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

8. DEATH AND THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

Vindobona, March 17, 180 AD. The emperor beckons his guard to come close and whispers: Go to the rising sun, for I am already setting. He barely has enough strength to pronounce these words. Marcus glimpses fear in the young officer’s eyes. The guard hesitates for a moment before nodding awkwardly and returning to his post at the entrance to the imperial quarters. Marcus pulls the sheet above his head and rolls over uncomfortably, as if to go to sleep for the last time. He can feel death beckoning him on all sides. How easy it would be to slip into oblivion and be free from the pain and discomfort once and for all. The pestilence is devouring his frail old body from within. He hasn’t eaten for days, weakening himself by fasting. Now, as the sun goes down, everything is very quiet. His eyelids flutter, although the pain keeps him awake. The emperor slips in and out of consciousness. But he doesn’t die.

He thinks to himself, “Your eyes feel so heavy now—it’s time to let them close.” The sweet sensation of consciousness dissolving begins to creep over him …

I must have fallen asleep, or lost consciousness again. I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed. Everything is dark. Soon it will be daybreak and the sparrows will sing their morning song. Spring has broken and the streams have thawed. Their waters flow into the mighty river passing by the camp outside.

The soldiers picture the spirit of the Danube as an ancient river god. He silently offers us all a lesson if only we pause to listen: all things change, and before long they are gone. You cannot step into the same river twice, Heraclitus once said, because new waters are constantly flowing through it. Nature herself is a rushing torrent, just like the Danube, sweeping along all things in her stream. No sooner has something come into existence than the great river of time washes it away again, only to carry something else into view. The long-forgotten past lies upstream from me now, and downstream waits the immeasurable darkness of the future, vanishing from sight.

I won’t be needing my medicines or physicians again. I’m relieved the fuss is over. The time has come to let the river wash me away too. Change is both life and death. We can try to stall the inevitable, but we never escape it. It’s a fool’s game,

With meats and drinks and magic spells

To turn aside the stream and hold death at bay.¹

Looking back, it seems more obvious to me now than ever before that the lives of most men are tragedies of their own making. Men let themselves either get puffed up with pride or tormented by grievances. Everything they concern themselves with is fragile, trivial, and fleeting. We’re left with nowhere to stand firm. Amid the torrent of things rushing past, there’s nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes.

You may as well lose your heart to one of the little sparrows who nest by the riverbank—that’s what I used to say. As soon as it’s charmed you, it will flit away, vanishing from sight. I once set my heart on my own little sparrows. I called them my chicks in their nest: thirteen boys and girls, given to me by Faustina. Now only Commodus and four of the girls are left, wearing grave faces and weeping for me. The rest were taken before their time, long ago now. At first I grieved terribly, but the Stoics taught me how to both love my children and endure when Nature reclaimed them. When I was mourning my little twin boys, Apollonius patiently consoled me and helped me slowly regain my composure. It’s natural to mourn—even some animals grieve the loss of their young. But there are those who go beyond the natural bounds of grief and let themselves be swept away entirely by melancholy thoughts and passions. The wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.

Nature also reclaimed my beloved son Marcus Annius Verus, not long before my brother Lucius died. I gave him the name I bore myself as a child, passed down through generations in my family. My little Marcus bled to death on the doctor’s table while they were removing a tumor from beneath his ear. I could only mourn him five days before I had to leave Rome for the war in Pannonia. Later, gentle Apollonius would remind me of a saying from Epictetus: “Only a madman seeks figs in winter.” Such is one who pines for his child when his loan has been returned to Nature. I loved them, by all means, but learned also to accept that they were mortal.

Leaves that the wind scatters to the ground,

Such are the generations of men.²

And what were my children but such leaves? They arrived with the spring and were brought down by the winter blast; then others grew to take their place. I wanted to keep them forever, although I always knew that they were mortal. Yet the heart that cries “Oh let my child be safe!” is like an eye wanting only to gaze on pleasant sights, refusing to accept that all things change, whether we like it or not.

