How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

6. THE INNER CITADEL AND WAR OF MANY NATIONS

It was an ambush! Wave after wave of Sarmatian horsemen crashed out of the forest on the far side of the River Danube to engage the Roman legionaries head on. Some split off in a classic pincer maneuver, outflanking and encircling the men standing helplessly in the killing zone, midway across the frozen river. Marcus looked on quietly with his generals. The barbarians regularly sneaked across the river that marked the front line to raid settlements in the province of Pannonia. The Romans had learned that the enemy horsemen were most vulnerable when encumbered with loot on their return journey, so they would pursue them across the river, hoping to catch them as they slowed their pace to make the crossing back into their own lands. Sometimes, however, the raiders were just leading the Romans into a trap.

As soon as the Romans recognized the enemy ambush was being sprung, the infantry assumed their standard defensive formation, known as a “hollow square.” Officers and lightly armored troops were protected on the inside by legionaries facing outward on all four sides, their rectangular shields packed tightly together forming a protective wall. The Sarmatians knew that tactic very well. It worked as long as the Romans could hold formation, but they would be massacred if a cavalry charge managed to break through the square and throw them into disarray. That’s why the Sarmatians had lured them onto the river: their horses were trained to charge across the ice. When their lances smashed into the shields of the legionaries forming those defensive walls, the Romans would slip, lose their footing, and tumble like bowling pins.

The Sarmatians were a mysterious, intimidating enemy. They were actually a loose coalition of nomadic tribes led by King Bandaspus, ruler of the Iazyges, the most warlike among the tribes. Sarmatian men were tall and muscular, with fierce blue eyes and long reddish-yellow hair and beards. These exceptional horsemen rode into battle clad in a type of scale mail carved from hooves. Their unusual armor reminded the Romans of a python’s skin, perhaps even conjuring images of dragons. It was said that the Iazyges worshiped fire. They wore great helms and fought with huge wooden lances tipped with sharpened bone. However, what shocked the Romans most of all was the discovery, as they removed helmets from the corpses of slain Sarmatians, that many of the warriors were women.

The sight of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sarmatian horsemen charging across the frozen Danube must have been terrifying. Marcus had learned to gaze calmly on these fearsome warriors and the carnage of the battlefield by recalling the Stoic precepts he’d studied as a young man. He took a slow, deep breath as he watched the first wave of lancers collide against Roman shields. Almost immediately, his general and son-in-law, Claudius Pompeianus, turned toward him and smiled. Their plan was working: this time the Sarmatians were in for a surprise. The legionaries held formation perfectly as the lances struck their shields and glanced off harmlessly. Marcus’s infantry had learned a new trick. Men on the interior of the square had laid their shields on the ice, holding them fast in place. The legionaries forming the outer wall then braced their rear foot against their comrades’ shields. So far, that was proving good enough to stabilize them against the impact of enemy lances.

As the Sarmatian horsemen reeled from the shock of their failed charge, the Roman counterattack began with deadly efficiency. Skirmishers darted out between the legionaries’ shields. The Romans quickly grabbed hold of the horses’ bridles and used their own body weight to make the horses slip and fall sideways onto the ice, dismounting their riders. The Roman legionaries thrust spears at the Sarmatians from behind their wall of shields. The ice was soon awash with blood as bodies piled up. The remaining barbarians found themselves struggling to keep their footing. Unable to flee back to the safety of the forest, they were thrown into disarray right where the Romans wanted them. Before long everyone was slipping, caught up in a melee, Romans grappling with Sarmatians on the bloody ice. However, Marcus’s legionaries were trained in wrestling. If a Sarmatian knocked a Roman down, the Roman would pull his assailant on top of him while lying prone on the ice, then kick him off with both legs, throwing him onto his back and reversing their positions. The tribesmen had little experience of this kind of disciplined close-combat fighting and, caught off guard by the change of tactics, were eventually routed.

Marcus had successfully turned the ambush around and inflicted a major defeat on King Bandaspus. After several initial setbacks, the tide of war now began to turn in Rome’s favor. The Sarmatians could no longer depend on using the terrain to their advantage. Voluntarily walking into an ambush had obviously been a dangerous strategy for the Romans. It required immense discipline and careful preparation—the troops had trained in secret during the winter months. And it worked. They had kept their nerve in a chaotic situation, facing their most fearsome enemy, and snatched victory from the very jaws of defeat. HOW TO RELINQUISH FEAR

Epictetus taught his students to think of Stoic philosophy as being like the caduceus, the magic wand of Hermes: every misfortune is transformed into something good by its touch.¹ Marcus had learned to become adept at this sort of thinking. Stoics calmly envisaged different types of misfortune on a daily basis as part of their contemplative training, learning to view them with relative indifference. Indeed, envisaging feared catastrophes as if they were really happening can be viewed as a kind of emotional battle drill, a way of preparing for worst-case scenarios. Stoics would mentally rehearse ways of responding to these events with wisdom and virtue, turning obstacles into opportunities where possible. One consequence of embracing our fears is that we’re more likely to creatively turn apparent setbacks to our advantage, as the Romans did in their battle on the Danube. These Sarmatian ambushes must have seemed like military catastrophes to the Romans at first. What if they concealed the opportunity to spring a deadly trap, though, that could turn the tide of the war? The obstacle standing in the way becomes the way.

