, giving speeches, kind of like on social media today, the most popular post gets the most engagement or most likes. The office would compete to get the biggest round of applause from their audience or to draw the biggest crowd. So they saw what they were doing,

is kind of like a game, a competition, it was all about appearances, it was all about image over substance, if you like. And I think that's really the difference. So one of the differences that Socrates would have said as well is, you know, there's a, and I expect a so- so critic irony that people don't mention that much but it's mentioned several times in Plato that Socrates used to pretend

he had a bad memory. We're just kind of weird right? He'd be like oh I listen I've just got this terrible memory people like socrates we know you don't have a bad memory and the reason supposedly that he did it was that he didn't like the fact that Sophists would talk for a long time without interruption. And he thought he needed to keep stopping them and just say, hang on a minute, that thing that you just said or that assumption that you just made can we just go back a couple of steps and question that? Like, because if you, I'm kind of, I'm going to lose track if you keep going. Like, just let's just stop every couple of minutes and check if they hated that because they kind of interrupted their flow. But, you know, because I'm going to lose track if you keep going, like just let's just stop every couple of minutes

and check if they hated that because they kind of interrupted their flow. But it's really easy for someone to make an assumption that's false and then talk for an hour about it and then line you with you know, retrics, that's kind of what he wanted to prevent them from doing. So, Sophos would talk about without necessarily allowing people to question the freezer positions that they were making.

So, that's something I imagine you can relate to. I certainly can too. I can explain a piece of stoke philosophy. I can get it perfectly done on the page. I can do it in an interview like this. I can do it in an interview like this. I could do it on social media. I even can know what will the audience will respond to most, what will resonate the most, what people need to hear the most.

But there is of course the very big difference between then applying that in your personal life, not because you don't agree with it or don't care about it, but because it's extraordinarily hard, right? So there's a certain, there's like multiple levels of hypocrisy, right? There could be the hypocrisy of like,

hey, you shouldn't have premarital sex or sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, you're carrying on and having affairs. You're saying something that you just don't believe. You're trying to hold some, you're holding people to a standard for, you know, Christianity reasons or personal reasons or whatever, which you don't believe. That's a level of hypocrisy, which maybe Seneca is at, maybe he's not. And then there's this sort of other level, which is, you know, maybe Marcus Aurelis is

talking in meditations about, you know, life is too short to care about this or that, or this is why you can't lose your temper at so and so. And then life is hard, right? Then actually doing it is hard, even if you agree with it and can repeat it back perfectly. Yeah, it's absolutely, absolutely. And so, I mean, I think we're kind of getting to the core of what the difference was between these two characters, Neuro, Marcus, are really as... Probably the people that were around them, I think, made a difference, and maybe also their personality traits. But I think that the Marcus didn't want to be famous, as far as we can tell.

Like, I think also Marcus saw Hadrian in decline. And what I take away from reading the Roman histories, that maybe as an always emphasized, is I really think Hadrian had a big impact on Marcus and it was a car crash. Like, and Marcus saw Hadrian kind of going crazy. Like, I can have imagined Hadren a bit like, you know, Colonel Corks in a apocalypse now or something like that.

He built this huge estate like outside of Rome and can just hold himself up there. Like he'd completely fell out with the Senate and was having these political bridges and going crazy. And so Marcus saw like this collapse basically happening. Hedren actually brought Marcus to come and live with him for like the last six months or so of his life. And Marcus, a teenager at the time,

I think was scared and for several reasons. And you know, he looked at that and thought, I don't mind it, I'll play this guy. And I think it really shook him. Like the historians say, the shook him and sometimes the exaggerate, there's propaganda and rhetoric that leads them to say he didn't really want to be Emperor. We had to kind of drag him into it. But I think in Marcus's case, that's true. Like he thought the last Emperor was a complete car crash and I don't want to end

up like him. And then, you know, Marcus saw Antoninus Pius and he thought, this guy's the opposite. Like, so he went from this terrible, like, negative role model, like, that completely frighted him off to seeing someone doing the opposite and being everything that Hadrian wasn't. And by the say, Marcus says several times that no one could say of Antonanainess that he was a softest. But he's interesting. But it's actually, you know, talking to this office, Hadrian wanted definitely not

want to be a softest. Like, you know, he kind of competed with them. Like, and what wanted to be famous for his rhetorical skill? It is really interesting because we know for a fact that Hadrian was an enormous influence on Marcus. They have a multi-year relationship. He picks him out as a kid, as you titled your new graphic novel. He gives him this nickname.

