The Angel Standing in the Sun, by JMW Turner (cropped)
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
The Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) is the master of the ‘consolation’, a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcia, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on ‘losing’ him to exile—an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter.
The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least 14 children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad:
Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.
The image is deliberately impersonal. To a parent, the death of a child is a profound loss; but to nature, it is no more extraordinary than the falling of a leaf. The Stoic challenge is, somehow, to hold both perspectives at once.
Marcus was a Stoic, and would have known, at least in principle, how to cope with grief, loss, and bereavement. But if Seneca could have consoled Marcus on the loss of his children, and could only have told him three things, what would he have told him?
A Life Can Be Sufficient
First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die—indeed, they often do—and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence. Since a life can never be long or great enough, the most that it can be is sufficient, and we would do better to concentrate on what that might mean. A short life may be complete, just as a long life may be squandered, or drag on for far too long. It is not how many years we have, but what we make of those years, or the shape of those years.
Is Death Really Such an Evil?
Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life. Life is full of suffering, and grieving only adds to it, whereas death is the permanent release from every possible pain. Indeed, many people who have died—think only of our friend Cicero—would have died happier if they had died sooner. If we do not pity the unborn, why should we pity the dead, who at least had the benefit, if benefit it is, of having existed? The unborn cry out as soon as they are delivered into the world, but to the dead we never have to block our ears. If weep we must, it is not over death, but the whole of life, that we should weep. Marcus, you may find this bleak, or me brutal. But if death is a loss to those who remain, it does not follow that it is a misfortune to the departed—and we should not deepen our grief by assuming it is so. When King Midas compelled the wise Silenus to reveal what was best for human beings, he replied: ‘Not to be born; and, failing that, to die soon.’
The People We Love Are Only on Loan
Third, we should treat the people we love not as permanent possessions but as temporary loans from fortune. When, in the evening, you kiss your wife and children goodnight, reflect on the possibility that they, and you, might never wake up. In the morning when you kiss them goodbye, reflect on the possibility that they, or you, might never come home. That way you’ll be better prepared for their eventual loss, and, what’s more, savour and sublime whatever time you spend with them—and, in that way, lead them to love you more.
If you do lose a loved one, do not grieve, or no more than is appropriate, or no more than they would have wanted you to, but be grateful for the moments that you shared, and consider how much poorer your life would have been if they had never entered into it.
Sometimes, like now, Marcus, our grieving is recent or prominent, but in truth we are permanently grieving. We accumulate losses—people, places, possibilities, former selves. Much of that grief simply recedes, only to resurface more softly in our quieter moments.
Everything leaves us, and if they do not, we leave them.
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 26 July 2026.
We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves marginally more comfortable. The Stoics, Cynics, and Spartans believed that this pursuit of comfort could pose a trap. Their remedy was occasional voluntary hardship.
In the deep winter, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’
Like their predecessors the Cynics, and like the Spartans, the Stoics greatly valued hardship, albeit on a more modest or moderate scale. They believed that we should occasionally practise poverty or put ourselves through mild hardship, and this for several reasons:
First, to discover what we can do without, and reduce our fear of losing those things. In his Letters, Seneca advises Lucilius: ‘Set yourself a period of some days in which you will be content with very small amounts of food, and the cheapest kinds, and with coarse clothing, and say to yourself, ‘Is this what I was afraid of?’’
Second, to be reminded that simple things, such as bread and olive oil, or a good night’s sleep, can be just as enjoyable and profitable as any great banquet (if not more so), and thus that pleasure is both readily available and highly transferable.
Third, to better reflect upon our true goals, or to work towards them. ‘If you want to have time for your mind,’ says Seneca, ‘you must either be poor or resemble the poor… One cannot study without frugality, and frugality is just voluntary poverty.’
Here are six more advantages of self-imposed hardship, according to the Stoics:
To increase our appreciation and enjoyment of the things that we normally enjoy.