These opportunities came more readily to Stoic leaders because they were trained to be unafraid of seeming misfortunes. After all, Fortune favors the brave, as the Roman poets said. However, for the Stoics, the supreme goal was to remain composed and exercise wisdom even in the face of great danger, whatever the outcome. Marcus tells himself to always remember when he starts to feel frustrated with events that “this is not a misfortune, but rather to bear it nobly is good fortune.” After Lucius’s sudden death in 169 AD, Marcus had been unexpectedly left in sole command of the troops assembling along the Danube for the First Marcomannic War. In his late fifties, with no military experience whatsoever, he’d found himself in command of the largest army ever massed on a Roman frontier. He stood at the head of roughly 140,000 men who awaited his orders, unsure what to expect of him. It must have been incredibly daunting. Yet he embraced his new role completely and turned it into an opportunity to deepen his Stoic resolve.

There should be no question that he risked his own life in stationing himself at the front. At the outbreak of the war, Pannonia had been completely overrun by a huge coalition army led by Ballomar, the young king of the Marcomanni. Ballomar had secretly brought together many smaller tribes, but he was also supported by a huge army of the Marcomanni’s powerful neighbors, the Quadi. The Romans had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Carnuntum, reputedly losing twenty thousand men in a single day, including the praetorian prefect in command, Furius Victorinus. Nevertheless, Marcus remained very close to the action. In The Meditations, he vividly describes the sight of severed hands, feet, and heads lying at unsettling distances from their bodies.² Indeed, he makes a point of noting down that he’s writing at Carnuntum, the main legionary fortress on the front line, and “on the Granua, among the Quadi,” which puts him farther east, presumably later, across the Danube inside enemy territory.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the danger that he faced, Marcus never really mentions anxiety about the terrors of war in The Meditations. It does seem as though he was a natural worrier at first, anxiously burning the midnight oil as he worked obsessively on matters of state. By the time he was writing these notes to himself on philosophy, though, he seems to have become a much calmer and more self-assured man. Perhaps he redoubled his efforts to assimilate Stoicism following the death of his tutor Junius Rusticus, and that accounts for the transformation. When he arrived in Carnuntum to take command of the legions, he was both physically frail and an absolute novice—an “old woman” of a philosopher, sneered the future usurper, Avidius Cassius. Everyone must have questioned Marcus’s competence to lead such a massive campaign. However, both his practice of Stoicism and the long and grueling wars against the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians were slowly molding his character. Seven years later we find him a hardened veteran, and the northern legions, having learned to revere their new commander, are now fiercely loyal to Marcus Aurelius.

The soldiers firmly believed that the gods were on their emperor’s side, and they even attributed two legendary battlefield miracles to Marcus Aurelius’s presence. The first, called the “Thunder Miracle,” occurred in 174 AD, when the troops claimed that Marcus’s prayers had called down a lightning bolt that destroyed a siege engine being used by the Sarmatians. A month later, in July 174 AD, it was claimed that Marcus brought about a “Rain Miracle.” A detachment of men from the Thundering Legion, led by Pertinax, found themselves surrounded, vastly outnumbered, and out of water. According to one account, Marcus raised his hand and prayed: “With this hand which has never taken life, I turn to Thee and worship the Giver of life.” (That would surely be the Stoic Zeus, although Christians later implausibly claimed that Marcus was praying to their God.) At that moment, a torrential rainstorm ensued, and as they fought on, it’s said the Romans gulped down water from their helmets, mixed with the blood running from their wounds. Marcus wasn’t superstitious, as we’ve seen. The legions, however, clearly believed that he was blessed by the gods and acclaimed him their victorious commander. We’re told that when he eventually passed away, the soldiers wept loudly. THE STOIC RESERVE CLAUSE

So how did Marcus overcome his total lack of experience and become such an accomplished military leader? How did he remain composed in the face of uncertain odds against such formidable enemies? One of the most important Stoic techniques that he employed was called acting “with a reserve clause” (hupexhairesis), a technical term that he mentions at least five times in The Meditations. Although the idea goes back to the early Stoics, Marcus actually learned how to perform every action cautiously and with a “reserve clause” from reading Epictetus’s Discourses.³ In essence, it means undertaking any action while calmly accepting that the outcome isn’t entirely under your control. We learn from Seneca and others that it could take the form of a caveat, such as “Fate permitting,” “God willing,” or “If nothing prevents me.” It implies that one is taking action while excluding something: assumptions regarding the eventual outcome, particularly any expectations of success. We say “reserve clause,” incidentally, because our expectations are reserved for what is within our sphere of control. We’re pursuing an external result “with the reservation” that the outcome is not entirely up to us. “Do what you must, let happen what may,” as the saying goes.