So they're clearly an affection and a bond. And Hadrian selects him, grooms him for power. And yet he appears almost nowhere in meditations. There's like one or two sort of offhanded mentions. And it's really about how no one will remember anyone from Hadrian's court. And so it's, I, maybe what I could make up about that is he, he, he had a love and an affection for Hadrian, but very much saw him as who he didn't want to be. And so his treatment of hajran is sort of a, if you can't say anything nice, don't say

anything at all. And so it's this judgment by omission that he very much learned who to be from Antoninus and who not to be from Hadrian, which is unusual because most of the hereditary kings would have only seen like their parent ruling. Yes. Marcus has the unusual experience of seeing two predecessors do their job before he comes a lot. Yeah, and he was adopted by hegem's, technically he was a adoptive grandfather. But he had gone a lot, even a little tidy bit further.

And I'd say that I think in an ancient world and certainly in Latin literature, like the educated Romans were much more attuned to rhetoric than most of us all today. Sure. And they knew that if you heap praise on somebody educated Romans were much more attuned to rhetoric than most of us are today. And they knew that if you heap praise on somebody, often implicitly what you're doing without even mentioning their name is trashing somebody else. So in particular, if you say the new emperor is so intelligent and so merciful,

that implies that the last emperor was stupid and cruel, right? And they totally heard that. So when Marcus heaps praise an Antoninus pious and says nothing which would be a profound insult, would be very serious, like in Rome, to completely blank, you know, hatred. People would read that and think, of course the stuff he says about Antoninus Pius is implicitly a criticism. And some of it really stands out,

like that line about Antoninus, no one could ever call Antoninus. So it really sounds like it's an implicit criticism of Hadrian as to some of the other things that he says. And you're right, he does mention Hadrian, I think two or three other times, but it's only to use him as an example of somebody who used to be a big deal,

and is now pushing up daisies, like, so being leveled by death. Well, you sort of you meet people who are very successful, or they have maybe what you think you want, and, or maybe you just see them on TV, or maybe you're just reading about them in a Shakespeare player, whatever, and you go, oh, that's not success at all.

I don't want to be this person. I think is it post-adonious or panatitis that sees a marious at the end of his life and realizes like, oh, this might have been the most successful general and console that Rome has ever known, but this guy is a complete slave to power and ego, and he really paints this sort of pathetic picture of a great man. And I think Marcus had a unique understanding of what a great emperor was and then whatever he didn't think a great emperor was, which was more Hadrian.

But then there is this kind of conflict of interest there because Hadrian was so good to Marcus and had set Marcus. So I think it was, perhaps he just saw his adopted grandfather as this kind of tragic figure who he very much did not want to end up like. Yeah, but Ryan, the last teenage boy, the Hedian, he fables on and was really, really good to win. That's true.

Found Dr. Dundin, the ballerman, and I, and I was, and Tenoeus, and he was about the same age that Marcus, when Hedian first discovered him, that Marcus was like when Hadrian came back from his travels and he was, they grew close. So I think Marcus, so we know there were many, many busts of Antinous, all, of course, all around Hadrian's villa. Marcus has brought, they are, he sees all these busts of this early teenage kid that was Hadrian. Imagine how weird that would have been. Sure. Be surrounded by loads of images of hate this crazy, despotic, rural, dead, ex teenage

boyfriend. And now he's decided that he wants you to move in. Well, I think part of that also, it must have been, that must have made Marcus Fuehl to say that he's extremely awkward and self-conscious. Many must have thought, am I going to end up drowning to the bottom of the nail or something if I say something or do something that upsets hatred?

You know, it's hatred turned into a god. He de-affonates him. And brother, a God, he deified him. And built a huge cult around him. So Hadrian's praising you isn't necessarily a good thing. It could be quite scary, sometimes strings, there's strings attached to the favor. Yes, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, that's interesting. Zeno famously said that well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. And I think mental health is a journey like that. Little decisions you make, little interventions, little things that you learn, help get you to a place where you're happier, you're more resilient. And for me, a small, but accumulatively big part of that journey has been therapist. I've had all sorts of therapists in my life. I've done all the different things you can do.

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much speculation considering it'd be kind of such an obvious insinuation. There isn't that much speculation about a relationship between Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian. Yeah, there's nothing about that as far as I'm aware of, but it lords obviously with Antennaus, but then Marcus is the other kid that Hadrian's being, you know, we're told that there's this weird phrase that kind of bugs me a bit in the history of Augusta that says Marcus was brought up. The term it uses in Latin literally means in the bosom of Hedren, like he was reared in the bosom of Hedren, or sometimes it translates in the Hedrens lap, which obviously sounds kind of creepy. Like, and it must have been, although this isn't really emphasising the histories, they kind of go from emphasising how Hadrian was this, like, you know, predatory, older, my pedorast,

basically, to then kind of dropping that when it comes to talking about Marcus. Yeah, I, that is. I don't know. Maybe they just didn't want to tell us Marcus is like name in any way by any kind of sexual. And you end up with a lot of there was a lot of sexual injury in your end up at page and other teenage boy, not just until you know us. So obviously, you know, Marcus is in an upward environment there. And then he says in the meditations, again, really cryptically, something about Antoninus Pius doing a way with pedorasty, like any kind of praises him for that. And he praises Antoninus for bringing an end to it. It's not really clear what he means by now, but again, it does sound a bit like a contrast with Adrian.

