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Donald Robertson on The Stoic Emperor (Episode 122)
916 Plays8 months ago
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Donald Robertson about Marcus Aurelius. They dive into what we know about the man and the critical episodes of his life. Donald shares his thoughts on the Marcomannic wars, whether Marcus Aurelius ordered the assassination of one of his top generals, and why he appointed Commodus as his successor.
They end by discussing the central role that Stoicism and Stoic practices played in Marcus Aurelius’s life.
Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor
How To Think Like A Roman Emperor
(00:45) Changing Mind
(07:29) Commodus / Different Views of History
(16:58) Marcomannic Wars
(33:42) What Marcus Aurelius Didn't Say
(40:50) Stoicism in Marcus Aurelius's Life
(49:41) Avidius Cassius
(01:01:18) Marcus Aurelius and Stoic Practices
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Fronto's Advice on Paraphrasing
00:00:00
Speaker
Fronto tells Marcus to practice repeatedly taking philosophical ideas and paraphrasing them. So he says you have to keep turning them over and practice putting them in different words until you capture exactly the right image, figure of speech, raise to articulate the idea.
Interview with Donald Robertson on Marcus Aurelius
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I am speaking with the excellent Donald Robertson, the author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and the new Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor. Thanks again for joining.
00:00:41
Speaker
Thanks, Caleb. It's a pleasure. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today, as always. Good, excellent, excellent. Me too.
Donald Robertson's Evolving View of Marcus Aurelius
00:00:47
Speaker
So how has your picture of Marcus Aurelius changed from how to think like in Roman Emperor? It has changed a bit. I don't know if it's changed dramatically, but it has changed in some ways.
00:01:01
Speaker
So a bit of context, I suppose. I've written three books in a row about the same guy now, which is too many. Although I've just finished writing a book, as we were saying earlier, about another guy, so a critique. So I have moved on a little bit. And I wrote How to Think of the Roman Emperor, which is kind of a self-help with a lot of biographical anecdotes. Then I wrote a graphic novel about him. And then I was asked by Yale University Press to write a more conventional, proposed biography, but Marx really is.
00:01:29
Speaker
focusing on his character, so a kind of narrative biography rather than an academic one, and focusing on how stoicism influences him as emperors. The thing that really changed my conception of Marx really is the most
00:01:45
Speaker
was maybe writing the graphic novel because I had to really visualize his life and I think that benefited me enormously in writing the prose biography because I think really a good biographer
00:02:00
Speaker
A bad biographer just kind of shuffles words around in a sense, especially if you're working with classical texts. You go, I don't know, Diogenes literally says this, and Cassius Dio says that, and kind of paraphrasing those guys. But a good biographer will really shut his eyes and
00:02:18
Speaker
just try and imagine what it was actually like to be on the Danube frontier in the winter with a hacking call, talking to a load of Germanic tribal chieftains that had recently betrayed you shortly after your brothers died of the plague, and to try and really put yourself in those shoes.
00:02:43
Speaker
So a good biographer would really try and visualize how these things overlap, and how one would influence another and so on. Challenging to do it. That requires kind of creative thinking in a way. So that challenge helped me a lot.
Marcus Aurelius's Awareness of Mortality
00:02:58
Speaker
And funnily enough, so for us, I'd say that the plague I would see is having more of an impact on Marcus Aurelius' life than it might seem for us. But also,
00:03:11
Speaker
If I try to put myself in Mark's and really see shoes, I have to say the first thing that strikes me is that this guy must have awoken every morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, it's amazing that I'm still alive. And he compared to particularly how we are in the modern world who are dead.
00:03:33
Speaker
is kind of where I somewhere protected from some of these things. Obviously more than people were in the ancient world. People in the ancient world saw animals being slaughtered for their meat and things. That's all sanitized for us. We buy it in the supermarket wrapped in cellophane or whatever. We don't have to watch animals being butchered. We don't watch people dying in front of us. They're sent up to hospices and things like that. The pandemic that we had, I think part of the issue with it in a way was that, you know, although
00:04:03
Speaker
millions of people died. Most of us didn't really witness that happening. It seemed kind of abstract. So many people, for example, trivialize that or imagine it wasn't happening. They didn't really see exactly what's going on. Their perception is very different from doctors and nurses that were working with COVID patients, for instance. But in Marcus Aurelius' world, these things were more immediate. Also, many, many Roman emperors were poisoned.
00:04:30
Speaker
people, officials were poisoned or died under suspicious circumstances around Marcus. He was certainly threatened with a civil war and what goes hand in hand with that is the threat of assassination or being deposed and killed as well. He had constant health problems. He lived through a plague. When he fought the war on the Danube,
00:04:56
Speaker
there really was a risk that he would have been killed. He wasn't in battle, he probably stayed most of the time in fortresses, although there's some reason to believe he actually went into the field, but probably not close to the action. But nevertheless, I mean, Carnuntum, the main fortress, where we know he was stationed seems to have been overrun and 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed.
00:05:22
Speaker
in a battle there. I mean, it's quite possible that Marcus could have been killed during that campaign. So there were multiple reasons that he had to be concerned or grateful that he was still alive, I think each day. I think also people surrounding Marcus Aurelius, he says himself in the meditations that many of the people that read them were waiting for him to die.
00:05:46
Speaker
A lot of people wanted him to die. And I think he had that sense. People want me to die. Some of them might want to assassinate me. I've got health problems. In the ancient world, if you get a cough or a fever, it's not like today, where you go to the doctor and you get a diagnosis or whatever. In the ancient world, you're winging a prayer. You wake up with a fever. There's a pretty good chasm. It might drop dead the next day for all. Who knows what's causing it?
00:06:12
Speaker
And also he was bereaved to an extent that most of us would find hard to imagine. He lost many family members, but also seven of his children, predeceased him, which is trying to imagine that. It's quite hard to wrap your head around. So the combination of the threats to his own life, people dying around him, the visibility of the plague, he would see funeral pyres burning, mass graves, people blind perhaps,
00:06:42
Speaker
disabled permanently because of the effects of plague.
00:06:48
Speaker
Really, you know, it's no surprise that this is a man who thought contemplation of his own death was an important stoic exercise that he dwells on. More, for example, he dwells on it, I would say, more than Seneca does. So it's no surprise that he's a stoic. He's contemplating these things. But, you know, maybe he has a special interest in certain aspects of stoicism. Certainly what's prominent in the meditation is his contemplation of death.
00:07:15
Speaker
So I think I learned that Marcus Aurelius is a guy who had a strong sense on a regular basis throughout most of his adult life of his own mortality. And that really, I think, affected his character. And is there any place where you think about the events or decisions that Marcus Aurelius made during his reign differently?
Marcus Appoints Commodus: A Controversial Decision
00:07:42
Speaker
I have different views from many people about some of the things that he did or that happened. One of them is I know that one of many, many people think even Cassius Dio says the biggest mistake that Marcus made was appointing Commodus as his successor.
00:08:00
Speaker
I was going to ask you about this. Yeah. I mean, my view is that Marcus would have seen that differently and that he would have been more concerned, I think, avoid the risk of a civil war. The Roman empire was fragmented in half for three months during his reign.
00:08:24
Speaker
And it happened. So again, that's how fragile. He must have had the sense of the fragility of his own existence. He definitely also had the sense of fragility of Roman civilization as well. It wasn't a done deal. It wasn't stable. It did fragment. And then luckily, they managed to kind of weld it back together. And the Civil War of Cassius Dio, Avidius Cassius, sorry.