In Cicero’s dialogue De Finibus, the Roman Stoic hero Cato of Utica uses the memorable image of an archer or spearman to explain this subtle concept. The Stoic-minded archer’s true goal should be to fire his bow skillfully, insofar as doing so is within his power. Paradoxically, though, he’s indifferent to whether or not his arrow actually hits the target. He controls his aim but not the arrow’s flight. So he does the best he can and accepts whatever happens next. The target—perhaps an animal he’s hunting—could move unexpectedly. Marcus perhaps had this analogy in mind when he was spearing birds and hunting wild boar as a young man. Virtue consists in doing your very best and yet not becoming upset if you come home from the hunt empty-handed—we typically admire people who approach life in this way.

Marcus makes it clear that his internal goal is to live with virtue, particularly wisdom and justice, but his external aim, his preferred outcome, is the common welfare of mankind (not just of his Roman subjects, incidentally). Although the outcome is ultimately indifferent to Stoics, it’s precisely the action of pursuing the common good that constitutes the virtue of justice. Indeed, whether you succeed or fail in your attempts to benefit others, you may still be perfectly virtuous as long as your efforts are sincere. It’s your intentions that count, both morally and psychologically. Nevertheless, you must aim them at an appropriate outcome. For instance, acting in accord with justice means preferring to achieve, Fate willing, an external outcome that is both fair and beneficial for humankind. Marcus refers to this countless times throughout The Meditations.

Indeed, whereas other philosophical schools sometimes advised their students to preserve their equanimity by avoiding the stress and responsibilities of public life, Chrysippus told the Stoics that “the wise man will take part in politics, if nothing prevents him.” The wise man, in other words, desires to act virtuously with wisdom and justice in the social sphere, insofar as he’s practically able to do so. He simultaneously accepts, though, that the outcome of his actions is not under his direct control. There’s no guarantee that he’ll succeed in benefiting his fellow citizens, but he does his best anyway. In a sense, the Stoic gets to have his cake and eat it: to retain his emotional detachment while nevertheless taking action in the world. Like Cato’s archer, his goal is to do what’s within his sphere of control to the best of his ability while remaining somewhat aloof from the outcome. Likewise, we can imagine that on taking command of the legions in the north, Marcus might have said to himself something along the lines of “I will quell the Marcomanni and protect Rome, Fate permitting.”

Later, Christians would take to adding D.V. (Deo volente, “God willing”) to the end of their letters, and Muslims likewise say inshallah to this day. There’s a wonderfully clear description of this sentiment in the New Testament:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”⁴

Marcus Aurelius could easily have said those words in reference to the Stoic Zeus. They remind us that nothing is certain in life. Nothing is entirely under your control, except your own volition. Always accepting this and preparing yourself in advance to meet both success and failure with equanimity can help you avoid feeling angry, surprised, or frustrated when events don’t turn out as you might have wished. It can also stop you from worrying about things in anticipation of them going wrong. We naturally focus our attention on what’s most important to us. Stoics treat their own judgments and actions as the only thing truly good or bad. That inevitably shifts focus to the present and lessens emotional investment in the past and future. The worried mind is always getting too far ahead of itself; it is always in suspense over the future. The Stoic Sage, by contrast, is grounded in the here and now.

Marcus uses the analogy of a blazing fire to describe the wise man acting with the reserve clause. Imagine a fire so intense that its flames naturally consume everything cast upon them. Likewise, the mind of the Sage, acting with the reserve clause, adapts itself, without hesitation, to whatever befalls him. Whether he meets with success or failure, he makes good use of his experience. Stoics can only be obstructed externally, not internally, as long as they attach the caveat “Fate permitting” to their desires. For instance, when people disagreed with Marcus, he first tried to persuade them to see things from his perspective. However, if they persisted in obstructing what he believed to be a just course of action, he remained calm and transformed the obstacle into an opportunity to exercise some other virtue, such as patience, restraint, or understanding. His equanimity remained intact as long as he never desired what was beyond his grasp, which constitutes one of the foundations of the Stoic remedy for worry and anxiety.⁵

