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

2. THE MOST TRUTHFUL CHILD IN ROME

Marcus was born on April 26, 121 AD, and was “reared under the eye of Hadrian.”¹ He took the name Aurelius later; throughout his childhood, he was known as Marcus Annius Verus, after his father and his grandfathers. The family lived in the small town of Ucubi in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica (in modern-day Spain) before moving to Rome. When he was about three years old, his father died—we don’t know the circumstances. Marcus barely knew him but later wrote about his manliness and humility, drawing from what he learned of his father by reputation and what little he remembered.

Marcus was brought up by his mother and paternal grandfather, a highly distinguished senator who had served three times as consul. He was a close friend of the Emperor Hadrian and was the brother-in-law of Hadrian’s wife, the Empress Sabina, Marcus’s great-aunt. As a member of a wealthy patrician family with ties to the emperor, Marcus was naturally part of his grandfather’s social circle, and though we’re told he was loved by all, something about Marcus especially caught Hadrian’s eye. The emperor heaped honors on him from an early age, enrolling him in the equestrian order when he was six years old, making him what’s sometimes described as a Roman knight. When Marcus was eight, Hadrian appointed him to the College of the Salii, or leaping priests, whose main duty involved performing elaborate ritual dances in honor of Mars, the god of war, while dressed in ancient armor and bearing ceremonial swords and shields.

Hadrian nicknamed the boy Verissimus, meaning “truest” or “most truthful,” a play on his family name of Verus, which means “true.” It’s as if he found Marcus, a mere child, to be the most plainspoken individual at court. Indeed, Marcus’s family, though wealthy and influential, was notable for cherishing honesty and simplicity. Marcus’s tendency toward plain speaking gave him a natural affinity for Stoic philosophy, which he would discover later. However, it set him at odds with the intellectual culture prevailing at Hadrian’s court during the height of the Second Sophistic, a cultural movement celebrating formal rhetoric and oratory. By Hadrian’s time, Greek art and literature had become highly fashionable. Greek intellectuals, particularly orators, were highly esteemed and became tutors to the Roman elite, allowing Greek culture to flourish in the heart of the Roman Empire.

Teachers of rhetoric, the formal study of the language used in giving speeches and part of any young aristocrat’s curriculum in those days, were known as Sophists, reviving a Greek tradition that went back to the time of Socrates. They often included moral lessons, bits of philosophy, and other aspects of intellectual culture in their lessons. Hence our word “sophistication,” which is loosely what they sought to impart. As Socrates had long ago observed, although Sophists often sounded like they were doing philosophy, their underlying goal was to win praise by displaying verbal eloquence rather than attaining virtue for its own sake. Put simply, while they spoke a lot about wisdom and virtue, they didn’t necessarily live in accord with those values. They were usually more concerned with competing against one another to win public applause for their knowledge and eloquence. The appearance of wisdom therefore became more important to many Romans than wisdom itself. Even the emperor himself indulged in this. The Historia Augusta, one of our most important sources, says that although Hadrian was a somewhat talented writer of prose and verse in his own right, he often sought to ridicule and humiliate the teachers of these and other arts in an attempt to show he was more cultured and intelligent than them. He would get into pretentious arguments with certain teachers and philosophers, with each side issuing pamphlets and poems against the other—the ancient Roman equivalent of internet flaming or trolling.

For instance, the Sophist Favorinus of Arelate was renowned throughout the empire as one of its very finest intellectuals. He was well versed in the Skeptical philosophy of the Academy and won widespread acclaim for his rhetorical eloquence. He shamelessly buckled, though, in response to the Emperor Hadrian’s dubious assertions about the correct usage of some word. “You’re urging me down the wrong path,” Favorinus told his friends, “if you don’t allow me to regard the most learned of men as being the one who owns thirty legions.”² Hadrian didn’t like being wrong. Worse, he carried out merciless vendettas against intellectuals who disagreed with him. Indeed, when Favorinus eventually incurred Hadrian’s disapproval, he was exiled to the Greek island of Chios. Nevertheless, for some reason Hadrian came to admire above all the integrity and plain speaking of a rather grave young noble, his Verissimus, who loved real wisdom more than the cultivated appearance of wisdom.

Hadrian was a talented, passionate, and mercurial man, the sort of person you’d describe as very clever, but not necessarily wise. Perhaps surprisingly, we’re told he was a friend of Epictetus, the most important teacher of Stoicism in the Roman Empire. We might struggle to imagine the famous Stoic putting up with Hadrian’s relentless one-upmanship. However, the emperor was clearly on very good terms with Epictetus’s most famous student, Arrian, who wrote down and edited The Discourses and Handbook. As we’ll see, Arrian rose to prominence during Hadrian’s reign. Hadrian was no philosopher, though—he viewed philosophy in the same superficial manner as the Sophists did: a source for material to show off one’s learning.

By contrast, Epictetus, in typical Stoic fashion, continually warned his students not to confuse academic learning with wisdom and to avoid petty arguments, hairsplitting, or wasting time on abstract, academic topics. He emphasized the fundamental difference between a Sophist and a Stoic: the former speaks to win praise from his audience, the latter to improve them by helping them to achieve wisdom and virtue.³ Rhetoricians thrive on praise, which is vanity; philosophers love truth and embrace humility. Rhetoric is a form of entertainment, pleasant to hear; philosophy is a moral and psychological therapy, often painful to hear because it forces us to admit our own faults in order to remedy them—sometimes the truth hurts. Epictetus’s own teacher, the Stoic Musonius Rufus, used to tell his students, “If you have leisure to praise me, I am speaking to no purpose.” Hence, the philosopher’s school, said Epictetus, is a doctor’s clinic: you should not go there expecting pleasure but rather pain.

As the years passed, Marcus would grow increasingly aware of his disillusionment with the values of the Sophists and his natural affinity with those of the Stoics. We can probably thank his mother for this to some extent. Domitia Lucilla was a remarkable woman who, like Marcus’s father, came from a distinguished Roman patrician family. She was also immensely wealthy, having inherited a vast fortune, including an important brick-and-tile factory situated near Rome. However, Marcus would later say that he was particularly influenced by the simplicity and unpretentiousness of her way of life, “far removed from that of the rich.”⁴

This love of simple living and distaste for the ostentatious impressed her son. Several decades later, Marcus revealed his distaste for the pretense and corruption of court life in The Meditations. He promised himself, though, that he would never again waste his time dwelling negatively on it. He added that it was only through recourse to philosophy that life at court even seemed bearable to him, and he bearable to those at court. He reminded himself that wherever it is possible to live, it is possible to live well, to live wisely, even at Rome, where he clearly felt it was a struggle to stay in tune with Stoic virtue. He found the insincerity of life at court a constant frustration, and he came to rely on Stoicism as a way of coping.⁵

Marcus also learned generosity from his mother. When his only sister married, Marcus gave her the inheritance his father had left him. Throughout his life, he received numerous other inheritances, and we’re told he would typically give them to the deceased’s next of kin. Decades later, during his reign as emperor at the outset of the First Marcomannic War, Marcus found that the state treasury was exhausted. He responded by holding a public auction, lasting two months, in which countless imperial treasures were sold off to raise funds for the war effort. His indifference toward wealth and the trappings of the imperial court turned out to be of great value, therefore, in responding to a serious financial crisis.