00:08:48
Speaker
So I think he was more concerned that that didn't happen again. And the Senate, I'm pretty sure, were more concerned. And I was kind of gratified, actually, to find there's an obscure part of Plutarch, I think it's in the Life of Brutus, where he refers to a guy that we believe is a Stoic saying the same thing that I would interpret Marcus as thinking, which is the
00:09:15
Speaker
a bad emperor is better than a civil war in terms of their political theory. So I think that's why Commodus was appointed. We pretty much know who would have been the alternative. It would have been Pompeianus, Marcus's son-in-law, for sure.
00:09:39
Speaker
He married Lucilla, who was the widow of Lucius Verus. So in Roman society, she was an Augusta, which is kind of like being an Empress. She was the widow of Marx's co-Emperor.
00:09:59
Speaker
So Pompianus was the son-in-law of Marcus Aurelius, he was his most senior general on the Danube, and he was married to an Empress, a Roman Empress, so he was a hail of bread from being appointed Emperor. And we're told that he was asked or invited to become Caesar,
00:10:21
Speaker
the heir to roman empire three times altogether but declined each time so the story really in a sense is about why did this guy refuse to become emperor and i think in part by the way the character of maximus in gladiator i like to maybe i'm being paradoxical in this because i know that people like to say gladiators
00:10:48
Speaker
complete nonsense historically. Actually I think there's more in it that echoes Roman history than people realise. So the character of Maximus in it is loosely based on this actual guy who put out Pompeianus, Marcus' son-in-law.
00:11:05
Speaker
Why was he unwilling to become emperor? He was an equestrian, so not of the senatorial class, and he wasn't of noble or patrician birth, so he was of relatively humble means. Marcus was known
00:11:24
Speaker
for operating a meritocratic system and promoting humble origins. We know that that was controversial and it upset a lot of Roman elites. We know that Pompeianus' marriage to La Cilla was controversial.
00:11:41
Speaker
So it may be that they just thought if this guy becomes an emperor, there's going to be another civil war because some of the provinces are just going to break away and say, not a chance. He's, he's not, uh, he's not an arrest. He's family on even Senate rules, you know, who assisted and it just gives them an opportunity and excuse to have a rebellion. And actually the civil war that Mark has faced is probably really linked to that. Cause it's no coincidence.
00:12:10
Speaker
that Avidius Cassius and Pompeianus are both, Marcus's two most senior generals, and they were both born close to each other. They're both Syrian. But Avidius Cassius was an absolutely blue-blooded family. He was a descendant of Herod the Great, and also a distant descendant of Augustus. So he couldn't have more blue blood in his family, this guy. So Marcus's two senior generals are both Syrian dudes,
00:12:40
Speaker
And one of them is kind of middle class, if you like, or whatever. He's questioning me. He's not from the operational ones of Roman society, per se. This other guy couldn't have more royal prep by degree and comes from the senatorial class. And that might be one of the reasons that I've had these cases instigated the civil war, because he just thought, not a chance. You're promoting this guy above me?
00:13:08
Speaker
Like that would have been probably insulting to her. And I think I've seen more of that. And so I think the Senate would have said, well, we need to make sure this doesn't happen. Even a rubbish emperor, even your son, who's like, you know, is an embarrassment, maybe would be better. And the Roman empire being torn into fragments and possibly collapsing.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think we underrate today the importance of bloodlines to ancient peoples. People often say that the preceding emperors had set this precedent of adopting someone, but they didn't have suitable errors. And there's no question.
00:13:55
Speaker
that people in the Roman Empire, to some extent in Rome even, but definitely in the east of the Empire, up 100% and in the other provinces, believed that the rightful successor of the Emperor would be his son. And if you didn't appoint Commodus, you're left with a pretender in the wings. I mean, it would be a death sentence for Commodus.
00:14:19
Speaker
essentially like he'd almost certainly rivals to the Roman throne tend not to live very long like basically for obvious reasons you can't have a guy that should have been the emperor hanging around like if he's got a lot of money and a lot of powerful friends and stuff like that even if he's a nothing
00:14:43
Speaker
people are going to rally around him and make him into comment. This would become a useful idea or whatever. You know, he people, other people who were smarter, more cunning, more aggressive would have exploited him as an opportunity to challenge pumpianas or whoever Marcus had appointed. And I really, you know, we're told that it was, um, uh, Lucy is various first of all.
00:15:08
Speaker
that insisted that Marcus appoint Commodus and one of his other sons as heirs. And then there's a letter from the Senate that purportedly insists that Marcus has to grant imperial powers.
00:15:25
Speaker
to Commodus and make him a full-blown co-Emperor. I mean Commodus was made Emperor about three years before Marcus died, so that's different from Ladiator. He's not Caesar, he's Emperor already by the time that Marcus dies, but the Senate seemed to have thought we need to sort this out, especially because we were worried they had a civil war, we can't afford to run the risk of another one. There's only so much harm the Emperor can do,
00:15:55
Speaker
about a civil war. The thing that really freaked Romans out in the civil war is that, to a large extent, many Romans were
00:16:04
Speaker
felt they were relatively safe if there was a war in the frontiers. Because Rome itself is quite far away from where a lot of these, although they were devastating, it's pretty far away from the border with Parthia. And a lot of Romans didn't have to go and fight in the legions. But civil war is a whole different ballgame. When Caesar had this civil war, Rome was evacuated.
00:16:30
Speaker
You know, so powerful every, Romans would be like, no, this would, this would bring water very doorstep. We can't, can't, can't allow it. So sure. The, you know, this guy's a jerk, perhaps, but, uh, perhaps he's an alcoholic as well. There's some reason to plead like many purple Romans. He, he, you know, he may have actually been an alcoholic, possibly even using other substances, but they, I think they thought it was the least worst option.
00:16:58
Speaker
Sure, sure. And as soon as you come into existence, communist is going to have partisans, partisans that are going to need to be dealt with. And it is always interesting, as you say, that I think one of the first rules of taking a throne is to eliminate any potential rivals, especially these rivals by blood. So that's always important to you in mind, I suppose, if you're thinking of becoming Roman emperor. I wanted to ask you about
00:17:27
Speaker
Marcus Reyes is often critiqued for the Marco Manic Wars. He starts seeing these imperial enterprises. To what extent do you think that criticism is accurate?
Complexities of Marcus's Military Decisions
00:17:44
Speaker
Well, first of all, it's a very complicated question to answer. Like many historical questions, I don't think we can give a conclusive answer. And we have to deal with the fact that our modern assumptions and values are going to be completely out of kilter with what would be the norm in Roman society. So it's a tricky question to answer. However, I'd start off by saying that usually when people say this, they've got no idea
00:18:09
Speaker
what they're talking about, they just think he had a lot of wars, so therefore he's a war-monger. And that's the extent of the argument usually. And I think the reality is a lot more complicated than that. For instance, many of the Germanic peoples that he was fighting wanted to migrate into the Roman Empire.
00:18:29
Speaker
And so ironically, he's kind of fighting against people who want to be integrated into Rome. They think it's going to be a better, more comfortable life for them. And one thing that we're told, then it raises the problem of how much can we actually trust the Roman histories in this regard. But for what it's worth, bracketing that for now. What the Roman histories tell us is that Marcus, first of all, relied extensively on diplomacy.
00:18:59
Speaker
One of the reasons for the Civil War, it's pretty clear, was that there was a faction of powerful Roman senators and generals who thought that Marcus was too much of a military dove.
00:19:11
Speaker
They thought the war was too expensive and going on too long, not because Marcus, I think, was just decided to fight an expensive war, because Marcus was relying too much on diplomacy. And I think they would have had more of a kind of scotch there, a policy like, let's just kill all these guys, be done with them kind of thing. Or let's just use fear. I mean, we're told stories which seem exaggerated, a bit of a deus casius.