Indeed, Marcus goes so far as to say that if you don’t act with the reserve clause in mind, then any failure immediately becomes an evil to you or a potential source of distress. By contrast, if you accept that the outcome couldn’t have been other than it was and wasn’t under your direct control, then you should suffer no harm or frustration. In this way, the mind is saved from anxiety and preserved in its natural equanimity, like the sacred sphere described by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, “round and true,” touched by neither fire nor steel, tyrant nor public censure.⁶ The poet Horace also employed this image of the pure sphere when describing the Stoic ideal of a wise man who is master of himself, undaunted by poverty, chains, or death, defying his passions and looking down on positions of power. A man “complete in himself, smooth and round, who prevents extraneous elements clinging to his polished surface, who is such that when Fortune attacks him she maims only herself.”⁷ Misfortune gains no foothold in his mind because he remains detached from external events, refusing to invest them with any intrinsic value. We could also simply describe this as “adopting a philosophical attitude” toward the outcome of our actions: being resigned to whatever happens and remaining unperturbed come what may. THE PREMEDITATION OF ADVERSITY

If every action is to be undertaken with the reserve clause, an acceptance that we may fail, then it follows that we should anticipate a whole range of setbacks that can potentially befall us. Indeed, the Stoics broaden this strategy, preparing themselves to cope with adversity by patiently visualizing every major type of misfortune, one at a time, as if it were already happening to them. They might picture themselves already in exile, in poverty, bereaved, or suffering from a terrible illness. As we’ll see, going one step further and anticipating your own death plays a very special role in Stoicism. The technique of exposing yourself to stressful situations repeatedly in small doses so that you build up a more general resistance to emotional disturbance is known in behavioral psychology as “stress inoculation.” It’s like inoculating yourself against a virus, and it’s similar to what we’ve come to think of as resilience building.

Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” The clearest example of this prospective meditation strategy in The Meditations comes when Marcus describes part of his morning routine—preparing himself for the day ahead by anticipating various obstacles. Whereas other Stoics focus on the threat of disease, poverty, exile, and so on, Marcus is clearly more concerned with facing interpersonal problems, such as dishonesty, ingratitude, or betrayal. He imagines himself encountering a variety of difficult people in order to accustom himself to coping with them.

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.⁸

It’s easy to see how this passage might relate to his life as emperor. Marcus certainly had enemies in the Senate, a faction opposing his military policy, and he later faced a full-scale civil war. He says that he was surrounded at court by individuals who didn’t share his values and who were hostile toward him; some even wished him dead. However, the Marcomannic Wars were themselves about treachery and deceit. King Ballomar of the Marcomanni was a Roman client and ally. Yet he secretly conspired for years to launch his surprise attack deep into Italy, bringing war to the very doorstep of Rome itself. He seized his chance at the height of the Antonine Plague, when the Romans were weak and troops normally garrisoned along the Danube were still returning from the Parthian War. It was a huge betrayal. So when we read this famous passage from The Meditations, we should bear in mind that Marcus was using Stoicism to prepare himself to deal calmly not only with petty nuisances but also with major political and military crises that changed the shape of European history. All of Rome was thrown into a panic by the news that a massive horde of barbarian warriors was plundering its way through Italy. Marcus responded calmly and with self-assurance. He used Stoic exercises like the premeditation of adversity to ready himself for sudden crises that would have left other men reeling.

Premeditation of adversity can be useful in confronting anger and other negative emotions, but its techniques are particularly suited to treat fear and anxiety. The Stoics defined fear as the expectation that something bad is going to happen, which is virtually identical to the definition originally proposed by Aaron T. Beck, the founder of modern cognitive therapy. Fear is essentially a future-focused emotion, so it’s natural that we should counter it by addressing our thoughts concerning the future. Inoculating ourselves against stress and anxiety through the Stoic premeditation of adversity is one of the most useful techniques for building general emotional resilience, which is what psychologists call the long-term ability to endure stressful situations without becoming overwhelmed by them.

Aesop’s fable “The Boar and the Fox” is all about building resilience. One day a fox was walking through the woods when he spotted a wild boar sharpening his tusks against the stump of a tree. The fox found this hilarious and made fun of the boar for worrying about nothing. When he finally stopped laughing, he asked, “Why are you being so fretful, you fool? There’s nobody here for you to fight!” The boar smiled and said, “True, but when one day I do hear the huntsmen coming, it will be too late then to prepare for battle.” The moral is that in times of peace, we should prepare for war if we want to be ready to defend ourselves. The Stoics likewise used moments of leisure to prepare themselves to remain calm in the face of adversity. EMOTIONAL HABITUATION