Marcus’s mother was a lover of Greek culture, and she may have introduced her son to some of the intellectuals who later became his friends and teachers. Marcus mentions that his Stoic mentor, Junius Rusticus, taught him to write letters in a very simple and unaffected style, like one in particular that Rusticus sent Marcus’s mother from Sinuessa, on the Italian coast.⁶ Perhaps Rusticus and Marcus’s mother had been friends for many years. Along with his mother’s love of Greek culture, some of the old-fashioned Roman values instilled in Marcus during his upbringing doubtless paved the way for his later interest in Stoic philosophy. Indeed, that may be why he reminds himself of them in the opening passages of The Meditations.

Marcus began to build on these values by training in philosophy from an exceptionally young age. The Historia Augusta says that he was already wholly dedicated to Stoic philosophy while Hadrian was alive. However, he seems to have learned about philosophy first as a practical way of life when he was still a young boy living in his mother’s house, long before he began studying philosophical theory under several eminent tutors. He first taught himself to endure physical discomfort and overcome unhealthy habits. He learned to tolerate other people’s criticisms and to avoid being easily swayed by fine words or flattery.

Mastering our passions in this way is the first stage of training in Stoicism. Epictetus called it the “Discipline of Desire,” although it encompasses both our desires and our fears or aversions. As we’ve seen, the Stoics were very much influenced by the Cynic philosophers who preceded them. Epictetus taught a form of Stoicism that held aspects of Cynicism in particularly high regard. It’s said he was known for the slogan “endure and renounce” (or “bear and forbear”). Marcus seems to recall this saying in The Meditations when he tells himself that he must aim to bear with other people’s flaws and forbear from any wrongdoing against them, while calmly accepting things outside of his direct control.⁷

In book 1 of The Meditations, Marcus, after contemplating the good qualities and lessons learned from his own family, next goes on to praise a mysterious unnamed tutor, probably a slave or freedman in his mother’s household.⁸ It’s truly remarkable that Marcus seems to credit a humble slave with more influence upon his moral development than either the Emperor Hadrian or any of his rhetoric tutors, who included some of the most highly esteemed intellectuals in the empire. This unnamed man showed young Marcus how to endure hardship and discomfort with patience. He taught Marcus to be self-reliant and to have few needs in life. Marcus also learned from him how to turn a deaf ear toward slander and how to avoid sticking his nose into other people’s concerns. This is very different from the example set by Hadrian or the famous Sophists competing to win the emperor’s favor and the applause of crowds at Rome. The same tutor also persuaded Marcus early on not to side with the Green or Blue factions at the chariot races or with different gladiators in the amphitheater. As we’ve seen, the Cynics were renowned for training themselves to endure voluntary hardship (ponos) through their somewhat austere lifestyle and use of various exercises. They were also famous for cultivating indifference toward external things and disregarding both praise and condemnation from others. Doing so allowed them to speak the truth very plainly and simply. We’ll never know whether Marcus’s nameless tutor was influenced by Cynicism or whether he just happened to share similar values. He certainly provided the child with a solid foundation for his future training in Stoicism, though.

So who first introduced Marcus to the formal study of philosophy? Astoundingly, he tells us that it was his painting master, Diognetus. They would have met when Marcus was aged around twelve, as he entered the next stage of his education. There are some striking passages in The Meditations in which Marcus appears to exhibit a painter’s eye for visual details like the cracks on a loaf of bread, the lines on the face of an elderly person, or foam dripping from the mouth of a wild boar. These observations are used to illustrate Stoic metaphysical ideas: the beauty of something’s apparent flaws and its worth become clearer when viewed as part of a larger picture. So it’s tempting to wonder if they were inspired by philosophical conversations that Marcus had as a child with his painting tutor.

In any case, Diognetus taught Marcus not to waste his time with trivial matters and steered him away from popular amusements such as quail fighting—the Ancient Roman equivalent of today’s video games, perhaps. He warned Marcus not to be duped by charlatans who hawked miracles and magic charms or by those (presumably early Christians) who professed to exorcise demons. Disdain for the supernatural and caution against wasting time and energy on diversions such as gambling are attitudes that Marcus may have learned from a Cynic or Stoic philosopher. Diognetus also taught him to tolerate plain speaking (parrhesia) and to sleep covered with a pelt in a camp bed on the ground, almost certainly references to the Cynic regime.⁹ Indeed, the Historia Augusta confirms that around the time Diognetus would have become his tutor, Marcus adopted the dress of a philosopher and began training himself to endure hardship. However, his mother argued that sleeping on a mat like a legionary on campaign was inappropriate. With some effort she persuaded him to use a couch instead, albeit one still spread with animal pelts instead of normal bedding.

Marcus says that Diognetus taught him these and other aspects of “Greek training” (agoge). Although we don’t know what all of these aspects were, we can infer what some may have been. Cynic philosophers often ate a very simple diet of cheap black bread and lentils, or lupin seeds, and drank mainly water. According to Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, Stoics should likewise eat simple, healthy food that is easy to prepare, and they should do so with mindfulness and in moderation, not greedily. Like the Cynics, the Stoics would sometimes also train themselves to endure heat and cold. According to legend, Diogenes the Cynic did this by stripping naked and embracing frozen statues in winter or rolling in hot sand under the summer sun. Seneca described taking cold baths and swimming in the River Tiber at the beginning of the year—and cold showers are popular with those influenced by Stoicism today. Although Marcus doesn’t mention these details, he may have adopted similar practices as a youth as part of his “Greek training” in enduring voluntary hardship. The French scholar Pierre Hadot believed that this phrase alluded to the notorious Spartan training, aspects of which may have influenced the austere lifestyle adopted by Cynic philosophers and some Stoics.