00:19:40
Speaker
strapping dozens and dozens of summation tribesmen to a huge wooden post, presumably on a hilltop and setting fire to them, to send a message to the local tribesmen to say, don't mess with the Roman Empire. There are too many of these guys for us to fight, but we need to intimidate them into submission. We're told the videos Cassius used to just chain
00:20:09
Speaker
dozens of captured enemies together, take them out in a boat into the middle of the Danube and push them in the river to drown, like animals, is the quickest, easiest way to execute hordes of them. And so those guys, I think, would have been doing that, perhaps. The Roman War was brutal.
00:20:27
Speaker
at the best of times. But Marcus, we hear a lot more about his emphasis on negotiation, on diplomacy, on peace treaties, on trade agreements to try and use economics to influence the Germanic tribes. The other thing we have to bear in mind is many of these tribes, there were lots of them and they were often fighting each other.
00:20:49
Speaker
And in some cases we're told that some of them insisted that Marcus come into the war, particularly in the Second Markomanic War, the Sarmatians demanded that Marcus fight the Quadai. So it's a complicated kind of dynamic that's going on. It's not just like one side versus the other. They also keep switching sides.
00:21:12
Speaker
they're notorious for it. So the Germanic tribes, many of them would join forces with the Romans and be fighting against other Germanic tribes, and then they kind of switch back again and switch back and forth. So it's much, and sadly, it's very complicated. To make it even more complicated, just like politics today,
00:21:31
Speaker
We say this country went to war against that country, but in every country there are multiple political factions and power switches hands between them. It may be that there's a faction, there's usually a pro-war and an anti-war faction, or a pro-Roman and anti-Roman faction in another country.
00:21:51
Speaker
So, it's too simplistic to say Marcus is fighting against this country. In a sense, he's fighting against the current regime in that country, and that may be then replaced by a regime that's allied to Rome, and now their buddies with them. But the common people that live in that country, who knows what they are, feelings about which regime did they prefer? Did they prefer the anti-Roman regime, or did they, maybe they were sick of fighting Rome, and they'd much rather be allied to them.
00:22:21
Speaker
It's hard to know for sure, but we're told that Marcus, we're told much more about him resettling. Large numbers, many thousands of captured Germanic tribesmen. We're told that he had a problem with the formations.
00:22:43
Speaker
And the problem was that they were a nomadic civilization. And so it would be difficult, basically, effectively impossible to resettle them.
00:22:54
Speaker
within the bands of the Roman Empire. One reason for resettling tribesmen is to disarm them. So you can say, you guys have to hand over your weapons, and you're all going to work on farms and stuff like that, to beat yourselves into palosios, as we say. So come inside the Empire and stop fighting us. Get rid of all your weapons. We can keep an eye on you then.
00:23:18
Speaker
And also, in a sense, their families would be kind of, like, in it, hostages, potentially. You could put it from one point of view. Their wives and children, like, now inside the Roman Empire as well. So the summations what we're told Marcus did was to recruit them as massive auxiliary cavalry units. And normally, in different empires, as a kingdom of the ancient world, often what happens when you recruit enemies into your own army,
00:23:47
Speaker
is that you send them as far away as possible. So you don't want these summation guys close to home in case they just decide to rebel. Like he sent them to Britain. Like supposedly, which must have been, you know, is the stuff of fan fiction, you know, our alternative history. There's a movie called King Arthur.
00:24:08
Speaker
that's in which King Arthur is a Romano, British, Roman general and governor. And it's about these summations being sent to ancient Britain. So it's hard to imagine what that would have been like. It must have been a bit of a culture shock. But that's one of the things we were told that Marcus actually did. So really not using
00:24:35
Speaker
Enslavement, he's not, they're not talking about enslaving these people or auctioning them as slaves, which would have been done or just killing them. The Romans didn't really have prisoner of war camps, right? And so sometimes what seems brutal to us, I mean, actually even slavery in the eyes of many people in the ancient world was justified because they thought, if you capture enemy soldiers,
00:25:02
Speaker
Do you just give them a stare on taking off and then send them home? But then they're just going to attack you again. Right? Or do you just run into a video of Cassius and just run them all up and drown them on mass? Seems kind of brutal.
00:25:18
Speaker
So an alternative would be, what do you do with them then? We don't really have prisoner of war camps. You auction them with slaves, and that allows you to disarm them and keep them under control. Or you resettle them within the empire, and that allows you to keep them under control. But then probably what Marcus did at one point eventually was he was going to cross the Danube. He started to build Roman forts.
00:25:44
Speaker
across the Danube. So they would have kind of colonized Sarmatia and Markomania. I think they were going to call it and build two new Roman provinces. And again, that sounds like he's invading other countries and stuff, but it may have been that some of the people in those countries were actually fine with that because it would have brought them peace.
00:26:07
Speaker
And they wanted to migrate to Northern Italy, for example, anyway. And this is perhaps a kind of compromise to say, okay, we can bring you into the employer, but you guys are going to have to stay in this region.
00:26:20
Speaker
Roman politics, I think, the war is a little bit more complicated than they seem at first, but in essence, the impression I get is that Marcus was seen as not aggressive, and faced a civil war for being too much of a military dove, which is obviously at all odds with the criticism that people sometimes raise today that he was too much of a military hawk.
00:26:44
Speaker
Right. I think today we think that argument is basically, well, these Germanic tribes must have been hanging out on their own more or less. And then as a part of some Imperial colonial venture, the Romans come in and kill many of them and exploit the rest, which of course has some amount of truth in it, but it's far too simplistic of a picture.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's, I mean, it could be, it could be that if you, if we could go back in time and do a kind of Voxpot, get a microphone and say to an average like Merklemani or Quadai, you know, so what's it like? You know, I mean, it'd be really interesting. I don't know what their opinion would be.
00:27:24
Speaker
Our views of what was in history are usually kind of one-dimensional and simplistic anyway. But certainly a lot of them wanted to live in Northern Italy. And the quaddai in particular were Roman client state. So their governor probably was someone who had been raised in Rome.
00:27:52
Speaker
And so what you have to imagine in a sense is a guy who was maybe born there but raised in Rome and educated there, who would be in charge of the country. And they were probably one of the most prosperous tribes. They were the largest tribe in the region and probably one of the most prosperous ones because they controlled the amber road through which a lot of trade, particularly amber, came down to Rome. So they had a favorable relationship
00:28:19
Speaker
and a strong trade incentive to remain allies of the Roman Empire. So when they rebel,
00:28:27
Speaker
It could be that many people in that country thought, these are radicals that have come to power and they're really jeopardizing the welfare of everybody else in this region by instigating a war against the women's. Maybe we preferred it when it was a peaceful year and we could make money from trade. We were doing pretty well. But who knows? Because we have very limited and biased sources.
00:28:51
Speaker
But certainly, it's a more complicated question, I think, than we assume. And there is some reason to believe that Marcus was following his principles and trying to engage in more of a just war that was guided by diplomacy. In the meditations, there aren't many. One of the peculiar things about the meditations is there are a number of peculiar things about meditation stylistically.
00:29:21
Speaker
One is, it's written in quite an artfully vague way. So a good example of that would be, sometimes Marcus, in particular in book one, Marcus mentions a bunch of specific people. But throughout the rest of the meditations, despite sometimes mentioning very specific people and events, at the same time, it's also incredibly vague. He only mentions the Antonine Plague.
00:29:44
Speaker
very briefly and in a very indirect way. He uses a metaphor for something else. He refers to war in general terms. For example, in perhaps the most famous passage in the Meditations, which is the first passage in book two, he says, every morning when you wake up, tell yourself that you're going to meet deceitful and ungrateful people.
00:30:08
Speaker
He doesn't say who they are, or even what sort of people he's talking about. But you can bet your bottom dollar he must have had some specific people in mind, surely, when he wrote that. You know, if I said that, you said that, like, you'd have some examples of mine.