Of course, we don’t always know what specific challenges we’re about to face in life. However, your general emotional resilience can be developed by training yourself in advance to cope with a broad enough range of situations. That’s precisely what the Stoics did through the premeditation of adversity strategy. One of the most robustly established findings in the entire field of modern psychotherapy research is the fact that anxiety tends to abate naturally during prolonged exposure to feared situations, under normal conditions. That’s been the basis of evidence-based phobia treatments since the 1950s, and it’s also an integral part of modern treatment protocols for other, more complex forms of anxiety, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Take a person with a severe cat phobia, for instance, and place them in a room with some cats. Their heart rate will go up, probably almost doubling within a few seconds. But what happens next? Well, what goes up must come down … If they remain in the room and do nothing but wait, their anxiety will typically diminish over time. That may take as little as five minutes or maybe as long as half an hour or more. Nevertheless, in most cases, their heart rate will eventually go back down to something approaching its normal resting level. If you bring them back the next day and put them in the room with the cats once again, you’ll typically notice that their heart rate will go back up but not as high as before, and it will tend to lower more quickly. If you repeat this exercise for several days, then they will become emotionally “habituated” to the cats, their anxiety having permanently reduced to a normal or negligible level.

That this basic truth was understood long ago is nicely illustrated by another of Aesop’s fables, called “The Fox and the Lion.” One day a fox strolling through the woods spotted a lion—a creature she’d never seen before. She froze with terror but stopped to watch from a distance before slowly creeping away. The next day she went back to the same spot and saw the lion again, but she was able to get closer than before, hiding behind a bush for a while before making her escape. On the third day, the fox returned, but this time she found the courage to walk right up to the lion and say hello, and somehow the two became friends. The moral of the story is that familiarity breeds not contempt but indifference. We can expect anxiety to abate naturally with repeated exposure, under normal conditions.

What the Stoic literature doesn’t make clear, though, is that the feared situation must be experienced for considerably longer than normal for anxiety to properly habituate. In fact, if exposure is terminated too soon, the technique may actually backfire and increase anxiety and sensitization to the feared situation. So it’s important to compare what the Stoics recommend to what we know from clinical research using similar techniques.

Exposure therapy works best when the anxiety-provoking trigger is physically present, like the cats in our example above. Therapists call this in vivo, or “real-world,” exposure. However, anxiety also habituates almost as reliably, in most cases, when the threat is merely imagined, something known as in vitro, or “imaginal,” exposure. The Stoics realized that exposure to imagined events can lead to emotional habituation in this way, allowing anxiety to abate naturally. Their recommendation to regularly picture catastrophic events, which we’ve called the premeditation of adversity, is essentially a form of imaginal exposure therapy. Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Lion” shows that people have long grasped this phenomenon, but it’s still quite remarkable to discover a philosophical therapy employing it over two thousand years before it was rediscovered by modern behavior therapists.

However, in the case of imaginal exposure, maintaining the image for long enough requires considerable patience and concentration, especially when practiced as a form of self-help without the aid of a therapist. Many people find that it helps to imagine the anxiety-provoking situation as if it were a short movie clip, or sequence of events, with a beginning, middle, and end, lasting roughly a minute or so. They can then replay the same scene repeatedly, in their mind’s eye, for five to fifteen minutes or even longer. For example, someone who is anxious about losing their job might visualize being called into their boss’s office, told that they’re being sacked or made redundant, and later clearing their desk and leaving, etc. They’d picture this as a short movie, perhaps repeatedly on a loop. As noted, the actual amount of time required varies, but anxiety should have reduced to at least half its initial level before ending the exercise. The most common reason for failure is that people terminate these sorts of exposure exercises before their emotions have had enough time to habituate. It takes patience, in other words.

Therapists will often ask their clients to rate their discomfort or anxiety level while picturing a scene on a scale from zero to ten, or as a percentage. Clients then re-rate their anxiety every few minutes during repeated imaginal exposure until it has sufficiently reduced. For example, the cat phobic might patiently visualize stroking a cat over and over, until their anxiety reduces from 80 percent to at least 40 percent or even lower if possible (where 100 percent would be the most severe anxiety they could imagine feeling and 0 percent would be no anxiety at all). Nota bene: It’s important to emphasize that any technique that involves imagining upsetting scenes should be approached with caution by individuals who suffer from mental health problems or those vulnerable to being emotionally overwhelmed, such as sufferers of panic attacks. When doing this alone, don’t pick an image that’s going to be too much for you to handle, such as a traumatic memory of sexual assault, for instance—that’s where the support of a qualified psychotherapist may be necessary. Nevertheless, most people are capable of safely confronting ordinary fears and worries in their imagination. SPONTANEOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGE

Emotional habituation is the most important process to take place during imaginal exposure, such as the premeditation of adversity. However, we can activate a surprising number of other beneficial psychological processes when we patiently and repeatedly picture stressful events. Therapy clients who are asked to mentally review emotional situations in this way may exhibit one or more of the following changes:

1. Emotional habituation, as described above, where anxiety or other feelings naturally wear off over time and become blunted through exposure to the feared situation.