Indeed, philosophy in the ancient world was first and foremost a way of life. Today, “academic philosophy” as taught in universities has turned into a much more bookish and theoretical pursuit. Ancient philosophers, by contrast, were often recognizable because of their lifestyle and even the way they dressed. The Stoics, like the Cynics before them, traditionally wore a single garment called a tribon in Greek. This rudimentary cloak or shawl, made from undyed wool usually of a grayish color, was worn wrapped around the body, often with the shoulders exposed. Certain philosophers, like Socrates and the Cynics, also walked barefoot. Some Roman philosophers still dressed like this, although the style was perhaps occasionally viewed as antiquated and an affectation. Marcus, at least in his youth, wore the cloak of a philosopher, and as we can see from sculptures, he had a longish, well-kempt beard, which was probably typical for Stoics of that period.

Perhaps Diognetus dressed and lived as a philosopher himself and Marcus was inspired to imitate his example. Once again, it’s striking that at the height of the Second Sophistic, when oratory and poetry were all the rage at the court of Hadrian, Marcus was drawn in an opposing direction. He was wrenched away from the sophistication and ostentation of rhetoric by the simplicity and honesty of Greek philosophy. In addition to introducing him to this way of life, Diognetus started encouraging the boy to write philosophical dialogues and attend the lectures of several philosophers. (He names three men but nothing more is known about them.) A few years later, aged around fifteen, Marcus briefly attended lectures at the house of a famous Stoic teacher called Apollonius of Chalcedon, who happened to be visiting Rome. Apollonius then departed for Greece, but, as we shall see, he would soon be recalled.

By this time, Marcus was already an aspiring Stoic. Apollonius and others must surely have introduced him to the teachings of Epictetus, arguably the most influential of all Roman philosophers. Epictetus, whose school had long since relocated from Rome to Greece, died when Marcus was still a boy, so they almost certainly never met. However, as Marcus’s education proceeded, he would enjoy the company of older men who had most likely attended Epictetus’s lectures and were studying The Discourses transcribed by Arrian. In The Meditations, Marcus names Epictetus as an exemplary philosopher alongside Socrates and Chrysippus,¹⁰ and quotes him more than any other author. Indeed, Marcus clearly came to view himself as a follower of Epictetus. However, his family probably assumed that his education would focus on learning rhetoric from eminent Sophists, especially once he was designated a future emperor.

Hadrian’s marriage was childless, so in his later years, when his health began to deteriorate, he adopted a successor. To everyone’s surprise, he chose a relatively undistinguished man called Lucius Ceionius Commodus, who then became known as Lucius Aelius Caesar, starting a tradition that the official heir to the empire would assume the title Caesar. However, Lucius was in such poor health that he dropped dead little over a year later. Hadrian reputedly wanted Marcus, now sixteen, to become his successor, but he felt the boy was still too young. Instead, he chose an older man called Titus Aurelius Antoninus, who was already in his early fifties and had two daughters but no surviving sons. He was married to Marcus’s aunt, Faustina. So, as part of a long-term succession arrangement, Hadrian adopted Antoninus on condition that he would in turn adopt Marcus, placing him in direct line to the throne. Hadrian thereby adopted Marcus as his grandson.

In early 138 AD, on the day of his adoption, young Marcus Annius Verus assumed Antoninus’s family name, becoming forever known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. However, complicating matters, Lucius Aelius, the man Hadrian originally appointed as his successor and Caesar, had left behind a young son of his own, also called Lucius. Antoninus therefore adopted the child Lucius, who thereby became Marcus Aurelius’s new brother. Later, immediately following his own acclamation, Marcus would appoint his adopted brother co-emperor, at which point he became known as the Emperor Lucius Verus. It was the first time two emperors had ruled jointly in this way. Marcus presumably made the decision to share power with his brother at least in part to avoid the risk of unrest caused by having a rival dynasty with a claim on the throne. (We’ll come back to the relationship between Marcus and his brother Lucius later.)

At first, Marcus was deeply dismayed that Hadrian had adopted him into the imperial household. He was reluctant to move from his mother’s villa to the emperor’s private home. When his friends and family members asked him why he was so perturbed, he rattled off a whole list of his concerns about life at court. Based on his later comments, we know he struggled with the insincerity and corruption of Roman politics. That night, though, after learning he was to become emperor, Marcus dreamt that he had arms and shoulders of ivory. Asked in the dream if he could still use them, he picked up a heavy load and discovered he had become much stronger. Exposed shoulders were the mark of a Cynic or Stoic philosopher’s endurance against the cold, so he may have foreseen in this dream that his training in Stoic philosophy would grant him the strength and resilience required to fulfill his future role as emperor.

Marcus was now second in line to the throne and destined to succeed Antoninus. He was introduced to the circle of intellectuals at court, some of the finest rhetoricians and philosophers in the empire. He must also have observed the way the emperor bullied them. This was completely at odds with Marcus’s values, as were Hadrian’s growing suspicion, intolerance, and persecution of his supposed enemies. Later, during his own reign as emperor, Marcus made a point of allowing his political opponents to go unpunished when they publicly ridiculed or criticized him. The most he ever did in response to outspoken critics was to address their remarks politely in speeches or pamphlets, whereas Hadrian would have had them banished or beheaded. Marcus famously pledged that not a single senator would be executed during his reign, and, as we will see, he maintained this promise even when several of them betrayed him during a civil war in the east. He believed that true strength consisted of one’s ability to show kindness, not violence or aggression.

In his final years, Hadrian became something of a tyrant. He grew increasingly paranoid, paid agents to spy on his friends, and ordered a swath of executions. The Senate ended up hating him so bitterly that after his death they wanted to annul his acts and withhold the traditional honor of deification. However, the new emperor Antoninus reasoned with them that it would be better to act in a more conciliatory manner, for which he earned the cognomen Pius. Hadrian would doubtless have been infuriated by the fact that despite being mentioned several times elsewhere in the text, he is conspicuously absent from the first book of The Meditations, in which Marcus individually praises his family members and teachers. On the other hand, Marcus listed the virtues of Antoninus at great length more than once and made it clear that he represented his ideal role model as emperor.

Roman historians portray Antoninus, in many ways, as the opposite of his predecessor. Indeed, some of the traits Marcus praises in his adoptive father can be read as implicit criticisms of Hadrian. Antoninus was completely unpretentious. We’re told that upon being acclaimed emperor, despite some resistance from the palace staff, he earned great respect from the people by minimizing the pomp of the imperial court. He often dressed as an ordinary citizen, without wearing the robes of state, to receive visitors, and he tried to continue living as he had previously done. Whereas his subjects came to humor Hadrian, wary of his changeable moods and quick temper, Antoninus was famous for his calm demeanor and for welcoming plain speaking at court and elsewhere. Unlike Hadrian, Antoninus would simply ignore any barbed remarks made at his expense.