00:30:26
Speaker
And now Roman statesmen had a formal meeting every morning. They would receive visitors, especially the emperor, would have received senators, courtiers, Germanic envoys first thing every morning. So he must have that in mind, although he doesn't make it clear
00:30:51
Speaker
So sometimes he's speaking in very vague terms and you can say, well, I guess. And the odd thing about that passage is he says, you must remind yourself that these people are your kin, not through blood. Like, not through birth, but through your shared humanity. Now, that's a remarkable thing.
00:31:12
Speaker
for a guy to say about the emissaries of a nation that he's currently in the middle of fighting a war against. He must have them in mind. But the only time he specifically mentions them is there's a very cryptic passage. And I know recently I've found someone that actually interpreted this in a completely different way. But there's a passage where he says, capturing formations
00:31:39
Speaker
would be like catching fish in a net or he says like catching I think he says like a fly being caught in a spider's web and taking pride in that would be a form of brigandry he says. So it's not a bit of a cryptic passage
00:32:05
Speaker
Capturing summations and taking pride in it, it sounds like he's suggesting or simply implying that enslaving enemy soldiers is somehow unjust. Now that would be a very odd thing for a Roman emperor to say if it wasn't
00:32:22
Speaker
the fact that we have some evidence that this was an established stoic argument against slavery. I wish we knew more about that because there's no reference to Marcus auctioning enemy soldiers as slaves. And there are many references to him doing contrary things, like I said, recycling them or recruiting them into auxiliary units.
00:32:47
Speaker
I mean, also you could, just to show some balance here, you could say that recruiting soldiers into an auxiliary unit was potentially not much fun. Like if he's sending them off to fight in a war and they might die, but I'm pretty sure they would have preferred that to a life of slavery.
00:33:06
Speaker
There's one point where he mentions the war and so he says the opposite of, I'm a warmonger and I love butchering people. He says, capturing formations is barbaric, is if you're capturing an animal.
00:33:24
Speaker
like, you know, as if you're catching a he or catching fish in a net, you know, there's someone who thinks that is a good thing is basically like a thief or a brigand. That's not something you'd expect a warman got to see. Right, right. Yeah, I suppose that there's perhaps strategic reasons for Marcus not to include too many personal details in his journal, which is unfortunate, but I think makes sense.
00:33:54
Speaker
I didn't have the biographers in mind. Yeah. I mean, he, um, I mean, he actually is quite remarkable. What he doesn't say in meditations.
00:34:07
Speaker
like that it's interesting you know when you study ancient texts we've got such limited source material you have to do some mental gymnastics to try and almost like squeeze as much information as you can out of them and there are tactics that you would use to do that but one of them is just to ask yourself well what is what's omitted here what's what's missing from this text a good example of that is book one where Marcus has a kind of structure to it and he lists 17
00:34:37
Speaker
individuals that he admires, you can measure the number of words and see that he says far more about Antoninus Pius and to some extent Junius Rusticus than he does about anyone else. But there's a couple of people that give zero words that should be in there and one of them is Hadrian
00:35:05
Speaker
Marcus's adoptive grandfather, the person that chose him to become a Caesar and the guy had a great influence over Marcus's early life and Marcus lived in Hadrian's villa for the last four or five months of Hadrian's life, he saw a decline in death.
00:35:27
Speaker
Marcus mentions Adrian three or four times later in the meditations, but only to use him as an example of someone who was very powerful and famous and now is dust, so to as a contemplation, a memento mori. But he has nothing positive to say about him. And in Roman society, that was something they were much more sensitive to than we are today. That's a grave insult. It's one of the reasons I don't believe that the Meditations was intended for publication.
00:35:56
Speaker
because I think there are a number of reasons, but that's just one. And then the other person he doesn't mention is Herodias Atticus, who was the most celebrated intellectual of the era. He was the leading figure at that time of the Second Sophistic, so he was a sophist. He was a family friend of Marcus Aurelius. Marcus knew him entirely.
00:36:19
Speaker
He was still alive towards the end of Marcus's life and he visited him in Athens. But Herodias lived for a while in the household of Marcus's maternal great grandfather. It's the same household as Marcus's mother.
00:36:34
Speaker
And he was appointed Marcus's main Greek rhetoric tutor. So he had a strong family connection. The guy was his personal tutor. He was the most famous intellectual in the world. He was incredibly influential, wealthy, over controversial. I mean, he's an interesting guy because if you go to Greece today, sometimes you might think, gee, there's a lot of Greek history that there aren't any traces of today.
00:36:59
Speaker
There are several buildings that still stand as monuments to Herodotus Atticus, because he was the sort of, you know, Elon Musk or, you know, Jeff Bezos type figure. He was one of the wealthiest men in the world and he constructed a number of monuments and buildings. The Odeon of Herodotus Atticus is one of the main tourist attractions. The Foo fighters play the concert there. You know, they often have concerts there.
00:37:24
Speaker
in Greece today. But Marcus doesn't mention this guy at all. As one of his teachers, he mentions his teachers, doesn't mention this. But not his most famous teacher. And worse, he mentions a guy whose name he can't remember.
00:37:41
Speaker
who he says was a trophies or a kind of nanny tutor when he would have been up until the age of seven, I think, like a small child. He would have had this tutor in his grandfather's household. And he says he learned some moral lessons from this guy that remained with him for the rest of his life.
00:38:01
Speaker
They sound similar to ideas in cynic philosophy, but maybe that's just a coincidence. But he can't, he doesn't seem to remember this guy's name and in most scholarly views, probably a slave or a former slave, a freed man. And so Marcus cites him as one of the teachers that influenced him the most and doesn't say anything about Herodias Atticus. That would be the modern equivalent
00:38:29
Speaker
if somebody's mum had grown up in the same household as John Peterson.
00:38:36
Speaker
And Jordan Peterson was appointed your personal tutor for most of your adolescence. And then when you were writing your biography, you said that the person who had the biggest moral impact on your education was your nanny, whose name you can't remember. And you didn't mention deriving anything of value whatsoever from Jordan Peterson.
00:39:03
Speaker
So if you publish that, people will be like, wow, that's like kind of implicit. And so really like by a mission in Roman society, multiply that by 10 because they were much more sensitized to this kind of thing. So that's, that's missing. And then the other thing he does is that sometimes people get short shrift. So Lucy has various, his co-emperor.
00:39:26
Speaker
Like, now look at how much he says about Antoninus Pius. And not only that, later in the book he does it again and he lists all the things he admires about Antoninus Pius. He does it twice. And I think there may be another passage as well where he kind of touches on it briefly. Then we see the first is his co-emperor. All he says is that he was loyal and affectionate. So that's damning someone with faint praise. That's it. And those aren't even particularly good compliments.
00:39:54
Speaker
He was loyal as opposed to what? That's like the minimum requirement for a co-emperor, right? It's like, what's the best that you can say about this guy? At least you didn't betray me. Well, that's something, I guess. And he was affectionate. He was your adoptive brother and you grew up together.
00:40:16
Speaker
Like, at least he doesn't hate my guys. Like, he doesn't try to kill me. Like, although the Roman Hespers kind of suggest that there was some friction between them. Um, so he really seems to damn Lucy as various with, uh, with faint praise.
00:40:31
Speaker
But when you're doing a biography, you have to, I guess, look at what people don't see, kind of compare and contrast what they're saying about different things. And then you can squeeze maybe, if you're lucky, a little bit more meaning out of the limited resources that we have.
00:40:50
Speaker
Right. What of Marcus Aurelius's actions do you think most embodied his stoic philosophy? So where's that tight connection between the philosophy you see in meditations and his life?