To break from our normal routine, and reinvigorate our minds while exercising our freedom.
To be prepared for future hardship, which, unless we are suddenly struck dead, is all but a certainty.
To be convinced that the greater part of our suffering lies not in fact but in our attitude towards it.
To practise self-discipline, or test our fortitude.
To empathise with less fortunate people, and people from the past.
In addition, self-imposed poverty and hardship can also have more mundane benefits, such as losing weight, saving time or money, and making yourself popular by seeming like one of the people.
Finally, all these motives are in themselves a source of pride and pleasure of a different kind. ‘Do not,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘lament misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of man who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you.’
Seneca does us the favour of putting self-imposed hardship into radical perspective when he says: ‘Armies have endured being deprived of everything for another person’s domination, so who will hesitate to put up with poverty when the aim is to liberate the mind from fits of madness?’
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
The Stoic dog and cart: we can run willingly alongside the wheel of fate, or resist and be dragged along anyway.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.
The Stoic revival has picked up pace in recent years, with people looking for something more substantial than the material hedonism that has come to fill the space vacated by the retreat of organised religion.
Although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluid concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma.
But the similarities do not end there.
Although Stoicism and Buddhism emerged at different times and a continent apart, they repeatedly arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about desire, attachment, suffering, and the good life.
Desire and Attachment
According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the cause of all suffering is desire, and the natural way to eliminate this suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The first division of the Noble Eightfold Path is ‘right view’, or maintaining perspective on reality.
Similarly, the Stoics taught that we ought at every moment to be rational. Unfortunately, we are too readily waylaid from reason by unwise attachments and the destructive emotions to which they give rise. These attachments dangle the promise of pleasure or happiness but really offer only slavery—whereas, if only we could see it, nothing leads to pleasure and happiness as surely as reason and self-control.
In the words of Marcus Aurelius, which are all the more remarkable for coming from a Roman emperor:
Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river… Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.
The language differs, but the insight is much the same. We suffer not only because things change, but because we demand that they remain as they are. For both traditions, the path to freedom is not to exert greater control over the world, but to loosen the world’s hold over us.
God and Fate
Stoic physics is indebted to Plato’s Timaeus, in which the philosopher Timaeus claims that God’s creation is itself a god. Human souls, being fashioned from the inferior residue of the world soul, are aligned with the will of God. But once implanted into a body, they are overwhelmed by sensations and affections, which they can only overcome through appropriate nurture and education.
Like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, Stoicism rejects a separate divine sphere, arguing instead that God is infused in all things, including in us, who therefore share in His nature. We are, as the Stoic Epictetus often reminds us, a part or extension of God:
In conversation, exercise, discourse—do you remember that it is God you are feeding, God you are exercising? You carry God around with you and don’t know it, poor fool.
The Stoics were essentially pantheists, like Baruch Spinoza, who thought of God and creation as one and the same thing. And like that other great seventeenth-century philosopher, GW Leibniz, they believed that the universe is a rationally ordered whole and that everything that happens within it, if only we could see it, happens for the best of possible reasons.
Hence, our fate has already been determined: Instead of rebelling against it, we should be content to play the role that has been assigned to us. We are, said Zeno (the founder of Stoicism), like a dog tethered to a cart: the wise person runs smoothly alongside, whereas the fool struggles and strains but is dragged along anyway.
This is more subtle than simple fatalism. The dog cannot determine where the cart is going, but it can determine how it makes the journey. Its freedom consists in running willingly alongside the wheel of fate, instead of exhausting and injuring itself in futile resistance.
This echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as ‘duty’. When Krishna addresses the reluctant warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is not persuading him to fight so much as telling him that he is going to have to fight regardless:
Fettered by your own task, which springs from your nature, you will inevitably do what you in your folly do not want to do.