Like, you definitely couldn't have said that, Adrian. Shlay, you know, it sounds like you, you know, an implicit, some kind of implicit contrast that he might be making there again. I find Marcus Aurelis and Antoninus' relationship so fascinating because because okay, so so for people who don't understand or don't know this, Hadrian sees something in Marcus sets it believes he can be emperor, but but Marcus is only like 16 or 17 years old at the time, right?

And so it's too he he's smart. He's Hadrian understands power intimately enough to know that's how you make a Neuro, right? You do not give a 17 year old boy unlimited power. So there needs to be not even a regent, but there needs to be someone else to grew Marcus for success. And so he picks Antoninus. Maybe he thinks Antoninus will live for 10 more years or five years, and he lives for almost 20.

But this weird chain of succession that Hadrian sets up, Antenitis, as soon as he becomes emperor, could have done whatever he wanted, right? And that Antenitis goes, even though he, Antoninus had actually earned the job. Antoninus is the most successful Roman politician at that time. Is powerful, is well respected, is built this reputation. He earned it, and then he's being told, you're a placeholder for this kid. In every other historical instance of anything like that, you know, very quickly after.

Yeah, you're right. It's very weird. And actually I did, I feel a bit that's a law. It's also a three books, but Marcus, now, a row now, a row of pros by Oakford Field Marcus for Yale University of Press, but I had to really dig in to the details a lot more, but I still can't really understand exactly

what was going on with the succession plans. I mean, it may be they were just a little bit chaotic, because Hadrian, first of all, picks Lissius, Aelius, who's Lissius Various's father, like, and then everybody thought he was a terrible choice because he had no accomplishments to his father. Right. And then he, everybody thought he was a terrible choice because he had no

accomplishments to his name. And he died prematurely, like he was a very sickly man. And then Antoninus has nothing in common with us, dude. So it, there's no real logic to it. The only thing I can think is maybe the Hadrian succession plans were in such a mess at this point, and he was becoming subtle ill and paranoid and withdrawn and stuff, that possibly the Senate kind of pressure them into, like, a choosing unto me, and it's, so they may be thought, okay, you've had you've chose this other crazy guy, like there's just one of your own to Raj, or like another kind of hangar on, like that's a nobody. And I ended really badly. Like, so will you please just let us know how the guy that we won?

Like, it kind of feels a little bit like that to me because he should have gone from, you know, to to to to completely different type of character and Antoninus. And it was a, you know, good choice, surprisingly good choice. But I was going to say, I know a lot about trivia, like just kind of harking back to that thing about being brought up in the bosom of Hadrian. Something I didn't fully realize until I kind of started to write more and more about this, is Hadrian had, some of the Roman emperors had a network of spies that they used quite extensively.

And they also had this practice of paying informals like, that seems quite central to a lot of what happened. Adrian used that pretty extensively. We were told about it a number of times. You know, he'd open people's letters, like he'd have spies, put in people's households. And of course, all these people that he thought were conspiring to seize the throne from him, you can bet that he was opening

the mail and had spies in their households. So the freedmen and the slaves in their households are really easy to recruit as informals. Like these are people who have very little, if you say, listen, if you tell me everything you hear, then I'll say you're free and I'll give you a lot of money from the Emperor, that's extremely persuasive. So I think imagine knowing that and then being told you have to move into Hadrian's villa, we are everybody around you, works for him.

And so anything you say is potentially going to, you know, is going to be reported back to Hadrian. So I think Marcus must have thought, I have to be extremely careful what I say out loud and who I can find and even when it was in these millows house that say only once he lived into Hadrian says, and then supposedly Antoninus and Marcus did away with that. So that was, I think, you know, it's not spoken about much, but one of the other big changes, big transitions would be that they stopped spying on people allegedly.

Well, and I think there's probably, that's probably also a credit then to Antoninus and Mark's realized that they managed to pass the test given all the spying and informants that were going on. And isn't there a story that one of the reasons that Hadrian picks Antoninus is that he sees Antoninus helping his elderly father-in-law up a set of stairs, that there is this sort of inherent goodness in Antoninus that was relatively rare at that time, or is rare in politics even to this day. And perhaps that goes to, you know, whatever that goodness that he sees in Marcus that gets him to nickname

him for Christmas. And then the goodness that he sees in Antoninus, exception that proves the rule. It works out with both of them. They were both inherently good and decent people, despite a lot of temptations and a lot of reasons not to be. Well, I think so. In fact, I think we can go a bit further. So incidentally, there's another passage in the meditations that once you know this stuff about history, again, often these little bits of history suddenly give added meaning to some things that might have said. So one of them is, then you notice, he says, never say anything, never say I'll do anything that requires walls or patterns. He says, in the meditations, you think, yeah, of course, because literally you couldn't.