The wise man sees life and death as two sides of the same coin. When Xenophon, one of Socrates’s noblest students, received word that his son had fallen in battle, what did he say? “I knew my son was mortal.” He grasped so firmly the precept that what is born must surely also perish. I had evidence of this from an early age, having lost my father, Annius Verus, when I was just a child. I barely knew him, except through his reputation as a good and humble man. My mother, Lucilla, buried him, and in due course it fell to me to bury her. The Emperor Antoninus, my adoptive father, buried his empress, and then the time came for Lucius and me, his sons, to place him in his tomb and mourn for him. Then my brother the Emperor Lucius died quite unexpectedly, and I buried him too. Finally, I laid to rest my own beloved empress, Faustina. Soon I shall be reunited with her when Commodus lays my remains in Hadrian’s great mausoleum on the banks of the Tiber. My friends will deliver eulogies for me in Rome and remind the people that Marcus Aurelius has not been lost but only returned to Nature. The sun sets this evening and takes me down with it; tomorrow it will be another who rises to take my place.

So now you’re finally here, Death, my old friend, for assuredly I can call you a friend. You’ve been my guest many times, after all, welcomed through the gates of my imagination. How often have you accompanied me as I pictured the reigns of emperors from long ago while deep in my meditations? Everything is different, but underneath it’s all the same: anonymous individuals marrying, raising children, falling sick, and dying. Some fight wars, feast, work the land, and trade their wares. Some flatter others or seek to be flattered, suspect their fellows of plotting against them, or hatch their own plots. Countless among them engage in intrigues, pray for the death of others, grumble at their lot, fall in love, pile up fortunes, or dream of high office or even a crown. How many individuals whose names we’ll never know, their lives extinguished, lie forgotten, as if they had never been born at all? Yet turn your thoughts to the mighty, and what difference does it make? Death comes knocking at the king’s palace and the beggar’s shack alike. Augustus, the founder of the empire, his family, ancestors, priests, advisors, and his whole entourage—where are they now? Nowhere to be seen. Alexander the Great and his mule driver both reduced to dust, made equals at last by death.

And what of great dynasties, now utterly extinct? Think of the efforts their ancestors took to leave behind an heir, only to have their whole lineage end abruptly with the epitaph “Last of his line” engraved upon some tomb. And how many cities have, as it were, also died? Entire nations wiped out from history. Asked why he wasn’t rejoicing at the annihilation of Carthage, great Scipio wept and prophesied that one day even Rome herself will fall. Every era of history teaches us the same lesson: nothing lasts forever. From the court of Alexander, long gone, to those of Hadrian and Antoninus, among whom I once walked, known today through monuments and stories only. The very names “Hadrian” and “Antoninus” have acquired an archaic ring, like the names of Scipio Africanus and Cato of Utica inscribed in history books. Tomorrow my own name will sound old to others, describing a bygone era: “the reign of Marcus Aurelius.”

I will be joining them: Augustus, Vespasian, Trajan, and the rest. Yet it is a thing indifferent to me how or even whether I shall be remembered. How many of those whose praises were once sung have long since been forgotten? And those who sang their praises too. It’s vanity to worry about how history will record your actions. Even now, I’m surrounded by people who are overly concerned with what future generations will think of them. They might as well lament the fact that centuries ago, before their birth, their names were utterly unknown. The lips of mankind can grant you neither fame nor glory worth seeking. What matters is how I face this moment, which shall soon be gone, for I can already feel my very self evaporating, slipping gradually into extinction as if into a dream.

Death, when I rode in triumph through the streets of Rome alongside Lucius, were you with me then? The slaves stood with us in the chariots, holding golden wreaths above our heads, whispering at our backs “remember you must die.” Even as Lucius paraded his haul of gold and treasures and shackled lines of captured Parthians, his legionaries were bringing back something far more sinister from the east: the pestilence that followed them to Rome. It’s taken fourteen years, but the disease that saw Roman dead piled high on carts has finally claimed another Caesar. The Stoics taught me to look death square in the eye, to tell myself with merciless honesty each day “I am a mortal,” all the while remaining in good cheer. They say that when Zeno, the founder of our school, was elderly, he once tripped and fell. He banged on the ground and quipped: “I come of my own accord; why then do you call me?” Now I too am an old man, and, though you call me, I come readily to meet you, Death.

Yet there are still many afraid even to utter your name aloud. The Stoics taught me that there are no such words of ill omen. Socrates was the first to call the idea that death is terrible a mask to frighten small children. He said, “Friends, if a childish part of you is still afraid of death, you should sing a charm over him every day until he’s cured.” If I consider death for what it is, analyzing it rationally, stripping away all the assumptions encrusted round it, it’s revealed to be nothing but a process of Nature. Look at what is behind the mask, study it, and you will see it does not bite. Yet this childish fear of death is perhaps our greatest bane in life. Fear of death does us more harm than death itself because it turns us into cowards, whereas death merely returns us to Nature. The wise and good enjoy life, without a doubt, but nevertheless are unafraid of dying. Surely we are never fully alive as long as we fear the end? Indeed, to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave.