The Stoics were happy to admit that some individuals naturally embodied virtues they sought to acquire through years of effort, by means of study and training in philosophy. Antoninus was such a man, according to Marcus. The traits he’s described as possessing paint a vivid picture of the sort of character that Marcus wanted to develop through his training in Stoic philosophy. Once Antoninus had considered something and arrived at a decision, for example, he implemented it with unwavering determination.¹¹ In The Meditations Marcus contemplates how his predecessor never sought out empty praise or approval from others; instead, he was always willing to listen to other people’s views and consider them carefully. He was meticulous in examining matters that required careful deliberation. He never rushed making a decision and was always willing to question his first impressions. He would patiently think over the issue until he was completely satisfied with his reasoning. He honored genuine philosophers, though he didn’t necessarily agree with all of their doctrines. He didn’t attack charlatans, but he wasn’t taken in by them either. In other words, he was a very calm and rational man. His natural freedom from vanity helped him to follow reason more consistently and see things more clearly—unlike Hadrian, he didn’t always have to be right.

Under Antoninus and later Marcus, the culture at Rome would noticeably shift from favoring Sophists toward philosophers, particularly the Stoics. Marcus wanted to engage with Greek learning but in a totally different way than Hadrian. He genuinely sought to transform himself into a better person instead of merely scoring points against intellectual rivals. The seeds of that transformation were planted by his family, perhaps especially by his mother, but they were then nurtured by a series of exceptional tutors.

Nevertheless, young Roman noblemen were expected to undergo formal training in rhetoric. This began when they officially reached adulthood, symbolized by taking the toga virilis around the age of fifteen. Studying rhetoric in order to communicate more eloquently and persuasively would become Marcus’s main obligation as a student, although it clashed with his growing interest in Stoic philosophy. Herodes Atticus and others trained him extensively in Greek, the language he would use to write The Meditations. However, once Emperor Antoninus adopted Marcus, his main tutor became Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the leading Latin rhetorician of the day.

Fronto was embraced as a close family friend, and he remained so until his death around 166 or 167 AD, possibly a victim of the plague during its initial outbreak in Rome. Fronto later wrote down his glowing impression of Marcus as a youth: he was innately predisposed to all the virtues before being trained in them, we’re told, “being a good man before puberty, and a skilled speaker before donning the robes of manhood.”¹² Fronto was important enough to Marcus to be one of the tutors cited in book 1 of The Meditations. However, Marcus mentions little about Fronto’s influence on his character and reserves greater praise for Alexander of Cotiaeum, his Greek grammarian, a lower-grade teacher. Despite the importance of their relationship, therefore, Fronto didn’t much inspire Marcus as a role model. He also tried to actively discourage his young student from becoming a Stoic.

We know Fronto worried that philosophers sometimes lacked the eloquence required by statesmen and emperors and risked making bad decisions under the influence of their peculiar doctrines. He wrote to Marcus saying that even if he achieved the wisdom of Zeno and Cleanthes, the founders of Stoicism, he would still be obliged, whether he liked it or not, to wear the purple imperial cloak “and not that of the philosophers, made of coarse wool.”¹³ Fronto meant that Marcus was required not only to dress like an emperor but also to speak like one, draping himself in purple and winning praise for his formal eloquence. In reality, though, Marcus preferred to dress down and talk plainly like a philosopher or, failing that, an ordinary citizen. Fronto’s job was to imbue the boy with the cultural sophistication befitting his station in life and train him to become an effective political speechwriter and orator. This was a very difficult time for the young Caesar, as he felt torn between rhetoric and philosophy. Yet Fronto’s influence gradually waned. Eloquence is one thing, wisdom another. We’re told that Plato’s saying was always on Marcus’s lips: those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers.

The contest between Sophists and Stoics over young Marcus had started shortly after Hadrian’s death, when Antoninus summoned the philosopher Apollonius of Chalcedon back to Rome. The Historia Augusta claims that Antoninus instructed Apollonius to move into the imperial palace, the House of Tiberius, so that he could become Marcus’s full-time personal tutor. However, Apollonius replied in laconic fashion: “The master ought not come to the pupil, but the pupil to the master.”¹⁴ Antoninus was initially unimpressed by this response and quipped that it was apparently easier for Apollonius to make the trip all the way from Greece to Rome than for him to get up and walk from his house to the palace. He probably assumed it was just arrogance for a tutor to insist that the emperor’s son should come to his home for tuition like everyone else. Apollonius was the main philosopher whose lectures Marcus attended in his youth, which suggests that Antoninus eventually relented and allowed his son to mingle with other students outside the palace. As we’ll see, many decades later, toward the end of his life, Marcus was still causing a stir by attending the public lectures of philosophers, as if he were a common citizen.

Marcus was impressed with Apollonius’s skill and fluency as a teacher of Stoic doctrines. However, what he admired most was the man’s character. The Sophists talked at length about wisdom and virtue, but it was all just words with them. Apollonius, on the other hand, was completely unpretentious about his intellectual prowess, and he never became the slightest bit frustrated when debating a philosophical text with students. He showed Marcus what it meant in practice for a Stoic to “live in agreement with Nature”—that is, how to consistently rely on reason as our guide in life. Indeed, Apollonius was no mere professor but exhibited the true constancy and equanimity of a Stoic even in the face of severe pain, long illness, and the loss of a child. Marcus also saw in him a clear example of what it meant for Stoics to engage in a course of action with great vigor and determination while simultaneously remaining relaxed and unperturbed about the outcome. (They referred to this as taking action with a “reserve clause,” a strategy we’ll examine in more detail later.) Marcus adds that Apollonius would accept favors graciously from friends, while neither demeaning himself by doing so nor showing any hint of ingratitude.¹⁵ This man was an inspiration to the future emperor, in other words, and the sort of person that Stoicism promised to help him become.

Apollonius taught Marcus the doctrines of Stoic philosophy while showing him how to apply them in daily life. Marcus would have learned that the Stoics believed there was a relationship between the sincere love of wisdom and greater emotional resilience. Their philosophy contained within itself a moral and psychological therapy (therapeia) for minds troubled by anger, fear, sadness, and unhealthy desires. They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions). To say that Apollonius taught Marcus Stoic philosophy is therefore also to say that he trained Marcus to develop mental resilience through an ancient form of psychological therapy and self-improvement sometimes described as the Stoic “therapy of the passions.” An important aspect of this training would have involved Apollonius showing Marcus how to maintain his equanimity by deliberately using language in the special therapeutic manner described by the Stoics.