Evil and Liberation
Chrysippus, who succeeded Zeno and Cleanthes at the head of the Stoa, argued that evil is the inevitable consequence of nature’s goodness. For instance, many of the bones in the human skull are light and thin, improving it overall but by the same token leaving it vulnerable to blows. Evil presents us, as it did the hero Hercules, with opportunities to test and hone ourselves—and also a motive, for what would it mean to be good in a world without evil?
In Samkhya-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls and consciousness by providing them with experience and, in time, liberation. To put this more poetically, the world was created to show consciousness to itself. The doctrines of karma and moksha (liberation) could not hold in a world without evil.
Salvation, for the Stoic as for the Hindu, is to embrace life to the point of accepting fate, and so to become as one with the world. In Indian terms, it is to achieve moksha, that is, liberation from maya (illusion), dukkha (suffering), and samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth).
In the Encheiridion, Epictetus compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.
For all their theoretical differences, the traditions keep arriving at the same practical conclusion: do not mistake the stopping place for the final destination.
Cosmopolitanism
Philosophers debate whether karma theory is a firm basis for morality or just an appeal to naked self-interest.
One way around this problem is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions so that the system becomes impossible to game. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome.
For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.
The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others—so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.
The Stoics, too, believed that all human beings form part of a single organism. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we too each have a role to play in society, even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Remember,’ says Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Both Buddhism and Stoicism conclude that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone. Buddhism arrives at this conclusion through the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, Stoicism through the oneness of humanity. Although the working out is different, the conclusion is the same.
Time and again, Buddhists and Stoics begin from different assumptions, yet converge on the same human truths: that everything changes, that attachment enslaves us, that resistance compounds suffering, that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone, and that the boundaries we draw around ourselves are much more porous than they may seem.
Did Stoicism Make Marcus Aurelius a Better Emperor?
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a private journal, never intending it to be published.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 28 July 2026.
In Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), Socrates says that his vision of the ideal state could not exist ‘until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy…’
Here he was at last, more than five hundred years later, rarer even than the Æthiopian phœnix: the fabled philosopher-king—and not just any vassal or kinglet, but the Emperor of Rome.
His private journal, the Meditations, has become one of the world’s most widely read works of philosophy, inspiring everyone from statesmen and soldiers to psychologists and countless ordinary readers seeking wisdom in difficult times. J. S. Mill, in On Liberty (1859), hailed it as ‘the highest ethical product of the ancient mind’.
So, how did it work out?
How Marcus Became Emperor
Marcus was born in 121 CE as Marcus Annius Verus, into a prominent senatorial family with intimate imperial ties. He began from an early age to evince signs of virtue, so that the emperor Hadrian noticed him and even punned on his name, Verus (‘True’), calling him Verissimus (‘The Truest’).
In 136, Hadrian, having no male heir, adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, who now became Lucius Aelius Caesar. But Lucius died in 138, and Hadrian had to choose again.
This time, Hadrian adopted Titus Aurelius Antoninus, the husband of Marcus’ aunt Faustina the Elder, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt Marcus and the son of the late Lucius, also Lucius.
The intricacy of these machinations suggests that Hadrian intended Antoninus as a simple placeholder for Marcus, and the much younger Lucius as a spare.
Whatever the case, by the age of 17, Marcus had already been marked out as a future emperor.
Childhood and Education
Whereas most would have been overjoyed, Marcus was not.
In 132, under the influence of Diognetus, the eleven-year-old Marcus had taken up the dress and habits of a philosopher—to the extent that his mother had had to talk him out of sleeping on the floor. In the Meditations, the grown-up Marcus thanks Diognetus, a Stoic and painter, for introducing him to ‘the Greek lifestyle—the camp-bed and the cloak.’
His other tutors came to include the lawyer and orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the rhetorician Herodes Atticus, and Plutarch’s grandson, Sextus of Chaeronea.
As an orator, Fronto was second only to Cicero, and had something of the Cicero about him when he purchased the fabled Gardens of Maecenas. Much of the extensive and years-long correspondence between Marcus and Fronto is still with us.