You had to assume that everything that you did was in public view and was being worked back to the Emperor. So that must have had a special meaning for him. But you know, the other thing that strikes me is, we don't know why Hagey and Coles marked his veressness. It's a really weird omission. So this is kind of emphasized in the histories, and it's obviously quite important. It's in Cassiastia, it's in the history of Gustav, but also we know that this seems to have been public knowledge because Justin Martyr in his apology addresses Marcus as the rest of us, the philosopher, and Adel Hood. Right.

So everyone, even in a semi-official letter, he's using this title. So it must have become a sort of cognum, and he also, it's interesting he associates, he seems to associate it with him being a philosopher, which makes it even more intriguing. So what was it that earned him this title? There's a story there that's kind of like missing and it's kind of annoying because it obviously sounds like another really famous story, which is the context that we're told that is it is, it follows on from being told that Hadrian persecuted sophists and other intellectuals that disagreed with him. So he would exile them,

destroy their careers. And there's a famous office called Favreneus of Aralata, who supposedly jolt that Hadrian had used a word in correctly, and the surface working of obsessed with how to use individual words correctly and stuff, etymology and stuff like that. So he used a word in correctly, and Favrena's his followers said, how come you didn't just tell him that you got that wrong? And Favrena said,

well, you can forgive me for not wanting to point out the errors of a man that commands Dr. T. Legions. In other words, he's an intellectual coward, right? Like, he's a significant scale. Like true. Dr. Pauer is a risky proposition. It's like Hans Christie and Anderson's fable of the Emperor's New Clothes.

So everyone's scaled to tell this guy that he's walking about naked, but he's talking, he's using word wrong and stuff like that, except then there's this little kid. Actually, we don't know how old he was, but my best guess is it's kind of implied that it was before he reached six. In the history of Augusta, I think, from the context, so it's kind of implied that he did this when he was small. It sounds like Mark has said or did something that maybe everyone else at court was, and we don't know, but you know, all the kind of circumstantial clues sort of indicate is like the Emperor's new clothes. And everyone was like, wow, that kid is the only person that could tell Hadrian something he didn't want to hear. And then, you know, maybe weirdly, this guy that was spying on everybody and persecuting anyone that would speak out against him

took a shine to Marcus because he thought this kid is the only one that's got the nerve to tell me when I've made a mistake or something like that, perhaps. I mean, you, what it was, they said to him. No, that's lovely. And in meditations, he says, if it's not true, don't say it. Yeah, if it's not true, don't think it.

He did seem to put a lot of emphasis on just speaking the truth, do it the right thing, even if it made you unpopular, even if it was risky. And maybe that's a lifelong habit. Also, this is a bit of trivia as well, but Herodian says, the Marcus had another son called Marcus Annie as Verus. So he named this other son after himself. That was Marcus's birth name that ran in his family. And he appointed him Caesar alongside Comedus. He was like a year or two younger than Comedus,

but this kid died when he was about five years old and Herodian says that Marcus also nicknamed this kid Vyrismus. Like, so he handed down the nickname and he gave it to what seems like possibly his favorite son. Maybe this kid even though he only lived to be about five, perhaps also said something very blunt and frank and honest and and Mark has looked at me and thought, he's got this frankness, the paracial, like of the freedom of speech of the philosopher's cherish the love. It is remarkable, like when you think, you go, oh, how hard it would be to be stoic when

you're an emperor, right? And it won would be. But you think about, you just describe a situation where a person loses six children before adulthood. And you try, not just to think was that person able to be stoic, but like, could that person get out of bed in the morning, right? Like that is like a horror story of horror stories. It's as close to incomprehensible as I have found in the study of people. There's always things like, wow, that's hard to wrap my head around.

But the idea that Marcus loses, not one, not two, not three, not four, and I've got, but six children, it's impossible to even conceive what that, even when people say things like, oh, that was much more common back then. I mean, it wasn't covered like that. It's like, I'd say yes and no to people who say it's true. It's, it's, it's certainly true. The infant mortality was common, death and childhood was common. And some people work work in a numb tour.

There's also examples of people being absolutely dishoort, actually front-oeling one of his letters to Marcus, talks about how he lost our grandson that was very small, and he's virtually suicidal, he's completely beside himself, although the loss of his grandson. So it's certainly not true. And also, sometimes people think that Roman nobles could be quite, so we tend to make generalizations a bit figures, yeah, it's true, right? So it's true that a lot of Roman fathers were, had little contact with their children until they reach, like adulthood about 50 years old in Roman society. And however, Marcus in his letters shows that he was a real family man, and it sounds like