However, before we turn to the Stoic use of language, we first have to understand a little more about the Stoic theory of emotions. The curious tale of an unnamed Stoic teacher provides our best introduction to this topic. We find it in The Attic Nights, a book of anecdotes written by Aulus Gellius, a grammarian who was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. Gellius was sailing across the Ionian Sea from Cassiopa, a town on Corfu, to Brundisium, in southern Italy, possibly en route to Rome. He describes one of his fellow passengers as an important and highly regarded Stoic teacher who had been lecturing in Athens. We can’t identify the teacher with certainty; it’s not impossible, though, that Gellius could have been referring to Apollonius of Chalcedon.

Out on open water their boat was caught in a ferocious storm, which lasted almost the whole night. The passengers feared for their lives as they struggled to man the pumps and keep themselves from drowning in a shipwreck. Gellius noticed that the great Stoic teacher had turned as white as a sheet and shared the same anxious expression as the rest of the passengers. However, the philosopher alone remained silent instead of crying out in terror and lamenting his predicament. Once the sea and sky calmed, as they were approaching their destination, Gellius gently inquired of the Stoic why he looked almost as fearful as the others did during the storm. He could see that Gellius was sincere and courteously answered that the founders of Stoicism taught how people facing such dangers naturally and inevitably experience a short-lived stage of fear. He then reached into his satchel and produced the fifth book of Epictetus’s Discourses for Gellius to peruse. Today, only the first four books of the Discourses survive, although Marcus appears to have read the lost discourses of Epictetus and quotes from them in The Meditations. In any case, Gellius describes Epictetus’s remarks, which he confidently asserts were true to the original teachings of Zeno and Chrysippus.

Epictetus reputedly told his students that the founders of Stoicism distinguished between two stages of our response to any event, including threatening situations. First come the initial impressions (phantasiai) that are imposed involuntarily on our minds from outside, when we’re initially exposed to an event such as the storm at sea. These impressions can be triggered, says Epictetus, by a terrifying sound such as a peal of thunder, a building collapsing, or a sudden cry of danger. Even the mind of a perfect Stoic Sage will initially be shaken by abrupt shocks of this kind, and he will shrink back from them instinctively in alarm. This reaction doesn’t come from faulty value judgments about the dangers faced but from an emotional reflex arising in his body, which temporarily bypasses reason. Epictetus might have added that these emotional reactions are comparable to those experienced by non-human animals. Seneca, for instance, notes that when animals are alarmed by the appearance of danger, they take flight, but after they have escaped, their anxiety soon abates and they return to grazing in peace once again.¹⁶ By contrast, the human capacity for thought allows us to perpetuate our worries beyond these natural bounds. Reason, our greatest blessing, is also our greatest curse.

In the second stage of our response, the Stoics say, we typically add voluntary judgments of “assent” (sunkatatheseis) to these automatic impressions. Here the Stoic wise man’s response differs from that of the majority of people. He does not go along with the initial emotional reactions to a situation that have invaded his mind. Epictetus says the Stoic should neither assent to nor confirm these emerging impressions, such as anxiety in the face of danger. Rather, he rejects them as misleading, views them with studied indifference, and lets go of them. By contrast, the unwise are carried away by their initial impression of external events—including those that are terrible and to be feared—and continue to worry, ruminate, and even complain aloud about a perceived threat. Seneca gives a more detailed account of the Stoic model of emotion in On Anger,¹⁷ which divides the process of experiencing a passion into three “movements,” or stages:

FIRST STAGE: Initial impressions automatically impose themselves on your mind, including thoughts and emerging feelings called propatheiai, or “proto-passions,” by the Stoics. For example, the impression “The boat is sinking” would quite naturally evoke some initial anxiety.

SECOND STAGE: The majority of people, like those on the boat, would agree with the original impression, go along with it, and add more value judgments, indulging in catastrophic thinking: “I might die a terrible death!” They would worry about it and continue to dwell on it long afterward. By contrast, Stoics, like the unnamed philosopher in the story, have learned to take a step back from their initial thoughts and feelings and withhold their assent from them. They might do this by saying to themselves, “You are just an impression and not at all the things you claim to represent,” or “It is not things that upset us but our judgments about them.” The boat is sinking, but you might make it ashore; even if you don’t, panicking won’t help. Responding calmly and with courage is more important. That’s what you’d praise other people for doing if faced with the same situation.

THIRD STAGE: On the other hand, if you have assented to the impression that something is intrinsically bad or catastrophic, then a full-blown “passion” develops, which can quickly spiral out of control. This actually happened to Seneca during a storm when he grew seasick and panicked so much that he foolishly clambered overboard and tried to wade ashore through the waves and rocks when he would have been much safer remaining on the boat.¹⁸

In other words, a certain amount of anxiety is natural. Indeed, the hearts of even the most experienced sailors might leap into their mouths when their ship looks like it’s about to be overturned. Bravery would consist in carrying on regardless and dealing with the situation rationally. The Stoic likewise tells himself that although the situation may appear frightening, the truly important thing in life is how he chooses to respond. So he reminds himself to view the storm with Stoic indifference and to respond with wisdom and courage while accepting his initial nervous reaction as harmless and inevitable. What he does not do, though, is make things worse for himself by continuing to worry.

For this reason, once the pallor and anxious expression have left his face, the wise man’s anxiety tends to abate naturally, and he regains his composure before long. He reevaluates his initial anxious impressions, confidently asserting that they are both false and unhelpful. On the other hand, the unwise and fearful perpetuate their own distress for much longer. Gellius read about this in the lost Discourse of Epictetus and learned that there is nothing un-Stoic about someone turning pale with anxiety for a while during a perilous situation like the one he’d just survived. It’s natural and inevitable to experience feelings like these, as long as we don’t escalate our distress by going along with the impressions accompanying them and telling ourselves that some awful catastrophe is about to happen.

Seneca likewise noted that certain misfortunes strike the wise man without incapacitating him, such as physical pain, illness, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes inflicted by defeat in war.¹⁹ They graze him but do not wound him. Indeed, Seneca also points out that there is no virtue in enduring things we do not feel. This is important to note: for a Stoic to exhibit the virtue of temperance, he must have at least some trace of desire to renounce, and to exhibit courage he must have at least these first sensations of fear to endure. As the Stoics like to put it, the wise man is not made of stone or iron but of flesh and blood.

In The Meditations, Marcus himself writes that although he tells troubling impressions to go away, he is not angry with them because they have come according to their “ancient manner”; in other words, they arise in the way basic feelings also arise in animals.²⁰ That implies that, like the anonymous Stoic teacher on Gellius’s storm-tossed boat, Marcus views them with indifference rather than judging them as inherently bad. Elsewhere he says that pleasant and unpleasant sensations in the body inevitably impinge on the mind because they’re part of the same organism.²¹ We shouldn’t try to resist them, but rather we should accept their occurrence as natural, as long as we don’t allow our mind to add the judgment that the things we’re experiencing are good or bad. This is important, because people who confuse “Stoicism” with “stoicism” (i.e., having a stiff upper lip) often think that it’s about suppressing feelings like anxiety, which they view as bad, harmful, or shameful. That’s not only bad psychology, it’s also totally in conflict with Stoic philosophy, which teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent: neither good nor bad. What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.