2. Emotional acceptance, where we gradually reduce our struggle against unpleasant feelings such as pain or anxiety, come to view them with greater indifference, and learn to live with them—something that, paradoxically, often greatly alleviates emotional distress.

3. Cognitive distancing, where we increasingly view thoughts and beliefs with detachment: we begin to notice that it’s not things themselves that upset us but our judgments about them.

4. Decatastrophizing, where we gradually reappraise our judgments about the severity of a situation, of how awful it seems, downgrading it by going from “What if this happens? How will I cope?” to “So what if this happens? It’s not the end of the world.”

5. Reality testing, where we reappraise our assumptions about a situation to make them progressively more realistic and objective; for example, reevaluating the probability of the worst-case scenario or that something bad will even happen at all.

6. Problem-solving, where repeatedly reviewing an event leads us to creatively figure out a solution to some problem facing us—perhaps like Marcus and his generals’ paradoxical idea of deliberately marching their legionaries into a Sarmatian ambush in order to spring a trap on the enemy.

7. Behavioral rehearsal, where our perception of our ability to cope improves as we practice, in our mind’s eye, employing skills and coping strategies in an increasingly refined manner—for example, mentally rehearsing assertive ways to deal with unfair criticism until we’re more confident about doing so in reality. This can take the form of modeling the behavior of others whose way of coping we admire and want to emulate—we imagine how they would act and then picture ourselves doing something similar.

I’ve found that informing patients that other people often experience these sorts of changes is helpful because it can make the same processes more noticeable in their own mind and more likely to happen spontaneously. Of course, it’s also possible to deliberately utilize these psychological mechanisms by employing various psychological techniques. For instance, in addition to the premeditation of adversity, Marcus refers to the repeated use of two particularly important Stoic exercises that resemble cognitive distancing and decatastrophizing in modern psychotherapy. We’ve mentioned these already, and now we’re ready to consider their use in relation to worry and anxiety. THE INNER CITADEL

Although Marcus says little about anxiety explicitly, he often talks about the kind of peace that Stoicism offers, and his words obviously have implications for the Stoic therapy of anxiety. During his early reign, after the death of Antoninus, he took trips to his holiday villas in Italy to get a break from the worries of the Parthian War and running the empire. We can see from his letters to Fronto that he was wrestling with the whole idea of taking time away from work, feeling instead that it was his duty to attend to state business even though his friends advised him that retreats were necessary for his health.

By the time he wrote The Meditations, during the Marcomannic Wars, pleasant retreats were a thing of the past, and his life was spent far from Rome. Marcus still found himself pining after his beautiful holiday villas, such as Antoninus’s family home at Lorium on the Italian coast, where Marcus spent much of his youth. He says that at times, like many other people, he feels a strong desire to get away from things and retreat to the peace of the countryside, seashore, or mountains.⁹ However, he tells himself that feeling the need to escape from life’s stresses in this way is a sign of weakness. It might be what the Stoics called a “preferred indifferent,” but escape is not something we should demand from life or feel we really need as a coping tool—that sort of dependence on being able to escape from stressful situations just creates its own problems. Marcus tells himself that he doesn’t literally need to get away from it all because true inner peace comes from the nature of our thoughts rather than pleasant natural surroundings. He tells himself that resilience comes from his ability to regain his composure wherever he finds himself. This is the “inner citadel” to which he can retreat, even on the frigid battlefields of the northern campaign.

Marcus returns, in particular, to the analogy of a mountain retreat several times. He reminds himself that it makes no difference where he is or what he’s doing; the time left for him in life is short, and he should therefore learn to “live as though on a mountaintop,” regardless of his circumstances. In fact, everything that troubles us here is just as it would be on a hilltop, by the seashore, or anywhere else—what matters is how we choose to view it.¹⁰ The Stoic can live with contentment and joy in his heart this way, even if men are against him and his physical environment is torturous. Wherever we find ourselves, our judgments are still free, and they are the seat of our passions.

In order to achieve this sense of inner peace, Marcus tells himself to frequently retreat not to the hilltops but to his own faculty of reason, thereby rising above external events and purifying his mind of attachment to them. He believes that to do this effectively he must reflect, in particular, on two concise but fundamental Stoic principles:¹¹

1. Everything that we see is changing and will soon be gone, and we should bear in mind how many things have already changed over time, like the waters of streams flowing ceaselessly past—an idea that we can call the contemplation of impermanence.

2. External things cannot touch the soul, but our disturbances all arise from within. Marcus means that things don’t upset us, but our value judgments about them do. However, we can regain our composure by separating our values from external events using the strategy we’ve called cognitive distancing.