Progressive Reforms by Marcus Aurelius
00:41:02
Speaker
Now, the first thing I'd say is the Roman histories don't give us many clear examples of that, but we wouldn't necessarily expect them to. That's not so much what they're interested in. And they don't. But they also, they would often say if someone's life was inconsistent with their values.
00:41:20
Speaker
there's an argument from silence there. I don't think anyone ever accused in the ancient world accused Marcus Aurelius of behaving inconsistently with his stoicism. And in fact, they seem to, he was contrary to what some people have said, he was famous as a stoic philosopher during his lifetime and afterwards. So like they do seem to portray him as a philosopher king, as someone who's
00:41:44
Speaker
consistent acts in a way that's consistent and in fact there's one or two places where they imply some people were annoyed with him because they thought he was too stoic he was too influenced by stoicists as an emperor and some of the decisions he made but they're a little bit vague about exactly what the connection would be and you know in some cases I think it's actually hard for us to reconstruct because we have limited information about stoic politics
00:42:07
Speaker
Now, Roman law was shaped, we believe, by stoic philosophers in developing their theories of jurisprudence. And so, you know, Marcus probably had been studying stoic legal and political theory, like in stoic theories of jurisprudence.
00:42:26
Speaker
that we don't know anything about that we don't read, right? And so there was probably a much more direct connection, but sadly, you know, it's not. I mean, if we could go back in time and see some of the texts by legal theorists that we're reading that were influenced by Stoicism, it'd probably be really obvious to us how that's shaping his policies.
00:42:47
Speaker
We, the least well-known source, there are people, I've seen people who say we don't know anything about Marxist release, which is kind of just crazy stuff that people say on the internet, right? We know more about Marxist release than we do probably about virtually any other ancient philosopher.
00:43:03
Speaker
because he was an emperor. So we have multiple statues of him at different periods in his life. We have coinage. We have inscriptions. We have cash of his private letters. We have his personal thoughts. We have three whole biographies of his life. We have many references and other writings.
00:43:21
Speaker
But we also, the least well-known source that we have is the Roman legal digests. There are hundreds of references to Marcus Aurelius' legislative activities. And so scholars have reviewed those and concluded, you know, they said, is there a pattern, like an agenda, to his legislative action and re-scripts, as the Romans call them?
00:43:46
Speaker
And his belief that, if I remember rightly, about half of them relate to improving the rights of women, slaves and children. So he seems to have been particularly concerned with orphaned children. He lost his father when he was three or four, so maybe there's some connection there.
00:44:05
Speaker
and improving the rights of women which would have been totally consistent with Stoic philosophy. One of the earliest Stoic texts by Cleanthes, we only know the titles of most early Stoic writings and often that doesn't help us much but some of the titles are actually statements and so you go okay the actual title of the book seems to tell you something. There's a book by Cleanthes called The Virtue is the Same in Men and Women
00:44:33
Speaker
That's the sort of title I like from an Asian book. That gives us a bit more information. And then to reinforce that, centuries and centuries later, Smithsonian's Rufus has two surviving lectures about how virtue is the same in men and women.
00:44:49
Speaker
So I think the Stoics, people would say they're not exactly proto-feminists in any sense of the word, but certainly compared to the rest of Roman society and Greek society, they seemed placed more importance on women's rights and held women in higher regard than would have been the norm.
00:45:11
Speaker
For instance, in ancient Greek philosophy, women, even in Roman society, women were treated as inferiors largely, but women were almost like slaves in classical Athens and they weren't allowed to leave the house normally, except to perform certain kind of menial tasks. Women were philosophers that gathered in the gymnasium, the lyceum, and the academy. Women weren't allowed to set food in there.
00:45:41
Speaker
There's a story that Plato had two female students, but they had to disguise themselves as men to get into the grounds of the academy. But for the Stoics to say, and men and women, and for Mosoni Shroves to say women should be educated in philosophy, is quite a radical departure from the conventions of their society.
00:46:04
Speaker
does that aspect of his legislation. And then there are many pieces of legislation, Marcus seems to be trying to improve the rights of slaves to obtain their freedom, to obtain manumission, as it's called in Roman law. And there was even a law that's named after him
00:46:23
Speaker
that we don't know the content of annoyingly, but it's often cited and it's phrased as this slave obtained his freedom legally in accord with the ruling of the deified Marcus Aurelius. So Marcus set some kind of legal precedent that we don't know.
00:46:42
Speaker
that was repeatedly using Roman law to justify granting freedom under what's up. I mean, it's kind of complicated, but for instance, if an owner committed a crime against a slave, it might be that then under Roman law that the slave was granted the freedom and so on. But that would be consistent with Roman, with
00:47:09
Speaker
arguably consistent stoic ethics because again contrary to what many people say there's evidence that the stoics from the time of the early store at least in some cases criticized the institution of slavery
00:47:27
Speaker
Diogenes Laertes tells us that the founders of Stoicism said that slavery is bad or unethical. And then we see fragments of that or echoes of that in subsequent writings. There are undoubtedly Stoics that had a more moderate view of slavery, like Seneca thinks you should be nice to your slaves.
00:47:53
Speaker
But not that, you know, they deserve, there's a problem with the institution, per se. Whereas I think there's reason to believe that Marcus thought the institution was problematic. And that in an ideal world, like in the ideal republic, there would be no slaves. Actually, we know, and here's a little bit of an inference for you. Zeno is republic.
00:48:19
Speaker
which was heavily based on, I mean, Stoicism is based on a political treaties, right? So Zeno's Republic, which is lost, but there's lots of tantalizing references to it, describes this kind of utopian stoic society. There is no slaves in it.
00:48:35
Speaker
Because Zeno says there's no property in the Stoic Republic, so there cannot be slaves. And it seems to be implied that there are no slaves. Everybody wears the same type of clothing in the society. So maybe right from the outset, the Stoics had questioned the issue. Now, that does not mean that the Stoics thought that they should immediately go out and ban slavery.
00:48:59
Speaker
Because Marcus also says that he, rather than political revolution, he believes that you have to be satisfied in making one small step at a time if it's in the right direction. So he very explicitly says he believes in progressive political change. Now you could say, if Marcus really has woke up one morning and said, I'm going to write a decree banning slavery, he'd be dead.
00:49:23
Speaker
before, you know, the ink had dried on it. Right? So realistically, he couldn't do that. So did he take any steps at all? Well, he took many small steps to make it easier for slaves to obtain their freedom. So, you know, we can make of that what we will. So there's reason, but you asked what's the best evidence, I suppose the most obvious example
00:49:46
Speaker
is there's a speech that Marcus gave on the eve of the Civil War.
Leadership and Power Sharing During Civil War
00:49:52
Speaker
He was in Sirmium and he, Gallaudet, would have been speaking presumably mainly to the Praetorian cohorts and he gave a speech which we're told was then sent to the Senate.
00:50:09
Speaker
It must have been published. Now, it's in Cassius Dio. Many people would say reading this, this seems implausible. At the end of the speech, he even says, this may seem incredible to you. Highlighting the thigh that this speech seems remarkable.
00:50:26
Speaker
So some historians have said he can't have said this because of the content of the speech. However, Cassius Dio is one of our, in certain regards, Cassius Dio is one of our best sources because he was a senator on the Commodus. He was around at the table of lions during the reign of Marcus Marcus, and close to the action.
00:50:47
Speaker
He says that this is a speech that was sent to the Senate and given to the army and circulated in public. So an argument that historians make is, in situations like that, it's harder for someone to fabricate the content. Because people would have said, that's not what Marcus said in that famous speech that he gave, you know?
00:51:08
Speaker
So it's harder for him to make up stuff like that. And what he says in the speech is there are several things that seem stoic. First, what he says we shouldn't complain about. This seems like a catastrophe.