I must die, but must I die groaning? For it’s not death that upsets us but our judgments about it. Socrates did not fear death; he saw that it was neither good nor bad. On the morning of his execution, he casually informed his friends that philosophy is a lifelong meditation on our own mortality. True philosophers, he said, fear their own demise least of all men. For those who love wisdom above everything else are continually in training for the end. To practice death in advance is to practice freedom and to prepare oneself to let go of life gracefully.

Indeed, I have been traveling along the road to death since the very day I came into this world. From a green grape to a ripened cluster to a shriveled raisin, everything in Nature has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each stage of man has its own ending or demise—childhood, adolescence, prime, and old age. Assuredly, this body is not the one to which my mother gave birth. Indeed, I’ve been changing, dying, every day since I was born. If there is nothing to fear in that, then why should I fear the final step? And if death is a loss of awareness, then why should I fret? For only that which is something can be good or evil, but death is nothing, the mere absence of experience. It’s no worse than sleep. Moreover, death is a release from all pain, a boundary beyond which our sufferings cannot go. It returns us to that state of peacefulness in which we lay before we were even born. I was dead for countless eons before my birth, and it did not vex me then. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care—as the Epicureans say.

For if it troubles me not at all that my body only occupies a small portion of space, then why should I be afraid that it only occupies a small span of time? In any case, from another point of view, we don’t disappear into nothingness but are dispersed back into Nature. I shall be returned to the earth from which my father drew his seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk, and from which I have taken my daily food and drink. For everything comes ultimately from one source and returns there taking another form. It is as though from softened wax you might shape a little horse, then a little tree, then a human form. Nothing is ever really destroyed, just sent back into Nature’s arms and turned into something else, over and over—one thing becomes another.

Today a drop of semen, tomorrow a pile of ash or bones. Not eternal, but mortal; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day. Like an hour I must come and like an hour pass away. The more our minds comprehend that we are parts of the whole in this way, the more we realize our own body’s frailty. I always reminded myself that I wasn’t meant to live a thousand years and that death would be here for me soon enough. I lived each day as if it were to be my last, preparing myself for this very moment. Now that it’s finally upon me, I realize it’s just the same as every other moment. I have the choice to die well or die badly. Philosophy has prepared me well enough. Do you suppose that human life can seem any great matter, said Socrates, to a great-souled individual who has embraced the whole of time and the whole of reality in his thoughts? No. To such a person not even death will seem terrible.

My soul disperses for a while, in drowsy reveries, teetering on the brink of insensibility. What a miraculous power thought has to travel swiftly across the world, or to consume grand vistas, enveloping more and more within its scope. Roaming dreamily over the whole wide world and bidding it farewell, I realize that I have taken flight above it. Like Homer’s Zeus, looking down on earth from Mount Olympus, observing now the lands of the horse-loving Thracians, now Greece, Persia, India, and surrounding everything the wine-dark sea. Or like our Scipio Aemilianus, who, slumbering in Numidia, dreamt that he was transported aloft, allowed to gaze down briefly on the world of men from among the stars.

I have long prepared my mind to embrace the most comprehensive outlook through the daily practice of philosophy. Plato said anyone seeking to understand human affairs should gaze down upon all earthly things this way, as though from a high watchtower. Each day I would rehearse, just as my teachers did, imagining myself suddenly raised aloft and looking down on the complex tapestry of human life from high above. Now, as the life keeps fading from my body, my daydreams turn into visions, real enough to touch. How insignificant the countless things men squabble over seem from this high vantage point. Like children, though, who think only of what baubles belong to their play, men, their minds captivated by narrow fears and desires, are alienated from Nature as a whole.

I can see them now below me, the great herds of human animals: numerous workers toiling in the fields, far-traveled merchants of all nations, and huge armies massed for battle—all of them like ants scuttling over the earth. Always busy at something, an anonymous, swarming mass, wandering astray down the countless labyrinthine paths that stretch before them. Men, women, and children, slaves and nobles, those being born and those dying, marrying and separating, celebrating festivals and mourning their losses; the tiresome clapping of tongues in courts of law—I see a hundred thousand faces of friends and strangers pass me by. I see great cities growing from humble settlements, thriving for a spell, then one day crumbling into deserted ruins. Races barbarous in their infancy, struggling toward civilization, then falling into barbarism again; after darkness and ignorance come arts and sciences, then the inevitable descent once again into darkness and ignorance. I see exotic and undiscovered races hidden in the far corners of the world. The many different rituals, languages, and stories of men. The countless lives of others long ago and the lives that will be lived many years from now after my own demise. And even though I was fated to be acclaimed the emperor of Rome, how few there are in the vast world who have even heard my name, let alone known me for who I really am. Those who do will soon be gone themselves and forgotten.