In other words, peace of mind can be achieved even in the chaos of the battlefield—as Socrates reputedly showed—or in the clamor of the Senate, as long as we keep our mind in good order. Marcus concludes by condensing this into six Greek words, perhaps quoted from a previous author, which we might translate as The universe is change: life is opinion. COGNITIVE DISTANCING FOR ANXIETY

The second of these two fundamental techniques for securing peace is familiar to us as cognitive distancing. We can employ it in response to real-world situations or during the sort of premeditation, or imaginal exposure technique, described earlier. Although we know that anxiety habituates naturally through repeated exposure and the Stoics presumably must have observed this during their use of regular premeditation, their real goal was to change our opinions about external events, not just our feelings.

Gaining cognitive distance is, in a sense, the most important aspect of Stoic anxiety management. This is what Marcus meant by “life is opinion”: that the quality of our life is determined by our value judgments, because those shape our emotions. When we deliberately remind ourselves that we project our values onto external events and that how we judge those events is what upsets us, we gain cognitive distance and recover our mental composure. DECATASTROPHIZING AND THE CONTEMPLATION OF IMPERMANENCE

The first basic technique for attaining peace, described by Marcus above, is related to decatastrophizing, or learning to downgrade the perceived severity of a threat from “total catastrophe” to a more realistic level. Again, decatastrophizing can be applied in real situations or in imagined ones, during the premeditation of adversity. For example, suppose you’re worried that you’ll fail an important exam and you become very anxious, feeling that failure would be the end of the world, a total disaster. Decatastrophizing would entail reevaluating the situation in a more balanced manner so that it seems less overwhelming and you’re more able to identify potential ways of coping. Viewing things in a more moderate and realistic way like this tends to reduce anxiety. You might experience setbacks, but it’s an exaggeration to talk as though they’re the end of the world.

As it happens, most people find it easier to visualize a scene if they write down a description of it first and perhaps review it later. Staying with the example above, you might write a page or so about losing your job: how it begins, being told the bad news, the immediate aftermath, etc. People often find that reading their description aloud several times before attempting to visualize it helps them to clarify the details and picture the scene more vividly. As always, it’s important to leave out emotive language (“They just treated me like trash and threw me out on my backside.”) or value judgments (“This is totally unfair!”). Just stick to the facts as accurately and objectively as possible.

Asking yourself “What next?” a few times can move your focus past the most distressing part of the scene and take away its catastrophic appearance. For example, what would happen after losing your job? It might be tough for a while, but eventually you’d find something else and your life would move on. Another simple and powerful technique is to ask yourself how you would feel about the situation that worries you in ten or twenty years’ time, looking back on it from the future. It’s an example of a more general strategy known as “time projection.” In other words, you can help yourself develop a philosophical attitude toward adversity by asking, “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?” You’ll often find that shifting your perspective in terms of time can change how you feel about a setback by making it seem less catastrophic. WORRY POSTPONEMENT

In recent decades, researchers and clinicians have gained a better understanding of the ways in which excessive worrying can perpetuate anxiety. By “worry” they mean something quite specific: an anxious process exhibiting a particular style of thinking. Worried thinking is perseverative—it goes on and on. It tends to involve “What if?” thoughts about feared catastrophes: “What if they get so angry they fire me? What if I can’t get another job? How will I pay for my kids’ college?” These questions often feel as if they’re unanswerable. One just leads to another, in a chain reaction, which goes on and on, fueling anxiety. Severe worrying can often feel out of control, but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s actually a relatively conscious and voluntary type of thinking. People sometimes don’t even realize that what they’re doing is worrying. They may confuse it with problem-solving, believing that they’re trying to “figure out a solution” when in fact they’re just going in circles making their anxiety worse and worse.

There’s a tendency, ironically, for people struggling with anxiety to try too hard to control involuntary aspects of the emotion while neglecting to take control of the voluntary aspects. We’ve already discussed how the Stoics acknowledged that our initial emotional reactions are often automatic. We should accept these as natural, view them with indifference, and accept them without a struggle rather than try to suppress them. On the other hand, we should learn to suspend the voluntary thoughts we have in response to these initial feelings and the situation that triggered them. In the case of worrying, perhaps surprisingly, that’s usually just a matter of noticing we’re doing it and stopping.

One of the leading researchers on the psychology of worry, Thomas D. Borkovec, carried out a groundbreaking study on “worry postponement.” He asked a group of college students to spot the times during a four-week period when they began to worry about something and to respond by postponing thinking about it any further until a specified “worry time” later in the day. Using this simple technique, the subjects were able to reduce the time spent worrying by almost half, and other symptoms of anxiety were also reduced. Worry postponement is now a central component of most CBT protocols for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a psychiatric condition characterized by severe, pathological worrying.¹² However, we can apply the same approach to ordinary, everyday worries like those of the students in the research study.