Herodes Atticus, one of the richest men in the empire, funded several public works including, in Athens, the Panathenaic Stadium and the odeon known as the Herodeon, both of which, remarkably, are still in use.
But although Marcus had for tutors the greatest men of his age, it is the dog-eared copy of Epictetus that he received from the Stoic Junius Rusticus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still today, it is difficult to read the Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus—the former slave who inspired an emperor.
Marriage and Children
In 136, Marcus had been betrothed to the daughter of Lucius Aelius Caesar.
But after the death of Hadrian, the engagement was annulled, and Antoninus, the new emperor, betrothed him to his daughter Faustina (even though Marcus and Faustina were legally brother and sister).
Marcus married Faustina seven years later, in 145, while serving out his second term as consul.
After the birth of their first child, a daughter, in 147, Antoninus gave Marcus the imperium and the tribunicia potestas(tribunician power), thereby elevating him, in effect, to the rank of junior emperor.
Faustina the Younger would bear Marcus at least thirteen more children, including two sets of twins, over the next 23 years—but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and echoes Homer in the Iliad: ‘Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.’
Relationship with His Co-Emperor
As Antoninus began to age and ail, Marcus took over more of his responsibilities—so that he was already well worn in upon his accession to the imperial throne in 161.
He could easily have ruled alone, but instead insisted upon making his adoptive brother Lucius co-emperor.
In truth, Marcus would rather have remained a philosopher, or private citizen, but considered it his Stoic duty to take up the purple. In the Meditations, he compares philosophy and the court to a mother and stepmother: ‘you would pay your respects to your stepmother, yes… but it’s your real mother you’d go home to. The court… and philosophy. Keep returning to it, to rest in its embrace. It’s all that makes the court—and you—endurable.’
In practice, Lucius—now Lucius Verus—deferred to Marcus, who was ten years older and, by experience and temperament, better suited to the role.
The burden Marcus inherited could scarcely have been greater. Rome stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia, embracing perhaps a quarter of the world’s population. Every frontier demanded vigilance, every province justice, every crisis a solution. Marcus found himself ruling the greatest empire on earth just as it entered one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
The Antonine Plague
Towards the end of 161, the Tiber broke its banks and flooded much of Rome, bringing about a famine.
At around the same time, the Parthians invaded the client state of Armenia and began destabilizing the East.
Lucius nominally led the Roman response from Antioch, assisted by able generals such as the Assyrian Roman, Gaius Avidius Cassius.
As the war wore on, Lucius made a trip to Ephesus to wed Marcus’ daughter Lucilla.
The Romans prevailed, but the returning armies brought back a plague, possibly of smallpox. The so-called Antonine Plague raged throughout the empire for many years and quite literally decimated (killed one in every ten) the population.
The Marcomannic Wars
In 167 or 168, Marcus and Lucius set out on a punitive expedition across the Rhine and Danube, while a horde of German tribes invaded Italy from behind their backs.
In 169, Lucius suddenly died, perhaps of a stroke, or from the plague.
Marcus battled on for three more years to secure the north-eastern border, while other parts of the empire suffered smaller scale rebellions or invasions. It is at around this time that he kept the notebook which we now know as The Meditations.
He never intended these notes for publication. They were not a philosophical treatise but a private conversation with himself: reminders to remain patient, humble, just, and rational amid war, illness, political intrigue, and personal grief. Their very privacy adds to their enduring appeal. We encounter Marcus not as a distant emperor addressing his subjects, but as a fellow human being struggling, day after day, to become a better person.
Threat to His Throne
By 175, Avidius Cassius had taken control of the East, including Egypt, the granary of Rome.
In that year, he heard rumours of Marcus’ death and proclaimed himself emperor.
Marcus set off for the East, rejecting offers of assistance from some of the friendlier German tribes. But three months after his proclamation, Cassius was murdered by one of his own centurions.