he spent a lot of time with his young children. He talks to Frontal about them. He seems to take real joy in watching them play and things like that. So that maybe if other Romans were like that, Marcus wasn't like that. He's in an incredibly affectionate and warm individual in his letters to his friends as well. So, certainly he would have been devastated. We're told that he was absolutely devastated when he lost one of his tutors. He had a better of his teachers. So, of course, he would have been devastated that the loss of his children. And, you know, something else you said was that it was kind of like a

horror show. When I was working on the graphic novel, one of the things that kind of made up for me, we kind of put it on the page and we tried to visualise Marcus's life, I dawned on me one day that a lot of it was, I thought, this is a horror story. I didn't realize, like, I'm actually, I didn't dawn on me until we were trying to visualize it and I thought, this is like we're writing a horror story in places. The warfare, the carnage, the, the anti-nin play, we talk, what happens in pro's history is that you'll say there was a play

and then there was a war and then there was a war and then there was another one and then there was like a civil war. They were all having a good time. They were having the same time. At the same time. Yeah, like the plague is on and going. Like for the rest of his life, like people were going blind and with sores on their faces and you know like horrible outbreaks and stuff, devastating. It was very visible as well., so Marcus' life, I think from that point onwards, from the point of the plague onwards, became, I think Rome must have become, and then the indications in the history

is that Rome became a darker and more desperate. Place were told incidentally about religious fanatics appearing and exploiting the gullible during the plague and stuff like that happening. There was a civil war during the plague. I think social unrest and I kind of break down of the cohesion of society to some extent. It was tense. Things got tense. Yeah, that's like a plague, civil unrest. If only there was some way I could relate to that experience. You know, your point about how the more you understand about Marcus' life, and this is what I was trying to do in lives of the Stokes, I think you do this well in the graphic

novel, you do it extremely well in how to think about how to think like a Roman Empire, Roman Emperor, is that when you understand the history, you realize a lot of these, as you said, a lot of these lines and meditations, you understand that it's not just this throwaway observation. There's a life experience behind it. So there's one part, and I talked to Robin Waterfield about this, I forget which book it is, it's later in meditations, but there's like two back-to-back

entries where Marcus is clearly talking about having, he talks about wanting children in an old age, you reach for your children and they're not there anymore. He talks about basically what it's like to care about someone and lose someone and then they're gone. He's not, this isn't just some abstract philosophical observation. He could be talking about the son that was named after him or his favorite daughter, or like these are real things that he's talking about that would have been excruciatingly painful and tragic and awful that really happened to him as a human being. Let's talk about the style of the meditations a little bit, because I've got something that really intrig to him as a human being. Let's talk about that.

The style of the meditations a little bit, because that's something that really intrigues me. Like, I know, when the physics are noticed about the meditations, there's a couple of strange things about the way that it's written. So it's artfully vague in a sense. There are places where he mentions names of individuals,

particularly in book one, but elsewhere, sometimes he will name people and we don't, we've no idea who he's talking about, like figures that are forgotten in history, and he'll mention some specific events, but generally it's really vague. So, like probably one of the most famous passages in the meditations is the brain of the start of book two too where he says every morning when you wake up tell yourself you're going to meet troublesome treacherous, meddling people and blah, blah, blah, blah. Who are these people? Well, you know, it's it's all in a way that he doesn't give any kind of indication throughout. I think there's a kind of technical reason why he does that. And it's also really cool how we know about it. So scholars when they discovered in the 19th century, we also have this cache of letters from frontal to markets

and also between frontal and a few other people that they knew. And frontal was Marcus' Latin rhetoric, Chutta, right? So scholars were a bit disappointed because frontal was meant to be second only to Cicero, the greatest orator in Roman history. And they thought, well, in these letters, he doesn't really seem that impressive. And it does not that much for a lot. There's very little philosophy really. And I mean, these mainly kind of talking about

family, complaining about his go and talking about sleep a lot. Big success. Yeah. And there are like, Marcus's whole work that he was kind of setting him as well like you know you've got to write an essay about such and such. But there's a really cool thing like at one point there's this kind of battle between Marcus being taught Stoic philosophy and being taught rhetoric between the Stoics and the Sophists and whether Janiea Schrostik is or Marcus Connoleus for Hunter is gonna be his main tutor, it seems like there's kind of like a tension that a conflict other obviously is.

And so, for Hunter will repeatedly try and persuade Marcus that he needs to study rhetoric, even if he wants to be a philosopher. And he says at one point, I think he returns to us a couple of times, actually, that philosophers tend to come up with paradoxes. Like so because they're thinking really deeply, those say things I've never been said before, they're struggling to find the words. And he says, so of course, these ideals that they have are kind of obscure and you

need rhetoric to be able to articulate them clearly for your own benefit and other people's. And he says to Marcus, as a homework assignment, what you should do is take these sayings and turn them over repeatedly in your mind and paraphrase them, like say them several different ways. Now, scholars immediately went,

well, hand it a minute, that kind of looks like what the meditations is. Like, he's taken these wisdoms, say, you know, because it's quite repetitive, right? Why is he saying the same thing over and over again in different words? Like because he's been saying this as an intellectual exercise, like decades earlier

