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How the Stoics Became Citizens of the World

The Dream of Scipio — Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.

Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.

By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.

The First Citizens of the World

This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India.

As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.

Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.

‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.

Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’

The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism

Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. 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.

‘Kindly remember,’ said 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.

Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.

What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius

From Rome to Europe

In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.

After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.

The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.

Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.

The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.

The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.

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Marcus Aurelius Wrote the Meditations for Himself—Here’s Why

Marcus Aurelius writing the Meditations on the German Front — 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.