Although Marcus was reputedly introduced to philosophy at an unusually early age, it’s believed that he didn’t wholeheartedly commit his life to Stoicism until Junius Rusticus supplanted Fronto as his main tutor, when Marcus was in his early twenties. Looking back on this time, Marcus was grateful that when he first began to dabble in philosophy he didn’t completely fall under the spell of a Sophist, like Fronto, or end up obsessively poring over books, working out logical puzzles, or speculating about physics and cosmology. Rather, he focused on Stoic ethics and its practical application in daily life. Whereas Fronto counseled Marcus to dress and speak more like an emperor, Rusticus did the opposite. He was among those who encouraged Marcus to set aside the vanity of status and dress down whenever possible rather than walking around in the formal attire of a Caesar (and later an emperor). This was exceptional behavior for a Roman of his status, incidentally, but the British Museum has a statuette in its collection that seems to confirm it really happened. It shows Marcus dressed not like an emperor but as a common citizen, apparently while visiting Egypt late in his life.

Rusticus also persuaded Marcus that he shouldn’t be led astray by his initial enthusiasm for formal rhetoric; neither should he waste his time writing theoretical essays or trying to win praise by merely playing the role of the virtuous man. Indeed, Marcus says Rusticus convinced him to abstain from oratory, poetry, and fine language in general and to adopt the more down-to-earth and unaffected manner of speaking associated with Stoicism. In other words, Marcus went through a sort of conversion from rhetoric to philosophy, and this appears to have been a pivotal event in his life. Why was it such an upheaval, though? Whereas Sophistry is all about creating an appearance, philosophy is about grasping reality. Marcus’s transformation into a fully-fledged Stoic therefore entailed a change in his fundamental values. It turns out that Stoic “plain speaking” isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. It requires courage, self-discipline, and a sincere commitment to philosophical truth. As we’ll see, this change in orientation and worldview went hand in hand not only with a more Stoic way of speaking but also with a whole new way of thinking about events. HOW TO SPEAK WISELY

We’ve seen that Marcus grew up at time when rhetoric was highly fashionable, particularly at the imperial court of Hadrian. He underwent a thorough training in speechwriting and oratory from a group of tutors, including Herodes Atticus and Fronto, the leading Greek and Latin rhetoricians of his day, respectively. However, from his early youth, Marcus had earned a reputation for speaking plainly and honestly. In stark contrast to Hadrian, who loved to make a show of his learning, Marcus tells himself that true philosophy is both simple and modest, and we should never be seduced into vanity or ostentation in this regard. Always take the shortest route, he says.²² The short way is the way of Nature, which leads to the soundest words and actions. Simplicity frees us from affectation and the trouble it brings. For Stoics, this honesty and simplicity of language requires two main things: conciseness and objectivity. It would be an oversimplification to say that this just means to stop complaining, but in many cases the Stoics did advise along those lines. The point at which our language starts evoking strong emotions is precisely when we start saying things that involve strong value judgments, whether to others or ourselves. According to Stoic philosophy, when we assign intrinsic values like “good” or “bad” to external events, we’re behaving irrationally and even exhibiting a form of self-deception. When we call something a “catastrophe,” for instance, we go beyond the bare facts and start distorting events and deceiving ourselves. Moreover, the Stoics consider lying a form of impiety—when a man lies, he alienates himself from Nature.²³

So how did the Stoics recommend we use language? Zeno, who wrote a Handbook of Rhetoric, didn’t consider verbal eloquence an end in itself but rather a means for sharing wisdom by articulating the truth clearly and concisely in a manner adapted to the needs of the hearer. According to Diogenes Laertius, Stoic rhetoric identified five “virtues” of speech:

1. Correct grammar and good vocabulary

2. Clarity of expression, making the ideas easily understood

3. Conciseness, employing no more words than necessary

4. Appropriateness of style, suited to the subject matter and apparently also to the audience

5. Distinction, or artistic excellence, and the avoidance of vulgarity

Traditional rhetoric shared most of these values, with the notable exception of conciseness. However, the Stoic use of language was normally seen as being completely at odds with established forms of rhetoric.

The Sophists, as we’ve seen, sought to persuade others by appealing to their emotions, typically in order to win praise. The Stoics, by contrast, placed supreme value on grasping and communicating the truth by appealing to reason. This meant avoiding the use of emotive rhetoric or strong value judgments. We usually think of rhetoric as something used to manipulate other people. We tend to forget we’re doing it to ourselves as well, not only when we speak but also when we use language to think. The Stoics were certainly interested in how our words affect others. However, their priority was to change the way we affect ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings, through our choice of language. We exaggerate, overgeneralize, omit information, and use strong language and colorful metaphors: “She’s always being a bitch!” “That bastard shot me down in flames!” “This job is complete bullshit!” People tend to think that exclamations like these are a natural consequence of strong emotions like anger. But what if they’re also causing or perpetuating our emotions? If you think about it, rhetoric like this is designed to evoke strong feelings. By contrast, undoing the effects of emotional rhetoric by describing the same events more objectively forms the basis of the ancient Stoic therapy of the passions.

Indeed, one way of understanding the contrast between Stoic philosophy and Sophistic rhetoric is to view Stoicism as the practice of a kind of antirhetoric or counterrhetoric. Whereas orators traditionally sought to exploit the emotions of their audience, the Stoics made a point of consciously describing events in plain and simple terms. Cutting through misleading language and value judgments and stripping away any embellishments or emotive language, they tried to articulate the facts more calmly and soberly. Marcus likewise told himself to speak plainly rather than dressing up his thoughts in fancy language. Indeed, nothing is so conducive to greatness of mind, he said, as the ability to examine events rationally and view them realistically by stripping them down to their essential characteristics in this way.²⁴ In the Discourses we’re told that a philosopher, presumably not a Stoic, once grew so frustrated with his friends questioning his character that he screamed, “I can’t bear it, you’re killing me—you’ll turn me into him!,”²⁵ pointing at Epictetus. That was a sudden display of histrionics: a blast of emotional rhetoric. Ironically, though, if he’d been more like Epictetus, he would have just stuck to the facts without getting worked up and said something like, “You criticized me; so be it.” In truth, nobody was killing this man and he could bear it.