by Frontal, but it may also explain why it seemed as weirdly abstract, because I guess if you took a philosophical insight about a specific situation, and then you think I'm going to keep paraphrasing that and trying to find different words. I think it starts to lose its specific. That's a teeth. If you know what I mean. Sure. Like, no, Anthony, that's actually, that's actually epictetus's advice, which I have on the back of the journal. He says, every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand, write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself, and others about them. That's what the philosophy

is. It's like, meditation is the byproduct of the physical, of the philosophy as opposed to the articulation of the philosophy. It'd be like if you could, if you could somehow see a transcript of a Zen Buddhist meditation practice, That's what you'd be seeing. But actually, the transcript is irrelevant. It was doing it that was important. So I think because it's kind of, he leaves it sort of abstract and maybe because he's really saying the same thing's over and over again.

It becomes a little bit more vague. The names can I drop, specific names drop out and stuff. I think that's probably why the meditations became so popular because when he says, imagine every morning that you're going to meet troublesome people and meddling people and so on, we think that sounds like that guy that works at the desk across from me. That sounds like my mother and law or that sounds like one of my friends, right? So we project ourselves, he leaves us enough space to project ourselves into his shoes. So the positive side of that is it's easy for people to see themselves in the words and to adapt them to their own modern situation. The downside

of it, I think, is that it does, it times become a level bit abstract. And if you start to combine it with a history, and imagine that he's talking about real people and real situations, I think in some ways that allows us to picture, to put more of a human face on stock philosophy and see what Marcus is saying is more of a kind of livable philosophy of life. So those pros and cons are thing to the abstract way that he tends to articulate himself and the meditations.

The example of that that hit me the hardest and we might have talked about this when we talked, I guess this would have been in 2020, but there's a line in meditations where Marx really talks about how there's two types of plagues. There's the one that can destroy your life and the one that can destroy your character, right? When I read that in 2007, you know, it was very different than when I re-read it for however many of the time in March of 2020,

you go, oh, I see what you're talking about now because now I've experienced a plague and I've seen what a plague does to people's character. And you realize Marcus is talking about the kinds of things that you're seeing around you all the time and the way that extra events and stresses can reveal what's fundamentally flawed or vulnerable in a person. I would put the time scale slightly different, like I think at the beginning of the pandemic, when people talked about that quote,

they thought it seems a bit harsh, like it seems to be being a little bit dismissive of the plate. But then as the pandemic went on, I think more people are like, no, he's got a point. Like, you know, I mean, the pandemic was bad, but like the impact on society, like psychologically and like politically is even worse like in some way.

So yeah, I can see where he's coming from for sure. But that's also strangely abstract as well. And it's the only time that he really explicitly mentions the plague and what he says about it is strangely kind of philosophical or splyse abstract, you know. That occupies 20 years of his life or whatever, 15 years of his life and it gets one and the only mention is, is that it can affect some people's character negatively. That seems like a weird summary of a momentously historical. And not just historical, but to him, it would have been a day-to-day event, right? In the way that he would have broken up every day and news of the plague or things inspired by or changed by the the plague would have been shaping what he was doing and that's the only instance of it.

On a huge, yeah, like I mean it's trade shifted the like the the fate of the war really explicit. I mean to the extent that I think the the Praetorian guards, how do I break the plague and so it kind of like his personal body got a personal region almost. And would they lost one of the Praetorian guards at that time? And now what historians think it's possible that he was taken by the plague as well. So he would have been a friend of Marcus, like he would have been one of these closest associates and one of his most senior generals. so you're not only seeing this everywhere, but it's causing total chaos in terms of the hierarchy of Roman society. Now he's got to thank people to fill these roles, and now he's got to figure out how to fight battles when some of these legions are dying of the plague.

It could also be the uprising in Egypt, where these tribesmen called the Bikolai, and were able to defeat the ejection legion, and then Evidius Cassius, Marcus, his most senior general in the East, had to be sent and given emergency powers to put down this uprising. That may be because the ejection legion had the plague

at the time, perhaps, and they may have been under strength. And then for the Bacool Line, we might have thought, this is our opportunity. You guys are all dying of the plague in there. Well, you know, and they saw a chance and took it. It seems like it's not a coincidence that the Romans had all these uprisings and the big Mark of Man I have Asia. The invasion at that very weak, because they were seriously weakened. Yeah.

I had something else I wanted to run by you because I've been thinking about it a lot recently. I was reading Hyrocleas or Heracles. How do you pronounce it? I guess hierarchies. Okay. I was reading hierarchies. And the translator was making this note that when the Stoics started, they started with a kind of, they were very much descended from the cynics, right? There's this sort of rejection of, you know, earthly things. There was kind of this,

it's hyper individualistic, like get what's your focus on your own self improvement, forget everything else. And that as Stoicism evolves, she's sort of noting that it's softens, right? But it softens into the notion of justice. Even though Zeno talks about courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, she's saying that the still, the justice was, was undervalued as a virtue.