His head was sent to Marcus, but the philosopher-king refused to behold it, and pardoned Cassius’ co-conspirators in the Senate.
Eastern Tour
Marcus then felt obliged to shore up the East, visiting Antioch, Alexandria, and Athens, where he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
In Athens, he endowed the first ever public chairs, one for each of the four major schools of philosophy, the Platonic, Peripatetic (Aristotelian), Stoic, and Epicurean.
His beloved Faustina, who had come with him, died in Cappadocia, and he honoured her service by having her deified.
Death and Succession
In 177, Marcus proclaimed his 16-year-old son Commodus co-emperor, breaking with the Nerva-Antonine dynasty’s remarkably successful practice of succession by the best man available—a tradition which, in truth, owed more to necessity than to enlightened principle.
This, with the benefit of hindsight, or even without, was a grave error, but what else could Marcus have done short of planting the seed of a civil war, or ordering the assassination of his own son?
In 180, Marcus, who had been sickly all his life, possibly with a stomach ulcer, passed away at his military headquarters in Sirmium, Pannonia, thereby bringing to an end the long period of relative peace and prosperity now known as the Pax Romana (27 BCE—180 CE).
In 192, Commodus was strangled in the bath by his wrestling partner Narcissus, acting in concert with other palace insiders, and with the retrospective approval of the Senate.
The demise of Commodus brought the Nerva-Antonine dynasty to a close, to be followed by the chaotic Year of the Five Emperors.
Assessment
Marcus did not merely write about Stoicism but sought to govern an empire according to its principles. Faced with flood, famine, plague, invasion, rebellion, bereavement, and chronic ill health, he repeatedly chose duty over inclination, clemency over retribution, and self-command over self-glorification. If any ruler came close to Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king, it was Marcus Aurelius.
I’ll leave the last word on Marcus to the historian Cassius Dio, who lived through his entire reign:
[Marcus Aurelius] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire. Just one thing prevented him from being completely happy, namely, that after rearing and educating his son in the best possible way he was vastly disappointed in him. This matter must be our next topic; for our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day.
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Delve deeper into the life and times of Marcus Aurelius in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
Marcus Aurelius Wrote the Meditations for Himself—Here’s Why
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a private journal, never intending it to be published.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
Marcus Aurelius never meant you, or anyone but himself, to read the Meditations. In fact, he may never have thought of it as a book at all.
In the latter years of his life, Marcus kept what amounted to a private journal: a series of reflections written for his own benefit—for strength, for guidance, and for self-improvement. We do not even know what he wrote them on. He might have made individual entries on papyrus sheets or rolls, wooden or wax tablets, or perhaps an early codex or notebook. Nor is it clear that the familiar division into twelve books is his own.
Books 1 and 2 end with geographical notes traditionally rendered ‘Among the Quadi, at the Gran’ and ‘At Carnuntum’—placing at least some of the writing amid Marcus’ Danubian campaigns against the Germanic peoples.
The Meditations, in other words, may never have existed as a ‘book’ in Marcus’ lifetime. At some point, someone divided his writings into twelve parts, or chapters—but the joins, as you might have felt, are entirely artificial.
The Fabled Philosopher-King
After the three Flavian emperors—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian—came the ‘Five Good Emperors’ of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and our man Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE). These emperors, wrote Machiavelli, ‘had no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the goodwill of their subjects, and the attachment of the Senate.’ Whereas Vespasian and Domitian had persecuted philosophers, Hadrian and Antoninus had courted them—until Marcus crossed over to the other side.
In Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), Socrates says that his vision of the ideal state could not exist ‘until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy… then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.’ Here he was at last, more than five hundred years later, rarer even than the Egyptian phoenix, the fabled philosopher-king—and not just any vassal or kinglet, but the Emperor of Rome.
Barging Into an Emperor’s Thoughts
The twelve books of the Meditations do not present any chronological or thematic order but consist of a variety of unrelated reflections that seem to have been written for Marcus’ own benefit: for strength, for guidance, and for self-improvement—for example, ‘To speak to the Senate—or anyone—in the right tone, without being overbearing. To choose the right words.’