I find myself marveling once more at the soul’s capacity to rid itself of myriad unnecessary troubles in this way. Enlarging itself, embracing the whole universe, and reflecting on the finitude and transience of all individual things, the brevity of our entire life, and the lives of others, when compared to the eternity of time. We become magnanimous, great-souled, by expanding our minds and rising above trivial things, which belong far beneath us. The soul flies free when it’s not weighed down by earthly fears and desires and returns to its homeland, a citizen of the entire cosmos, making its abode the immeasurable vastness of universal Nature.

Thanks be to the gods that I was encouraged to make a habit of picturing the whole cosmos thus, and contemplating the immensity of both time and space. I learned to set each particular thing in life against the whole substance of the universe in my mind’s eye and see it as far less than a fig seed, and measure it against the whole of time as nothing more than the turn of a screw. For what is impossible to see with mortal eyes is nevertheless possible to grasp with the intellect.

Before me now a mental image forms: the representation of a shining sphere enclosing all creation, each part distinct but nevertheless one, gathered into a single vision. All the stars of the heavens, the sun, the moon, our earth, both land and sea, and all living creatures, just as though seen within a transparent globe, which I can almost imagine holding in the palm of my hand. From this cosmic perspective, in truth, to rail against the universe in fury over all the troubles in history would be like weeping over a cut on my smallest finger.

My life all but over, nothing remains—no fears and no desires to separate me from the rest of Nature. I see before me the whole of the cosmos, its vast design, and the mighty revolutions performed by the celestial orbs. And I find myself plunged deep in this imagination, traversing the heavens above, as strength leaves my limbs.

In this vast ocean of being, what a minute dot our whole earth seems. Asia and Europe in their entirety are merely specks of dirt, the great oceans nothing but a raindrop, and the highest mountain merely a grain of sand.

I can only admire the grace and majesty of the stars as my mind is blessed to accompany them, and I marvel further still at the vision of the whole cosmos before me. May I be transformed through the proximity of death into something worthy of Nature and the cosmos, an alien in my motherland no more. Traveling through the breadth of Nature, my mind expands to a vastness that envelops individual events, swallowing them up and making them appear like a pinpoint by comparison. Where is the tragedy in such negligible incidents? Where is the surprise or astonishment?

What I spent my life learning I now see everywhere—as I turn my attention from one thing to another, all sides grant me the same vision. The universe is a single living being, with a single body and a single consciousness. Every individual mind a tiny particle of one great mind. Each living creature like a limb or organ of one great body, working together, whether they realize it or not, to bring about events in accord with one great impulse. Everything in the universe so intricately woven together, forming a single fabric and chain of events. Whereas I once saw each fragmentary part and with some effort imagined the whole, my sight is now transformed. Having let go of fear and desire forever, I can see only the whole to which every part belongs, and this appears more real to me than anything else. What I knew before, my life and opinions, seem like smoke through which I glimpsed Nature darkly.

Rejoicing in this comprehensive vision, my self is dilated until it becomes one with infinite universal Nature. How minuscule the fraction of cosmic time that has been assigned to each of our lives. How small this clod of earth over which we creep. The more confidently I grasp this vision, the more clearly I understand that nothing is of any great moment in life except that we should do two simple things: First we must follow the guidance of our own higher nature, submitting ourselves to reason’s dictates. Second, we must deal wisely and dispassionately with whatever universal Nature sends to be our fate, whether pleasure or pain, praise or censure, life or death.

My soul ascends higher as the remaining life now ebbs from my limbs. The difference between knowing and seeing has somehow given way. Before my very gaze, the constellations surround me, like those adorning the walls in the temples of Mithras. I glide effortlessly alongside them like a ship sailing over the smoothest waters. Around me are the multitude of stars, a host of beings composed of pure light. Naked and flawless, they gracefully follow their course through the heavens without deviation. How they differ from men below on earth. We possess the same divine spark, yet it lies buried deep within us, and we live as though imprisoned, anchored down in the mud by our own folly and greed.