But by the time it gets to Marcus Aurelius, this idea of being community minded, of participating, of trying, of giving a shit about other people, this becomes the primary still a virtue, which Marcus really says, you know, a number of times in meditations. And what do you think about that evolution? Yeah, what do you think about that evolution that I've another follow up to that? I think it's true. Like, I mean, maybe in some ways they just conceptualized justice and social responsibility a little bit differently and in classical Greece, then they did in Roman society, but for sure the cynics were less concerned

with our social bonds and responsibility and they do seem a bit harsh at times. And the story is, but Markis it puts so much emphasis on justice. He actually literally says it wouldn't be the most important, right? He mentions justice or natural affection or cosmopolitanism or something, something along those lines that something that has to do with our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to society and almost every page of the meditations. Like, it's the main theme really of the book. But that's not something I, obviously, in dialogue in New Zealand, if he is concerned about society, it's in a more red-a-main tree way.

Yeah, and I've just been interested in that evolution now, because it does seem that there is a hyper individualistic, I don't want to say right wing because it puts too much of a modern political. But there does seem to be a misunderstanding today of stoicism that skips out on the inconvenience of having to care about other people. And perhaps the confusion is in the dichotomy of control, we don't really control other people. So maybe people are confused as to why they're supposed to care about their well-being.

But Marcus really doesn't seem to have any confusion in this regard. I think it's also linguistically, because we use the word stoic. Like all of these terms for Greek philosophy, their meanings became caricatured over the centuries, right? Sure. So what we mean by a peculiarity today, generally is just somebody that enjoys fancy food and find dining and stuff like that, right? Yeah. And what we mean by cynic with a small C is just somebody that can sniff us things and, sure, you know,

as a negative attitude towards other people. And the surface skeptic, like, these other words, academic have all kind of become a little bit simplified, or caricature, than the meaning over time. So stoic comes to mean just being like a robot or, you know, being an emotional light. And that's actually how we use the term in psychology as a research construct. Like in research on law case to us as I'm consistently shows that it's problematic, it's toxic, it leads to increased psychological and emotional vulnerability.

We often have to explain to psychologists that what we mean by stoic philosophy is much more nuanced and complex, than just kind of suppressing your feelings. It's like when people hear the word sexy, it doesn't have anything to do with sex anymore. It means beautiful, attractive, well-designed, or sleek, or awesome.

When you hear stoic, 99% of the time, it's not remotely connected to stoic philosophy. And not confused. Even people that, we hardly even people that read Marx and really are so, are all of it. Since this is still kind of our viewing it through the lens in many cases. And so I met people who read the meditations and I talked to them about this and they say

that they hadn't even noticed that Marcus is talking about justice and society and natural affection. And I think how is it possible? Like, it's kind of the main, it goes on and on and on and on about it. It reminds me of this quote from William Blay that says, we both read the Bible day and night, but you read black, could I read white? I can't think, how do you know, could you have not noticed all the references, you know, to not being alienated from your fellow man and, you know, having love? What did you find at the beginning? Marcus says that he's describing the ideal story. He's talking about sex, dissafe,

Karen, E.R. like Plutarch nephew who is one of his stoic teachers. And he describes him as being free from passions. And he mentions anger. I, it's a free from passions such as anger. And yet full of foster, I get full of love. Yeah, the spot one of my foster, get full of love. Yeah, despite one of their favorite passages.

Full of love. Why, you know, brotherly love he's talking about, full of story, yeah, basically, is what we translate as natural affection. But it means the love of a period for the children that's kind of like paternal love. We might say platonic love, brotherly love. He thinks that's the pinnacle of stoicism.

And yet people think, have this kind of atomistic, individualistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people interpret stoicism in many cases. And I really think if Mark Sirrelius was around, he would think this is more or less the opposite of what I thought the human ideal was. You guys are completely alienated from other people around you and the rest of society

and it's still just want to reverence that. They want this, but in a sense, I think Stoic's actually, particularly in Zeno, and then the early Greek Stoics, it's tied up with their pantheism. And I think one of the starting points is this idea that they want us to be more of one with the rest of the universe. They want us to realize our oneness with the cosmos as a whole. And with our fellow men, like with our human deans, it's extraordinary by the way, just as a slight aside to that. Marcus mentioned his being a Roman citizen a couple of times in the meditations, but other than that, he's when he talks about overcoming anger, filling love, overcoming alienation. He's talking about people in general,