The way we talk and think about events involves making value judgments, which shape our feelings. Shakespeare’s Hamlet exclaims, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” The Stoics would agree that there’s nothing good or bad in the external world. Only what is up to us can be truly “good” or “bad,” which makes these terms synonymous with virtue and vice. Wisdom therefore consists in grasping external things objectively, as indifferent in this regard. Sometimes the Stoics describe this as staying with our initial impression of things before we impose value judgments. Epictetus gives many examples, such as when someone’s ship is lost at sea, we should say only “the ship is lost” and not add value judgments or complaints like “Why me? This is awful!”²⁶ When someone bathes rather hastily, we should not react with disgust or even imply that he washed himself badly, but say only that he bathed quickly. When someone drinks a lot of wine, we should not say that he has done something terrible, only that he drank a lot of wine.²⁷ Marcus follows Epictetus’s guidance when he says, for instance, that he should tell himself someone has insulted him in a matter-of-fact way, but not add the value judgment that it has done him any harm.²⁸ If you stick with the facts and don’t unnecessarily extrapolate from them, you will put paid to many anxieties in life.

Zeno coined the Stoic technical term phantasia kataleptike to refer to this Stoic way of viewing events objectively, separating value judgments from facts. Pierre Hadot translates it as “objective representation,” which is the term we’ll use.²⁹ However, it literally means an impression that gets a grip on reality and thereby prevents us from being swept along by our passions. It anchors our thoughts in reality. Zeno even symbolized this concept by the physical gesture of clenching his fist—we still talk today of someone who looks at events in a matter-of-fact way as “having a firm grip on reality.” Epictetus explained that a Stoic might say someone “has been sent to prison,” but they should not allow themselves to go on about how awful it is and complain that Zeus has punished that person unjustly.³⁰ As an aspiring Stoic, you should begin by practicing deliberately describing events more objectively and in less emotional terms. Epictetus tells his students that if they can avoid being swept along with false and upsetting impressions, they will remain grounded in the objective representations they initially perceived.³¹

Sticking to the facts can, by itself, often reduce your anxiety. Cognitive therapists use the neologism “catastrophizing,” or dwelling on the worst-case scenario, to help explain to clients how we project our values onto external events. They turn the noun “catastrophe” into a verb to help clients remember that viewing events in this way is actually an activity they’re engaged in. Catastrophizing is also a form of rhetorical hyperbole, or exaggeration. An event like losing your job is not inherently catastrophic; we don’t just passively perceive how bad it is. Rather, we actively catastrophize it, turning it into a catastrophe by imposing a value judgment upon it that blows things out of proportion.

In cognitive therapy, we learn to take greater ownership of or responsibility for the catastrophic value judgments that distress us. Modern cognitive therapists advise their clients to describe events in more down-to-earth language, like the Stoics before them. They call it “decatastrophizing” when they help clients downgrade their perception of a situation from provoking anxiety to something more mundane and less frightening. For instance, Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, advised that clients suffering from anxiety should write “decatastrophizing scripts” in which they describe distressing events factually, without strong value judgments or emotive language: “I lost my job and now I’m looking for a new one” rather than “I lost my job and there’s nothing I can do about it—it’s just a total disaster!” Think about it: when you’re distressed, don’t you tend to exaggerate and use vivid, emotional language to describe things, both to yourself and other people? Decatastrophizing involves reevaluating the probability and severity of something bad happening and framing it in more realistic terms. Beck asks his clients, “Would it really be as terrible as you think?” Catastrophizing often seems to involve thinking, “What if?” What if the worst-case scenario happens? That would be unbearable. Decatastrophizing, on the other hand, has been described as going from “What if?” to “So what?”: So what if such-and-such happens? It’s not the end of the world; I can deal with it.

Another common method of decatastrophizing is for cognitive therapists to ask clients repeatedly, “What next?” Mental images of feared events often rapidly escalate to the worst, most anxiety-provoking part and then remain glued there as if the upsetting experience were somehow timeless. In reality, though, everything has a before, during, and after phase. Everything changes with time, and experiences come and go. Anxiety can often be reduced simply by moving the image past the worst point and imagining, in a realistic and noncatastrophic way, what’s most likely to happen in the hours, days, weeks, or months that follow. Reminding himself of the transience of events is one of Marcus’s favorite strategies, as we’ll see in later chapters. One way of doing that is to ask yourself, “What, realistically, will most likely happen next? And then what? And then what?” And so on.

Beck’s original cognitive therapy approach for anxiety was derived from something known as the “transactional” model of stress, developed by Richard Lazarus.³² Imagine a seesaw, with your appraisal of the severity of a situation—how threatening or dangerous it is—on one side. On the other side is your appraisal of your own ability to cope, your self-confidence if you like. If you believe that the threat outweighs your ability to cope and the seesaw tips toward danger, then you’ll probably feel extremely stressed or anxious. On the other hand, if you reckon that the severity of the threat is low and your ability to cope is high, then the seesaw will tip toward you, and you should feel calm and self-confident. The Stoics, like modern therapists, tried to modify both sides of this equation.

Normally, therefore, once you’ve arrived at a more realistic description of a feared situation, you will consider ways that you could potentially cope and get through it. Sometimes this involves creative problem-solving—brainstorming alternative solutions and weighing the consequences. The Stoics liked to ask themselves, “What virtues has Nature given me that might help me deal with the situation better?” You might also consider how other people cope so that you can try to model their attitudes and behavior. What would a role model like Socrates, Diogenes, or Zeno do? We can also ask “What would Marcus do?” if faced with the same situation. In modern therapy, clients model the behavior of others and develop “coping plans,” which describe how they would deal with the feared situation if it actually happened. Considering what another person would do or what they would advise you to do can help you formulate better coping plans, and that will typically lead you to decatastrophize the situation and downgrade your appraisal of its severity. That means going from thinking of events as “totally unbearable” to picturing realistic ways you can bear them and deal with them. The more clearly formulated your coping plan is and the more confident you are about putting it into practice, the less anxious you will tend to feel.