00:51:22
Speaker
He says that I assume that he's not doing this out of malice, but he's doing it in error, which is like the Socratic principle that no man does evil knowingly, which Marcus refers to repeatedly in the meditations. And he says that he's, this is interesting to compare to modern American politics. Marcus says that because this guy has impeached his authority,
00:51:51
Speaker
as Emperor, he would have been willing to step down voluntarily from the position of Emperor and appear in front of a Senate or military hearing and argue his case out in front of Ovidius Cassius and his critics and allow the Senate to decide. So Marcus was very into sharing power with the Senate. He was known for that. He wouldn't make political appointments without consulting the Senate.
00:52:22
Speaker
He appointed a co-emperor who perhaps, we're not sure, may have had the power but theoretically to veto some of Marcus's decrees if he had to.
00:52:35
Speaker
He seemed to want to place more limits on the power of... It's interesting because there's a debate in American politics. Can the president pardon himself? Can the president be prosecuted for certain crimes while he's in office or after he's in office and things like that? So we have this debate going on in America, about how much power the office of president has. And in Roman society, I'm the same thing, but Marcus is very much in favor of limiting those powers.
00:53:03
Speaker
You know, he wants a more democratic system and more power sharing. He's concerned about the office being abused by autocrats for obvious reasons. So in the speech he offers to step down and it's crazy. Like he says it's too late to do that. He makes it that's convenient because this guy's already declared war.
00:53:29
Speaker
So it's not really feasible to do that anymore. And he says that the best that I hope we can achieve from this would be to show the world that there's a way that's just and wise of dealing even with a civil war.
00:53:47
Speaker
Like, so rather than kind of basking in glory or revenge or anything like that, he says the opposite. But the goal is to demonstrate to the world that we are bigger and better than this and that we have the dignity, like, and the justice and the wisdom to deal with this in a prudent manner. Now, there is a criticism of Marcus Aurelius in, I guess, in the Historia Augusta that suggests that some people thought
00:54:15
Speaker
he was more kind of cunning and less sincere than he seemed. I don't know that there's a lot of evidence for that. I can find one piece of evidence for it. Which is that the story that we receive is that Avidius Cassius was assassinated by two of his senior officers. Because it seems a little bit odd, right?
00:54:45
Speaker
And that Marcus was shocked by this, okay? And then there's a few other fragmentary pieces of information. Like these two guys just decided spontaneously to assassinate the general. I guess that happens in Rome. There's a couple of problems with this. Number one, he wasn't the only person that got the chalk.
00:55:06
Speaker
in Egypt, he was in Syria, in Alexandria, the guy that he'd left in charge there as a prefect of Egypt was also assassinated by the army at the same time by coincidence. And I had the question, when we were writing the biography and I was saying try to visualize it, how did these guys manage to put his head in a sack? And what
00:55:34
Speaker
out of Syria, surrounded by three legions or whatever that were loyal, and the Praetorian cohort, loyal to various castes. They just went, sure, you guys put your head in a bag, take it to Marcus Aurelius. So at the very least,
00:55:54
Speaker
immediately in the aftermath of the assassination that whoever took command of the Praetorian cohort of these Cassius' Praetorians that he'd appointed must have given those guys permission, the assassin's permission, to take the head to Marcus Aurelius. We're also told that Marcus was criticized for being too lenient
00:56:21
Speaker
one of Ovidius Cassius' son, a son-in-law, a guy called Drunkianus, who would probably have been an officer, I don't think we know that's for sure, but we can assume there's a good chance he would have also been serving as a senior officer in Ovidius Cassius' army.
00:56:42
Speaker
Marcus protected him, he prohibited the senators from persecuting this guy, he made sure that he obtained most of his inheritance, and people thought you're being too soft on this guy. Now why is it just out of the kindness of his whore? Or is it because Drunkianus, the son-in-law of Vidius Cassius, was
00:57:05
Speaker
involved somehow in a coup against him. And Marcus was rewarding him by giving him a share of the guy's inheritance and protecting him against persecution. So I don't know that that sort of shows that Marcus planned and organized a coup with the involvement of Ravidius Cassius, his son-in-law, and coordinating assassinations in Egypt and in Syria. Somebody did.
00:57:35
Speaker
Like, maybe the other generals did it and then hoped that Marcus would support them. I think it's kind of logical Marcus was corresponding with them and this was... So that might be one of the things that people could have in mind at the time when they say, this Marx is really his guy, you know, he's a little bit more of a political operator than he makes himself out to be.
00:58:00
Speaker
I don't know, it's just speculation, but I think it's another plausible interpretation of what happened there. The version that we get that just says these two officers suddenly decided to assassinate their general and then walked out of Syria with his head in a bag seems to me somewhat far fetched. And I wouldn't be surprised if most Romans found that hard to believe.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, that might be true. On the other hand, you do have the precedent of some generals getting assassinated when the army in general is not as much of a fan of what they're up to. So perhaps, I don't know if we have any records on this front, if you get enough of the people on the ground who have some discomfort about going to war with Romans. I would have said we don't have a record of that. We can speculate about it.
00:58:46
Speaker
because Cassius didn't have as many legions under his command as Marcus Aurelius. He also supposedly managed to persuade the legions to claim him emperor by telling them that Marcus had already died, or was on the verge of dying. Now, if that's true, and then they found out that Marcus was actually alive, and mobilizing a loyalist army to march against them, you can imagine that lovely thing. Well, you lied to us.
00:59:16
Speaker
And they may also think, we're all going to die because he's got more allegiance than us. Now Marcus in that speech says that I'm going to pardon everybody involved in this insurrection. And so on the face of it, that seems like a kind of generous thing to do. But it's also a prudent thing to do because now they declared, the Senate had already declared the videos Cassius
00:59:44
Speaker
public enemy, which means basically, implicitly, the underwhelming law, he's fair game, and if somebody murders him they won't be prosecuted for it. So Marcus is saying, all you guys in the legions
00:59:59
Speaker
we're not going to lay a finger on you, right? And by the way, if you happen to feel it murdering the sky, we're not going to hold it against you. So, you know, again, there's maybe more layers to it, but you're right that the army may have simply thought this is, we're going to lose this war. This guy deceived us.
01:00:20
Speaker
So maybe, you know, he's the only one that wants to fight, you know, against this larger force that's heading towards us. So maybe, maybe we should just finish him off before we all die. And Mark has really just given us a free pass. One thing that's interesting about that is that if some rulers had said, Hey, you guys don't worry about this. If y'all surrender, we're just going to draw a line under it and pretend nothing happened. Right.
01:00:45
Speaker
Now, if someone had said that, I guess like say Nero had said that, you'd think, I don't know if I believe you. So it's interesting that they believed Marcus Aurelius when he said that. Now that's one of the things maybe that makes him a great leader, is that he could make promises like that, and people are like, no, Marcus Aurelius said that I believe him.
01:01:07
Speaker
I'm willing to risk my life. That's a great point. Stake my life on the fact that when Marcus really says we won't be punished for this, that that's what's going to happen. One other topic I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up is, and this connects to themes in your previous book, you know, how central were some of the stoic philosophical practices to Marcus
Daily Stoic Practices of Marcus Aurelius
01:01:30
Speaker
Aurelius? And do you uncover any additional or did any new stories stand out to you in that group card?
01:01:38
Speaker
I mean the first thing that's worth saying about that is that in the meditations he repeatedly says that of various exercises that he should do this frequently, that he should do it on a daily basis. So it's clear if you look at the text, and I think many people kind of picked this up intuitively, but if you look closely the evidence is there. He's describing
01:02:03
Speaker
a formal systematic daily exercise regime to some extent, which is obviously very intriguing. I wish we knew. There are other sources that seem to suggest that's how these kind of impure hadou, I think.