not just Roman subjects or citizens, and the people that he's dealing with as he's writing that are often, and what the Romans were called, barbarian, envoys, like, you know, that is strange to think. The, again, we're, we're full of sight of that, unless we imagine I'm writing the meditations in the evening after he's had a meeting with a bunch of foreign envoys in the morning. And also he'd been surrounded by foreigners, all the auxiliary units with it being Germanic tribesmen and people from other parts of the empire. Well, he's not just talking about his fellow well-educated rich Roman senators who went to the same schools and had the same under like he's not talking about our brotherly connection as he spent

time with a couple hundred people exactly like him in a beautiful marble palace. It's in it's in the mud of a quim com, right? Like it's it's it's it's far away and he's surrounded by salt of the earth of regular ass people. He says, at one point, actually, in meditations to put one, he says that he says, I'm not talking about a bond of seed, like family or blood, I erase, he specifically says, and it's odd that he would say that, because it really highlights the fact that he's talking about probably love towards the people he's at war with. Yeah, just so you know, I think it becomes highlighted more if we really try and visualize the historical context in which he's writing this.

If we're to believe and Lucian, the We've, and Lucian, the, the chronology of this annoyingly is the sum debate among scholars. But one interpretation is that 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in a single day, at the beginning of the Markio Manic War, at Conantum, where Markis then stationed himself. That would have been one of the biggest defeats in Roman military history. And then Marcus Goesley or in stations which must have been incredibly risky. Like, so knowing that he's in this place where loads of women have been slaughtered

by the Germanic tribesmen, he's telling himself, nevertheless, I have to view these people as my brothers and sisters. Yeah, he's being tested at the, the realist level because the preservation of the empire is at stake. Public opinion is at stake. He's just witnessed a horrible atrocity and he's trying to go back to his philosophical

first principles and go, not what do I emotionally think in this moment, not what is politically convenient to think in this moment, not what will rile the troops up in this moment, but like what and my bedrock values as a human being do I want to believe in this moment? Another, it reminds me of something that I wanted to mention actually, and we kind of came close to earlier when we were talking about how often he'd been bereaved and lost

all of those children, but also many other friends and family members that he'd lost. It only, as I was working on the graphic novel, and again, I tried to really visualize Marcus's life, did it really dawn on me? I just remember just kind of setting up one day and thinking, it really hit me for the first time suddenly, that Marcus really is during the plague surrounded by people who at one point increasingly were probably plotting to assassinate him. And also many people assumed that Marcus really was going to die because he looked very frail, and stationing himself at the frontier where he was risking his life. All of these things combined when I really started to picture it, I suddenly realized he really must have woken up each morning and kind of pinched himself

and thought, and I actually still alive. He was living on borrowed time. He really must have felt that, and even beyond the like, the all, like, again, the British and all these people I rent and were gossiping about, they thought he's not going to last much longer. And he had that going on for at least a decade, I think. Like people speculating about his impending death, what must it be like to kind of know that that's the gossip and that some people in the wings are just waiting for you to die? Like he was constantly

his sense of his own mortality. I really think must have been much more pervasive and intense than it would be for most of those. That was my favorite passage in your book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. You talked about how one of the rudimentary attempts to ward off the plate was they would burn incense, right, which was also masking the horrendous stench of dead bodies and how Marcus would have woken up every day and smelled that. All the Romans would. It would have been literally in the air just in the way that the virus is in the air. So, too, is the reality of your

looming inevitable death. And even we can't be 100% for sure, because actually one of the curiosities about Galen's account is he doesn't mention from what I remember, Pockmarks are scarring on the skin. That could be wrong, but that's my recollection. That seems a little bit odd. But if it was smallpox, which is believed

there's probably a variant of smallpox. Then, you know, we would expect people to have had pock marks on their faces. So for, you know, for the next 15 years or so, Marcus would have been surrounded by people's faces. And some people would also have lost their vision. You know, they would get kind of cataracts from the effect that the playots bred onto the surface of their

eyes. They would maybe even have lost fingers or be crippled, but so they would be very visible potentially. And you say the insides hanging there would have been a constant reminder as well. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up because memento mori is I think the most beautiful life-changing and probably perennial theme in meditation just over and over again. He's reminding himself life is very short He says you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think and if Marcus Are really is needed to remind himself of that in the midst of the Antenine plague,

when you really could drop dead like that, the idea that we wouldn't need to and are much softer, more protected, bubble of a world, we need that reminder much more so. And I think in the meditations, we're benefiting from the fact that Marcus really has faced so much danger. Yeah. So we get his wisdom is very deep.

In this regard, because he spent decades really, you know, in a very immediately contemplating his own mortality. And then we get to read about what he made of that philosophically. Beautiful. Well, I love the books, and I always love talking to you. And I hope to see again one of these book. Beautiful. Well, I love the books and I always love talking to you and I hope to see again one of these days. Yeah, light-clives been a pleasure, it's always right. Thanks very much.

Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It will take time and effort, it won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper will ultimately be achievable in life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper, the 10-Day Stoic Guide to controlling your anger, you can just go to dailystoic early and ad free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery

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