The mind of the Sage is like a star or our own sun, from which purity and simplicity shine forth. I’ve been fortunate enough to observe these characteristics in others. Men like Apollonius, Junius Rusticus, and Claudius Maximus by their own example showed me how to live wisely, virtuously, and in accord with Nature. Released now from earthly attachments, I feel my soul being transformed and cleansed, unveiling within me some glimmer of the deep wisdom that I once glimpsed in the words and actions of my beloved teachers. As I let life slip away, content to part from it, my mind is finally liberated to follow its own true nature without obstruction. I see things more clearly than ever before. The sun does not do the work of the rain or of the wind.

The sun himself and every star in heaven are telling me, “I was born to do what I am doing.” And I too was born to follow my own nature by striving for wisdom. Countless stars punctuate the night sky. Each one is distinct from the others, yet they all work together, forming the whole panoply of heaven. Man was meant to be like this: striving his whole life with patient endurance to cultivate the pure light of wisdom within himself and allowing it to shine forth for the benefit of others. Alone and yet at one with the community of fellow men around him, living wisely and in concord with them. The ancient Pythagoreans were right. To contemplate the unwavering purity and simplicity of the stars in this way is to cleanse our mind of earthly dross and set it free.

The rays of Apollo pour down in every direction but are not exhausted. Extending itself, sunlight touches objects and illuminates them without being weakened or defiled. It rests where it falls, caressing objects and exposing their features, neither deflected like the wind nor absorbed like the rain. Indeed, the mind of the wise man is itself like a heavenly sphere radiating the purest sunlight. It falls gracefully upon things, illuminating them without becoming entangled or degraded by them. For what does not welcome the light condemns itself to darkness. In the mind of one who has been purified, though, nothing is veiled or hidden.

Pure wisdom like the blazing fire of a sun consumes anything cast into it and burns brighter still. Reason adapts itself to any obstacle if it’s allowed to, finding the right virtue with which to respond. We have been given a duty of sorts to take care of this paltry body with its unruly feelings, but only our intellect is genuinely our own. We let go of our attachment to everything external, purifying and separating ourselves from things, when we firmly grasp the realization that they are transient and ultimately indifferent. When we cut our ties to the past and the future and center ourselves in the present moment, we set our soul free from external things, leaving it to invest itself wholly in fulfilling its own nature.

Things external to our own character such as health, wealth, and reputation are neither good nor bad. They present us with opportunities, which the wise man uses well and the fool badly. Though men desire wealth and other such things, these no more improve a man’s soul than a golden bridle improves a horse. We contaminate ourselves with these externals, blending and merging into things when we confuse them with our soul’s natural good. Rising above indifferent things, the mind of the wise becomes a well-rounded sphere, as Empedocles used to say. It neither overreaches itself, mingling with external things, nor shrinks away from them. Its light spreads evenly over the world around it. Complete in itself, smooth and round, bright and shining. Nothing clings to its surface and no harm can touch it.

I can still feel the pain over there in my body. That part of me that still lies bleeding and shuddering beneath the bedsheet. It seems very far away now. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Soon another lapse into unconsciousness will come. I think it will be the last one. And so I bid farewell to myself, in good cheer, not begrudging the loss. I take one last step forward to meet Death, not as an enemy but as an old friend and sparring partner. Clenching my fists gently and bracing myself against the unknown and unforeseen, I arm myself once more with the precepts of my philosophy:

The duration of a man’s life is merely a small point in time; the substance of it ever flowing away, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to decay.

His soul is a restless vortex, good fortune is uncertain and fame is unreliable; in a word, as a rushing stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as vapor, are all those that belong to the soul.

Life is warfare and a sojourn in a foreign land. Our reputation after life is nothing but oblivion. What is it then that will guide man? One thing alone: philosophy, the love of wisdom.

And philosophy consists in this: for a man to preserve that inner genius or divine spark within him from violence and injuries, and above all from harmful pains or pleasures; never to do anything either without purpose, or falsely, or hypocritically, regardless of the actions or inaction of others; to contentedly embrace all things that happen to him, as coming from the same source from whom he came himself, and above all things, with humility and calm cheerfulness, to anticipate death as being nothing else but the dissolution of those elements of which every living being is composed.

And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this, their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common to them all, why should it be feared by any man? Is this not according to Nature? But nothing that is according to Nature can be evil.³

It must be nearing dawn outside but I can no longer tell. My eyes have grown so feeble, surrounded by darkness on every side. I won’t live to see another sunrise. It doesn’t matter.