01:02:22
Speaker
in his books does a pretty good job of gathering evidence that shows across a number of authors this assumption being made that there are these exercises that are used on a consistent basis. A good example of a clear example
01:02:36
Speaker
is actually an exercise that the Stoics inherit from the Pythagoreans. It's in the golden verses of Pythagoras, which is a text that Seneca, Galen, and Epictetus all quote the same Pythagorean text.
01:02:55
Speaker
And famously, the Golden Verses says that every morning you should prepare for the day ahead and that every evening you should, before you close your eyes, review the preceding day three times and ask yourself three questions, which is, what did I do well? What did I do badly?
01:03:18
Speaker
what did I admit to do or what could I do better? Next time Cicero, I think, refers to this as well, if I remember rightly. I don't think there's an explicit reference to that in Marcus Aurelius, but he must have been familiar with it. So that is very clearly a formal exercise. It's like a modern self-help. It's like there's three questions you must ask yourself. It's like a checklist. Every night before you go to bed, it's systematic.
01:03:48
Speaker
It's there in this very well-known text and these stories refer up to it. For example, Epictetus is recommending to students that they do that. Stoicism!
01:03:58
Speaker
the outset was influenced by Pythagoreanism. Again, we mainly know that through a book title. So Zeno wrote a book called On Pythagorean Symbols. So right out of the gate, the find restosism was what clearly had studied Pythagoreanism and was writing books about it that he was handing down to the students. And then, so it's no surprise, scattered, the surviving stoic tests we get, even in Marcus Aurelius,
01:04:25
Speaker
He does talk about the Pythagoreans and emulating some of the contemplative practices that they do, but slightly different than the one I've just mentioned. So for sure, he would have done these exercises. In the Roman histories, we don't find I think any explicit reference to that, although I guess that's something he would have been doing more in private. However,
01:04:51
Speaker
There's another type of exercise that we have an amazing, like one of the coolest finds is that in the 19th century, an Italian scholar called Angelo found these letters, a cache of letters between the Fronto had written and some of the responses to them. Marcus Cornelius Fronto's Marcus Aurelius' Latin rhetoric shooter.
01:05:21
Speaker
And so he's corresponding with Marcus' mum, with Lucius Verus, with Avidius Cassius. Like, I mean, it's cool, like sometimes when you only have one historical text, you almost kind of think, are these guys a real, like, you know, this didn't even exist, like, you know, do we have any other evidence? But here you have Fronto writing letters to these guys, you know, so just as a, it's like a gold dust, you know, it's not a little bit of evidence that makes it seem more three-dimensional and more real.
01:05:50
Speaker
And Fronto was engaged in this kind of power struggle with Junius Rhysticus, Marcus Aurelius' stoic tutor. So imagine Fronto's like a Latin sophist, in a sense. He teaches rhetoric and oratory, he teaches sophistication, culture in general, but he's not committed to a philosophy like Stoicism, he's more interested in the art of persuasion.
01:06:18
Speaker
Marcus loves rhetoric, he's dedicated to studying it, but he seems to gradually, it's like changing a major at university, he's gradually, he seems to shift to wanting to commit more fully to stoicism. He doesn't have, he starts studying stoicism, we're told when he's 12 years old, or at least he starts studying some similar kind of philosophy. It may have been cynicism that he was into first, I suspect, but very soon got into stoicism.
01:06:46
Speaker
By the time he was about 15 or so he has stoic tutors. But there's a letter where he seems to talk about converting from rhetoric to Stoicism when he's in his mid-20s. So it took him a while to this kind of leap to saying, no, I am now fully connected to Stoicism.
01:07:12
Speaker
It's interesting what Fronto argues with him about. So Fronto says, look, I'm not going to do stoicism, he realises that's kind of a losing gambit. He says, stoicism is great, philosophy is great, but he basically says repeatedly to Marcus,
01:07:28
Speaker
that the thing about philosophy is it leads to paradoxical conclusions, right? And the insights of philosophy by the very nature are difficult to articulate in words. And he says philosophy will get you these subtle, nuanced, profound, paradoxical insights, but you need to study language.
01:07:52
Speaker
you need to study the art of rhetoric to know how to communicate those ideas clearly and effectively. Otherwise, they can get garbled. So these two things complement one another. And if you're going to be an effective ruler, you need both. Otherwise, people are going to think you're just academic. You're going to have ideas about justice that seem confusing to ordinary people. You need to know how to put this clearly and effectively into words. And this seems like the convincing argument
01:08:22
Speaker
Marcus but Fronto is his tutor and we can see throughout the letters interestingly Fronto is assigning him homework exercises and Marcus is doing homework and sending it back to Fronto. So Fronto will say write an essay about sleep, praising it or disparaging it and so Marcus will write an essay and send it back to Fronto and they'll argue about which is the best words to use in certain contexts and things like that.
01:08:51
Speaker
a little bit, you get a lot of bits of this, but you can see Mark Fronto clearly is giving him tuition, assigning exercises to him. Fronto tells Marcus to practice repeatedly, taking philosophical ideas and paraphrasing them.
01:09:07
Speaker
So he says you have to keep turning them over and practice putting them in different words until you capture exactly the right image, figure of speech, raise to articulate the idea. Now that's very intriguing because when we pick up the meditations we think this guy seems to say the same thing over and over again in different words.
01:09:29
Speaker
Like, why was he writing this? What's it for? And it's striking, because it's very unusual that we, you know, in ancient history, our sources are so sparse. When two things join up like that, it's like, you know, a eureka moment. He seems in the meditation basically to be doing
01:09:45
Speaker
what Fronto told him to do, which is to take the insights paradoxes of philosophy and keep paraphrasing them as a way of refining his understanding and his ability to articulate them. He was probably doing that for his own benefit, but it's a huge... So sometimes somebody said to me, I saw someone recently saying Marcus Aurelius isn't a great philosopher,
01:10:13
Speaker
I would say maybe that's kind of half true, right? Ironically, maybe actually, I don't know if I put it like this or not, but you could say Marcus Aurelius isn't an original philosopher. He's really just repeating stuff that other authors have said often. He's just quoting other books and things.
01:10:32
Speaker
Ironically, he's, I think, a great rhetorician. What he's doing in the meditations is taking ideas from other stories, texts, and other sources and rephrasing them in the way that he'd been trained to do. Some people have said, Marcus Aurelius, isn't a great writer?
Rhetorical Skills in the Meditations
01:10:51
Speaker
I think those people are wrong.
01:10:54
Speaker
Right? Because if they expect a speech like Cicero would write, Marcus gave those speeches throughout his life, but in the meditation he's writing aphorisms. And as an aphorist, he's excellent. Like his command of eulogy of the Greek, he has an extensive vocabulary.
01:11:11
Speaker
First of all, which is a sign of at least extensive education and training. It's clear from his use of the language. If you compare the meditations to the discourses of Epictetus, the language that Arian uses to transcribe Epictetus is repetitive, it's simplistic compared to the much more complex, diverse use of Greek language that Marcus Aurelius uses.
01:11:39
Speaker
He has a highly talented rhetorician, highly talented aparist, and the proof of that is in the pudding. Because why does anybody bother reading the meditations? It's partly because the powerful imagery
01:11:54
Speaker
tons of free and memorable tons of phrase that he uses. People remember the meditation to go back and read it over and over again because it's full of so many beautifully written aphorisms. So it's absurd in a sense for anyone to question his ability as an aphorist. Like, you know, history proves
01:12:14
Speaker
Like, that he was successful in that regard. He's one of the most quoted philosophers of antiquity, but not because he came up with original ideas, but because he took other people's ideas and articulated them in a concise and powerful manner. And Fronto tells him to go up and practice doing that. But Fronto tells him to do that when he's in his... When? He's writing the meditations when he's in his mid-50s, so three decades. Has he been doing this for three decades?
