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The Stoic emperor never intended his work for publication. So why did he write it?

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.

In the latter years of his life, Marcus kept a journal, now called the Meditations, which has miraculously come down to us, and through which we might enter the mind of the philosopher-king. 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 learned 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?”

In one place, he 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.

This kind of reflective journaling 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.

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.

And it’s surprising how Christian, or proto-Christian, he can sometimes sound—for example, when he writes: “God sees all our souls freed from their fleshy containers, stripped clean of their bark, cleansed of their grime. He grasps with his intelligence alone what was poured and channelled from himself into them. If you learn to do the same, you can avoid a great deal of distress. When you see through the flesh that covers you, will you be unsettled by clothing, mansions, celebrity—the painted sets, the costume cupboard?” Christian persecutions in fact increased during Marcus’ reign, although that probably had little to do with him.

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, after which it came to assume its place in the Western canon.

After Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China from 2003 to 2013, revealed that he had read it 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 Hans, arrived in 166, in the reign of Marcus.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories.

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The life and philosophy, and radical freedom, of Diogenes the Cynic.

​Diogenes and other Cynics took the asceticism of Socrates to an extreme. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged from statues, and walked backward in the street. He had not lost his mind but was trying to show people up as mindless hypocrites. The Cynics were the ancestors of the Stoics.

Diogenes the Cynic (c. 412–323 BCE) was a contemporary of Plato, who once called him “a Socrates gone mad.”

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality. This story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for “money,” nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for “custom,” nomos—although it is also the case that archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope.

Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting “dainties” and chose instead to sleep in a storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas and lupins. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection. He held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not “complicated every simple gift of the gods.” The term “cynic” derives from the Greek for “dog-like,” kynikos.

Diogenes placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accord with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accord with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and the courage to live like animals or gods, reveling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear. Thus, Diogenes taught that if an act is not shameful in private, it should not be shameful in public, either. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he replied, “If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.”

Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy. When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as “an animal, biped, and featherless,” Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, “Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.” Plato consequently refined his definition, adding to it “with broad nails.” One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, “Typical Plato.” Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to be lent one of his writing tablets, he replied, “You are a simpleton Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.”

Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women, not even by Alexander the Great, who, according to an apocryphal story, came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. When Alexander asked him whether he might do anything for him, he replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunshine.” To his credit, Alexander still declared, “If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.” The old dog used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, “I am just looking for a human being.” He would also walk backward in the street or walk into the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered around to laugh at him, he would turn on his heels and say, “Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.”

After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble. The Cynics exerted a strong influence on Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, who began his career as a Cynic.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories, which is part of the Ancient Wisdom series.​

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Socrate and Alcibiades, by FA Vincent.

What we can learn from the love story between Socrates and Alcibiades.

Socrates struggled to make the young, rich, and handsome Alcibiades into a good man. He taught him that true love is the love of the soul, not of the body. When Alcibiades tried to seduce him, he rejected him with some pointed words.

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, Socrates’ greatest love was with the blue-blooded Alcibiades (c. 450-404 BCE), who was by some 20 years his junior.

Alcibiades was the son of Cleinias, who claimed descent from Ajax the Great, and Deinomache, the granddaughter of Kleisthenes the Lawgiver. After the death of Cleinias at the Battle of Coroneia in 447 BCE, the 4-year-old Alcibiades passed into the guardianship of Pericles, the architect of the Athenian Golden Age.

Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Alcibiades

Plato’s Protagoras, which is set in around 434 BCE, opens with an unnamed friend gently mocking Socrates for chasing the teenage Alcibiades. But in Plato’s Alcibiades, which is set two years later, Socrates warns Alcibiades, who is about to enter public life, that only knowledge can qualify him to advise the Athenians. Being noble, rich, and handsome are simply not good enough.

Since politics is about just action, Socrates asks Alcibiades to define justice. When he flounders, Socrates suggests that Alcibiades is perplexed about justice because he is ignorant about justice and does not know that he is ignorant about justice. When a person thinks he knows what he does not know, he will make mistakes, which, in politics, will be all the graver.

A humbled Alcibiades promises to take greater pains about himself to get the better of other politicians. Socrates points out that Alcibiades’ true rivals are not other Athenian politicians but the Spartan and Persian kings, who, in the long run, can only be overcome by virtue. So could Alcibiades tell him, what is virtue?

Alcibiades is at great pains to define virtue and variously suggests that it is “the better order and preservation of the city,” “friendship and agreement,” and “when everyone does his own work.” At last, he despairingly admits defeat: “But, indeed, Socrates, I do not know what I am saying; and I have long been, unconsciously to myself, in a most disgraceful state.”

Socrates continues: To make ourselves better, we must first know who or what we are. Neither the physician, nor the trainer, nor any craftsman knows his own soul, for which reason their arts are accounted vulgar. He who cherishes his body cherishes not himself but that which belongs to him, and he who cherishes money cherishes neither himself nor that which belongs to him but that which is at one further remove from him. He who loves the person of Alcibiades does not love Alcibiades but his belongings, whereas the true lover is the one who loves his soul. The lover of the body fades away with the flower of youth, but the lover of the soul remains for as long as the soul follows after virtue.

There is another similar-themed Alcibiades, written by Aeschines of Sphettus (another of Socrates’ students) and preserved in scattered fragments, in which Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. To emphasize Alcibiades’ unpreparedness for public life, Socrates delivers an encomium [a formal expression of high praise] to the great Themistocles, whom Alcibiades arrogantly seeks to emulate and surpass—leading a weeping Alcibiades to place his head in his teacher’s lap and beg to be educated.

In the same year, 432, in which Plato’s Alcibiades is set, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea. Out in the field, the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that “all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers.” In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades says that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, after that, let him keep the prize for valour.

Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium

Plato’s Symposium is set in 416 BCE, some sixteen years after his Alcibiades. The setting is a drinking party held by the playwright Agathon. Most of the guests have a hangover from the previous night’s revels, and all agree to curtail the drinking in favour of conversation. Since the young Phaedrus has been lamenting that the god Eros [Love] is not sufficiently praised, the physician Eryximachus suggests that each person present make a speech in praise of love.

As the company applauds Socrates’ speech, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute girl. When he sees Socrates, he picks off some ribbons from Agathon’s garland and, with them, crowns Socrates, “who in conversation is the conqueror of all mankind.” When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, Eryximachus objects to “drinking as if we were thirsty” and suggests that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.

Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus [the tutor of the god Dionysus], he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him with his famed good looks, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables around and began to pursue the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.

Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:

Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.

After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose “as from the couch of a father or an elder brother.”

In the same year, 416, that the Symposium is set, the city of Egesta in Sicily asked Athens for assistance against its neighbour Selinous, and Alcibiades persuaded the assembly to let him lead a force to Sicily. But as the Athenian fleet was about to set sail, all the hermai [sculptures with the head and genitals of the god Hermes] in the city were vandalized. The assembly recalled Alcibiades to face charges of impiety, prompting him to defect to Athens’ archenemy, Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, and so diminished Athens that its empire began to crumble.

After some years, Alcibiades returned to Athens and served for a time as a general before being exiled and murdered. In the History of Animals, Plato’s student Aristotle mentions in passing his place of death: “In the mountain called Elaphoïs, in Arginusa, in Asia, where Alcibiades died, all the deer have their ears divided, so that they can be known if they migrate to another place, and even the foetus in utero has this distinction.”

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.