The steps to follow in worry postponement build upon the general framework that should be familiar to you by now:

1. Self-monitoring: Be constantly on the lookout for early warning signs of worry, such as frowning or fidgeting in certain ways—this awareness alone will often derail the habit of worrying.

2. If you are unable to address your anxiety immediately using Stoic techniques, postpone thinking about it until your feelings have abated naturally, returning to the problem at a specified “worry time” of your choosing.

3. Let go of the thoughts without trying to actively suppress them—instead, just tell yourself you’re setting them aside temporarily to come back to them later at a specified time and place. Cognitive distancing techniques can be helpful in this regard. You can also write down a word or two on a piece of paper to remind yourself of the thing you’re worried about, then fold it up and put it in your pocket to address later.

4. Return your attention to the here and now, expanding your awareness through your body and your surroundings, and try to notice small details you’d overlooked before. Worry goes chasing after future catastrophes and therefore requires inattention to the present moment. Become grounded in the here and now instead: “Lose your mind and come to your senses!”

5. Later, when you return to the worry, if it no longer seems important, you might just leave it alone. Otherwise, visualize the worst-case scenario or feared outcome that’s making you anxious, using the technique of imaginal exposure or premeditation of adversity.

6. Use cognitive distancing by telling yourself “It’s not things that upset me but my judgments about them.” You can also decatastrophize by describing the feared event in objective terms, without emotive language or value judgments. Remind yourself of its temporary nature by asking “What next?” and considering how things will move on over time.

Stoics tell us to be constantly mindful of our actions and look out for disturbing impressions, automatic thoughts, or images that pop into our stream of consciousness. Instead of giving our assent to them and allowing ourselves to be swept along by them into worry, we should tell ourselves that they are just impressions and not the things they claim to represent. In this way we gain cognitive distance from them and can postpone evaluating them until we’re in a better frame of mind to deal with them. Chrysippus reputedly said that with the passage of time, “emotional inflammation abates” and as reason returns, finding room to function properly, it can then expose the irrational nature of our passions.

In this chapter, we’ve looked at ways Stoics cope with worry and anxiety, with a focus on the Stoic reserve clause and premeditation of adversity. Many of the other techniques we mentioned in previous chapters are useful for coping with anxiety, but Marcus mentions two in particular that allow us to focus on the transience of upsetting events: cognitive distancing and decatastrophizing. We also looked at how the modern evidence-based technique of worry postponement resembles coping strategies described by the ancient Stoics.

Indeed, Stoicism provides some very powerful ways of overcoming fear and anxiety, which often resemble those supported by research on modern CBT. Remaining grounded in the present, spotting worry when it begins, and gaining cognitive distance from worry are healthy and effective ways of coping. We can also take advantage of the natural process of emotional habituation by patiently facing our fears in our imagination long enough for our anxiety to abate. This is an inevitable benefit of the Stoic technique called “premeditation of adversity,” but we can also help ourselves do this by employing verbal decatastrophizing and describing the feared event in very calm and objective language, suspending the value judgments responsible for our distress.

After decades of training in these and other Stoic techniques, Marcus was able to go calmly and confidently to the defense of the empire. The majority of people in Rome were thrown into total panic, fearing an impending catastrophe at the hands of the barbarian hordes invading Italy from the north. As emperor, Marcus faced one setback after another, and he must have felt out of his depth at times. However, he calmly persevered in the face of great adversity. Slowly, with his trusted generals Pompeianus and Pertinax by his side, Marcus began to gain the upper hand over the northern tribes.

The more warlike Zanticus replaced King Bandaspus of the Iazyges, but as the war turned against him, he finally surrendered and sued for peace in June 175 AD. Marcus was shortly afterward acclaimed emperor for the eighth time and granted the title Sarmaticus, conqueror of the Sarmatians. It’s reported that 100,000 Roman prisoners were freed as a result of the victory. Marcus resettled many thousands of the Germanic tribesmen and women in Italy rather than kill or enslave them, albeit with mixed success. This wasn’t an option with the nomadic and warlike Sarmatians, though. Instead, Marcus conscripted eight thousand of their horsemen into the Roman army, forming an elite auxiliary cavalry unit, most of whom were sent to garrison the Roman forts in Britain. He wrote in his notes that men who take pride in capturing Sarmatians as though they were fish in a net are no better than thieves or robbers.¹³

However, Marcus had to rush the final stages of the First Marcomannic War and the ensuing peace negotiations with the Sarmatians because an even greater threat suddenly loomed on the horizon. The Stoic precepts and practices that Marcus had honed during the First Marcomannic War were about to be put to the test once again. Far away in the east, a rival had staked his claim to the imperial throne, and that could mean only one thing: Romans were about to be divided by civil war, which threatened to tear the empire apart.