When their friends were struggling emotionally, Stoics sometimes wrote them letters of consolation, helping them to view events in a less catastrophic, more constructive way. Six consolation letters written by Seneca exist today. For instance, he wrote to a woman called Marcia who had recently lost her son. Seneca’s consolations to her include the argument that death is a release from all the pain of life, a barrier beyond which our suffering cannot extend, which returns us to the same restful state we were in before we were born. Moreover, Epictetus told his students that one of the Stoics he held in particularly high regard, Paconius Agrippinus, used to write similar letters to console himself whenever any hardship befell him.³³ When faced with fever, slander, or exile, he would compose Stoic “eulogies” praising these events as occasions to exercise strength of character. Agrippinus was truly a master decatastrophizer. He would reframe every hardship as an opportunity to cope by exercising wisdom and strength of character. Epictetus says that one day, as Agrippinus was preparing to dine with his friends, a messenger arrived announcing that the Emperor Nero had banished him from Rome as part of a political purge. “Very well,” said Agrippinus, shrugging, “we shall take our lunch in Aricia,” the first stop on the road he would have to travel into exile.³⁴

You can start training yourself in this Stoic practice of objective representation right now by writing down a description of an upsetting or problematic event in plain language. Phrase things as accurately as possible and view them from a more philosophical perspective, with studied indifference. Once you’ve mastered this art, take it a step further by following the example of Paconius Agrippinus and look for positive opportunities. Write how you could exercise strength of character and cope wisely with the situation. Ask yourself how someone you admire might cope with the same situation or what that person might advise you to do. Treat the event like a sparring partner in the gym, giving you an opportunity to strengthen your emotional resilience and coping skills. You might want to read your script aloud and review it several times or compose several versions until you’re satisfied it’s helped you change how you feel about events.

Marcus tends to refer to this way of viewing events as entailing the separation of our value judgments from external events. Cognitive therapists have likewise, for many decades, taught their clients the famous quotation from Epictetus: “It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things,” which became an integral part of the initial orientation (“socialization”) of the client to the treatment approach. This sort of technique is referred to as “cognitive distancing” in CBT, because it requires sensing the separation or distance between our thoughts and external reality. Beck defined it as a “metacognitive” process, meaning a shift to a level of awareness involving “thinking about thinking.”

“Distancing” refers to the ability to view one’s own thoughts (or beliefs) as constructions of “reality” rather than as reality itself.³⁵

He recommended explaining this to clients using the analogy of colored glasses. We could look at the world through positive rose-tinted glasses or sad blue ones and just assume that what we see is how things are. However, we can also look at the glasses themselves and realize that they color our vision. Noticing how our thoughts and beliefs tinge our perception of the world is a prerequisite for changing them in cognitive therapy. Later generations of clinicians and researchers discovered that rigorous training in cognitive distancing, by itself, was sufficient in many cases to bring about therapeutic improvement. Greater emphasis on this cognitive skill is an integral part of what became known as the mindfulness and acceptance approach to CBT.

Sometimes merely remembering the saying of Epictetus, that “it’s not things that upset us,” can help us gain cognitive distance from our thoughts, allowing us to view them as hypotheses rather than facts about the world. However, there are also many other cognitive distancing techniques used in modern CBT, such as these:

•  Writing down your thoughts concisely when they occur and viewing them on paper

•  Writing them on a whiteboard and looking at them “over there”—literally from a distance

•  Prefixing them with a phrase like “Right now, I notice that I am thinking…”

•  Referring to them in the third person, for example, “Donald is thinking…,” as if you’re studying the thoughts and beliefs of someone else

•  Evaluating in a detached manner the pros and cons of holding a certain opinion

•  Using a counter or a tally to monitor with detached curiosity the frequency of certain thoughts

•  Shifting perspective and imagining a range of alternative ways of looking at the same situation so that your initial viewpoint becomes less fixed and rigid. For example, “How might I feel about crashing my car if I were like Marcus Aurelius?” “If this happened to my daughter, how would I advise her to cope?” “How will I think about this, looking back on events, ten or twenty years from now?”

There are several distancing methods found in the ancient Stoic literature. For instance, you can help yourself gain cognitive distance just by speaking to (“apostrophizing”) your thoughts and feelings, saying something like, “You are just a feeling and not really the thing you claim to represent,” as Epictetus in the Handbook advised his students to do.

The Handbook actually opens with a technique to remind ourselves that some things are “up to us,” or directly under our control, and other things are not. Modern Stoics sometimes call this the “Dichotomy of Control” or the “Stoic Fork.” Just recalling this distinction can help you recover a sense of indifference toward external things. Think of it this way. When you strongly judge something to be good or bad, you also commit yourself to saying that you want to obtain or avoid it. But if something is outside your control, then it’s simply irrational to demand that you should obtain or avoid it. It’s a contradiction to believe both that you must do something and also that it’s not within your power to do so. The Stoics viewed this confusion as the root cause of most emotional suffering. They pointed out that only our own acts of volition, our own intentions and judgments if you like, are directly under our control. Sure, I can open the door, but that’s always a consequence of my actions. Only my own voluntary actions themselves are truly under my control. When we judge external things to be good or bad, it’s as though we forget what’s under our control and try to overextend our sphere of responsibility. The Stoics view only their own actions as good or bad, virtuous or vicious, and therefore classify all external things as indifferent, because they’re not entirely “up to us” in this sense.

As we’ve seen, of course, the Stoics still believe it’s reasonable to prefer health to disease, wealth to poverty, and so on. They argue, however, that we deceive ourselves when we invest too much value in external things. They also trained themselves to gain cognitive distance by understanding that events don’t seem the same to everyone: our own perspective is just one of many. For instance, the majority of people are terrified of dying, but, as Epictetus points out, Socrates wasn’t afraid of death. Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives. However, for Socrates and the Stoics, a good death didn’t so much mean a pleasant or peaceful death as one faced with wisdom and virtue. Knowing that not everyone sees a certain situation as catastrophic should make us more aware that the “awfulness” of it derives from our own thinking, our value judgments, and our way of responding rather than the thing itself. Awfulness (badness) is not a physical property. As Aristotle said, fire burns just the same in Greece as in Persia, but men’s judgments about what’s good or bad vary from one place to another. Marcus therefore compares our opinions to beams of sunlight shining on external objects, not unlike Beck’s analogy of looking at the world through tinted glasses. By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind.

In this chapter we saw how the values Marcus learned from his birth family, such as simplicity and plain speech, clashed with those of the Second Sophistic and the rhetoricians at Hadrian’s court. This led him to embrace the Stoics’ radical use of language as a counterrhetoric, through techniques such as redescribing events in more objective language, free from value judgments—an ancient precursor to decatastrophizing in modern cognitive therapy.

Accepting this approach to describing our situation, whatever it may be, is a foundational step in learning the other Stoic practices. It leads to the next step: considering what resources or virtues you have that would allow you to cope better, or how a wise person might deal with the same situation. Whether we call it cognitive distancing or katharsis, we separate strong value judgments from external events by letting go of excessive attachment to things. You might find this a tricky concept at first, but coming back to Epictetus’s famous saying—“It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things”—will serve you well as a guide.

We’ve seen that Marcus’s disillusionment with court life and formal rhetoric gradually led him to embrace philosophy more deeply. His personal mentor Junius Rusticus would persuade Marcus to undergo a more thorough conversion to Stoic philosophy and embrace it wholeheartedly as a way of life.