01:12:44
Speaker
a long time. Yeah, perhaps he's a model practitioner in addition to a rhetorician. There's a consistency to his life and practice. But I think that's, that's good advice that Fronto gave him, right? This rephrasing things in your own words, internalizing the principles, thinking about them in different contexts. It just got to be an excellent exercise.
01:13:09
Speaker
Some of the things he's doing are interesting. There's an overlap between rhetoric. I mean, the Stoics, like other Socratic philosophers in a sense were very critical of sophists and rhetoric, but they did also kind of recognize a place for it. There's an intersection, an overlap between rhetoric and philosophy. And so another one that you can identify
01:13:30
Speaker
is clearly in book one of the meditations you've got a structure separate from the rest of the book and he names these individuals and describes their ruptures so you might think okay it's interesting I guess maybe that's what he's doing is it like an acknowledgement section or is he actually is this some kind of mental exercise well conveniently later on in the meditations he tells us
01:13:50
Speaker
So, further on in the meditation he says, if you want to, one of the most effective things that you can do for benefiting yourself is to contemplate the virtues of another person, then list them in your mind and he gives some examples of this. That's exactly what he does in book one. He describes the methodology later in the book and he says that it's a psychological exercise. However,
01:14:11
Speaker
One of the reasons that he's able to rattle off this list, I mean, if you sat down and said, if you could concisely sum up the main virtues that you admire in someone else, like it would probably take you a little while to kind of refine the list, right? Like off the top of your head, you might think of two or three things, but this list that Marcus has, I can't imagine that this is
01:14:39
Speaker
to most people would come naturally. The reason it comes naturally to Marcus is that as Caesar, he often had to give speeches in the Senate praising Antoninus Pius.
01:14:55
Speaker
rhetorical exercises that he discusses with Fronto, like how do you formally praise someone, what can you learn from other speeches, what qualities we use to describe as an individual, what language you use. So in the meditations on the one hand this is a psychological exercise, he tells us it has, on the other hand he's been trained through years, decades of studying rhetoric to list the key admirable qualities or character strengths.
01:15:23
Speaker
in particular, Antonina's bias. But also, you know, other people, that was what you do when you give a speech at someone's funeral, a eulogy, for example. And it's something that he would have had to done frequently on formal occasions in Roman society. It was a very carefully worded thing. So here, again, you have this kind of intersection between his training and rhetoric and the philosophical, contemplative practices that he's doing.
01:15:51
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that's another great point. Well, I've kept you for a while. Is there anything else you'd like to add? I guess what I would add is that I have always believed that when people get into stoicism, they usually read the meditation's marks from these. Sometimes they read some of the other stuff. I'd say people ask me what else they should read. I'd say the most important
01:16:12
Speaker
thing that they could read in addition to that would be some of the literature about Socrates. Obviously, that doesn't necessarily mean reading the whole of Plato's Republic. There's a lot of literature, but certainly.
01:16:27
Speaker
Plato's Apology, which is pretty easy to read, would be a good starting point. And Xenophon's memorabilia has always had almost this kind of stronger connection with Stoicism. So Zeno was inspired to become a philosopher because he read part of book two.
01:16:45
Speaker
of Xenophon's memorabilia Socratic. So I would say if you're serious about Stoicism and you've read your Marx relations, you've read Seneca and Epictetus, maybe you'll read the Sonya Schruffins, you'll say what else should I read? To read probably Xenophon's memorabilia, Plato's Apology, and then maybe that'll lead you on into reading some of the other Platonic dialogues. What you get in the Stoics is a kind of bullet point list.
01:17:12
Speaker
Socrates Socratic philosophers. Epictetus is always telling his students to emulate Socrates. So if you love Epictetus you'd think this guy keeps telling me you should be more like Socrates. I guess I should find out what Socrates was like.
01:17:29
Speaker
But I think the Stoics are very much thinking of the idea of reconstructing the original Socrates. They're not remotely interested in Plato's theory of forms, for example, which is generally agreed to be something that he puts in the mouth of Socrates that was alien to him. Xenophon doesn't have Socrates mention the theory of forms. Aristotle tells us
01:17:54
Speaker
that Plato invented the theory of forms. So by implication Socrates couldn't have said anything about it. So we have to kind of like separate Plato out from Socrates. That's called the Socratic problem by scholars. Right. That stoics are more interested in the idea of the original Socrates. So I think people should go back and read Xenophon, read Plato's Apology and what they'll get
01:18:19
Speaker
are some of the philosophical arguments that are used to justify the Stoic ethics. The Stoics that we have, the Stoic texts that we have, do have some arguments in them, but generally they're assuming certain ethical principles.
01:18:36
Speaker
other ideas. And then they're talking about how to apply it, particularly in Marcus Aurelius. Even in Marcus Aurelius, there's little fragments of argument, but mostly he's taking ideas and thinking how to apply them in daily life. And so some reasons eventually are going to think, how do I know that virtue is the only tribute?
01:18:52
Speaker
Like, how do I know that all the virtues are one and that wisdom is kind of central to them and stuff like that? Well, Cossocrates had already laid out those arguments and the Stoics are taking that for granted. So if you want the kind of background philosophical foundations for Stoicism, you need to read probably Plato's Euthydemus.
01:19:16
Speaker
is a good place to start. And then, you know, scattered throughout the other biologues. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. And, you know, really impretiderism, even also one of the public. Here's another thing, just a bit of travel. Finish with a bit of trivia.
01:19:35
Speaker
The most famous stoic passage ever, I would say safely, is people aren't upset by events, by their opinions about them. It's passage four of the Enchiridion. And I say that because it was quoted by Albert Ellis, who taught it to all of his clients and students. It used to be a cliche in covers of babyotherapy. And so that's probably the most widely quoted. Even Max Aurelius quotes paraphrases that passage from Epictetus.
01:20:06
Speaker
But people never, or very rarely, go on and quote the following sentence. And in the next sentence, Epictetus says, because, for example, even death
01:20:21
Speaker
cannot be intrinsically terrifying because if it were, Socrates would have been frightened of dying. So we can think of do wise men think that these things are scary or depressing or terrifying although they view them differently and in that case maybe the fear that we have has got to do with our values and our attitude.
01:20:43
Speaker
It's kind of subjective in a sense, rather than being an intrinsic quality of the thing that we're talking about. Now, apart from the fact that he uses Socrates immediately as his go-to example, and he's kind of alluding to, clearly alluding to his trial in death, and probably hasn't made Plato's apology,
01:21:06
Speaker
The point he's making about our opinions and values shaping our distress, I don't believe is original to Stoicism, although we strongly associate it today with Stoicism, because that same point is made repeatedly in both Plato and Xenophon's dialogues and attributed to Socrates, at least by Xenophon. It's not stated as clearly as it is, it's definitely assumed
01:21:35
Speaker
in multiple dialogues. It's in Book 1 of Plato's Republic, although it's attributed to Cephalus rather than Socrates. Socrates is talking to someone else about that idea. But in Xenophon this argument is very much attributed to Socrates, the idea that it's
01:21:50
Speaker
not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. So that's a good example of something that people today think of as characteristically stoic. They're really deriving it. I think Epictetus has in mind, yeah, I'm getting this from argument with Socrates. It's not a coincidence I'm using him as an example because it's in the Socratic dialogues. So for sure you can find that stuff
01:22:14
Speaker
This thing's right to me. The memorabilia seems underrated. I agree with that. Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Donald. This has been great. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much, as always. Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become
01:22:42
Speaker
more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.