This touching intimacy, and the epigrammatic character of many of his reflections, have ensured the appeal and perennial popularity of the work.
The first book, in which Marcus reflects with gratitude on what he has learnt from various relatives and mentors, stands out from the rest as being more structured and autobiographical. He concludes this first book by thanking the gods that ‘when I became interested in philosophy, I didn’t fall into the hands of charlatans, and didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics.’ The influence of the Stoic teacher Epictetus, here and elsewhere, is easy enough to discern.
It is unlikely that Marcus intended his thoughts for publication, or, even, for anyone’s eyes except his own. The ‘you’ that he often uses is not a generic ‘you’, but him addressing himself—for example, ‘When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors… Then let it hit you: Where are they now?’
We are not so much reading Marcus’ philosophy as overhearing him trying to live by it—and barging into an emperor’s most intimate thoughts.
Was Marcus even a Stoic?
In one place, Marcus refers to the Stoics in the third person: ‘Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble.’
This suggests that he did not consider himself a Stoic, or even a philosopher, but merely a friend or student of philosophy.
Whatever the case, he clearly held the Stoics, and Epictetus, in the highest regard, and endeavoured all his life to live up to their precepts. In the Discourses, Epictetus advises the reader to rehearse and write down Stoic responses to life’s challenges.
This embedding of Stoic principles, this turning of theory into practice, is what Marcus appears to be doing in and by the Meditations. The journal was not primarily a record of what he thought, but a means of changing how he thought, of turning his best inclinations into habits.
Ancient Therapy
This kind of reflective journalling is not original to Epictetus. In On Anger, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that he acquired the habit from his teacher Sextius, who would nightly ask himself: ‘Which of your ills did you heal today? Which vice did you resist? In what aspect are you better?’ ‘Your anger,’ says Seneca, ‘will cease and become more controllable if it knows that every day it must come before a judge.’
Is there anything finer, then, than this habit of scrutinizing the entire day? What sort of sleep follows this self-examination—how peaceful, how deep and free… I exercise this jurisdiction daily and plead my case before myself. When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent… I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. —Seneca, On Anger, 3.36
According to Epictetus, students of Stoicism ought to be trained in three areas, or disciplines, if they are to become good and virtuous and happy: desire, action, and assent. This pedagogy is echoed by Marcus when he writes, ‘Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power.’ That Marcus’ principal themes break down around the three disciplines supports the notion that the work represents his attempt to apply and embed the precepts of Stoicism.
For Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, philosophy was not something merely to be read and understood. It had to be reinforced until its principles became second nature. This may explain the repetitive nature of much of the Meditations.
The Miracle Book
Who discovered the Meditations after the death of Marcus? Who copied it? Who disseminated it? We may never find out.
The first categorical mention of the Meditations, after more than four centuries of radio silence, is from the late ninth or early tenth century. In 1558, the German scholar Wilhelm Xylander translated the work into Latin (Marcus wrote in Greek), after which it came to assume its place in the Western canon.
The transmission of the Meditations is nothing short of a miracle. Private reflections never intended for publication somehow passed from hand to hand and copy to copy until, many centuries after Marcus’ death, they became one of the most circulated works of ancient philosophy.
After Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China from 2003 to 2013, revealed that he had read the Meditations over a hundred times, it became a surprise bestseller in China too. How fitting, then, that the first recorded Roman embassy to China, at that time under the Han, arrived in 166, in the reign of Marcus.
In the Meditations, Marcus repeatedly reminds himself that fame is fleeting, that reputation is worthless, and that even the greatest names are destined for oblivion. How ironic that these very thoughts have become his greatest claim to immortality. Today, the philosopher-emperor’s private journal is the Number 1 philosophy bestseller.
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Delve deeper into the life and times of Marcus Aurelius in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
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