Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Since Plato, it had been the dream of wise men that one day there might be such a thing as a philosopher king. Although the Stoics had been close to power for centuries, none of them had come close to wielding supreme command themselves. Time and time again they had hoped the new emperor would be better, that this one would listen, that this one would put the people before his own needs. Each one would prove, sadly, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Caesar. Octavian. Tiberius. Claudius. Nero. Trajan. Vespasian. Domitian.

The list of flawed and broken kings was long, stretching back not just past Rome but to the kings of Zeno and Cleanthes’s time. Just as the Christians had prayed for a savior, so too had the Stoics hoped that one day a leader cut from their own cloth would be born, one who could redeem the empire from decay and corruption.

This star, born April 26, 121, was named Marcus Catilius Severus Annius Verus, and for all impossible expectations and responsibilities, he would manage, to paraphrase his great admirer Matthew Arnold, to prove himself worthy of all of it.

The early days of the boy who would become Marcus Aurelius were defined by both loss and promise. His father, Verus, died when he was three. He was raised by both his grandfathers, who doted on him, and who clearly showed him off at court. Even at an early age, he developed a reputation for honesty. The emperor Hadrian, who would have known young Marcus through his early academic accomplishments, sensing his potential, began to keep an eye on him. His nickname for Marcus, whom he liked to go hunting with, was “Verissimus”—a play on his name Verus—the truest one.

What could it have been that Hadrian first noticed? What could have given him the sense that the boy might be destined for great things? Marcus was clearly smart, from a good family, handsome, hardworking. But there would have been plenty of that in Rome, and there have been plenty of “true” teenagers. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good heads of state.

By the time Marcus was ten or eleven, he had already taken to philosophy, dressing the part in humble, rough clothing and living with sober and restrained habits, even sleeping on the ground to toughen himself up. Marcus would write later about the character traits he tried to define himself by, which he called “epithets for yourself.” They were “Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.” Hadrian, who never had a son and had begun to think about choosing a successor (just as he had been selected himself by the heirless emperor Trajan), must have sensed the commitment to those ideas in Marcus from boyhood on. He must have seen, as they hunted wild boar together, some combination of courage and calmness, compassion and firmness. He must have seen something in his soul that Marcus likely could not even see himself, because by Marcus’s seventeenth birthday, Hadrian had begun planning something extraordinary.

He was going to make Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome.

We don’t know much about Hadrian’s stated reasons, but we know about the plan he settled on. On February 25, 138, Hadrian adopted an able and trustworthy fifty-year-old administrator named Antoninus Pius on the condition that he in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius. Tutors were selected. A course of successive offices laid out. Even after Marcus became a member of the imperial family, we’re told, he still went to the residences of his philosophy teachers for instruction, though he could have just as easily demanded they come to him. He continued to live as if his means and his status had not irrevocably improved.

By the time Hadrian died a few months later, destiny was set. Marcus Aurelius was to be groomed for a position that only fifteen people had ever held in Rome—he was to wear the purple, he was to be made Caesar.

It was not an altogether dissimilar path to the one that Nero’s mother had charted for her boy. Would the results be different?

Unlike most princes, Marcus did not yearn for power. We’re told that when he learned he had officially been adopted by Hadrian, he was greatly saddened rather than overjoyed. Perhaps that’s because he would have rather been a writer or a philosopher. There was an earnestness to his reticence. One ancient historian notes that Marcus was dismayed at having to leave his mother’s house for the royal palace. When asked by someone why he was downcast about such an incredible bounty of fortune, he listed all the evil things that kings had done.

Reservations are not the same thing as cowardice. The most confident leaders—the best ones—often are worried that they won’t do a good enough job. They go into the job knowing it will not be an easy one. But they do proceed. And Marcus, around this time, would dream a dream that he had shoulders made of ivory. To him it was a sign: He could do this.

At age nineteen, Marcus Aurelius was consul, the highest office in the land. At age twenty-four, he held it again. In 161, at age forty, he was made emperor. The same position held by Nero and Domitian and Vespasian and so many other monsters.

Being chosen to be king—having enormous power thrust upon him at so early an age—somehow seems to have made Marcus Aurelius a better person. This utterly anomalous event in human history—how one man did not go the way of all kings—can only be explained by one thing: Stoicism.*

But it would be an injustice to Marcus Aurelius not to give him the full credit due for the work he had to put in. And we know it was conscious, deliberate work. He recognized, quite openly, the “malice, cunning and hypocrisy that power produces,” as well as the “peculiar ruthlessness often shown by people from ‘good families,’” and decided he would be an exception to that rule. “Take care not be Caesarified, or dyed in purple,” he was still writing to himself as an old man, “it happens. So keep yourself simple, good, pure, serious, unpretentious, a friend of justice, god-fearing, kind, full of affection, strong for your proper work. Strive hard to remain the same man that philosophy wished to make you.”

It wasn’t just the headwind of power that Marcus faced in life. From his letters, we know he had recurring, painful health problems. He became a father at age twenty-six—a transformative and trying experience for any man. In Marcus’s case, though, fate was almost unbelievably cruel. He and his wife, Faustina, would have thirteen children. Only five would survive into adulthood.

His reign, from 161 to 180, was marked by the Antonine Plague—a global pandemic that originated in the Far East, spread mercilessly across borders, and claimed the lives of at least five million people over fifteen years—and some nineteen years of wars at the borders. As the historian Dio Cassius would write, Marcus Aurelius “did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign.”

But these external things don’t deter a Stoic. Marcus believed that plagues and war could only threaten our life. What we need to protect is our character—how we act within these wars and plagues and life’s other setbacks. And to abandon character? That’s real evil.

Perhaps the copy of Epictetus that Junius Rusticus had given him had so landed with Marcus Aurelius because they both were dealt hard blows by fate. It is a striking contrast, an emperor and a slave sharing and loving the same philosophy, the latter figure greatly influencing the former, but it is not a contradiction—nor would it have seemed odd to the ancients. It’s only in our modern reactionary, divisive focus on “privilege” that we have forgotten how much we all have in common as human beings, how we all stand equally naked and defenseless against fate whether we possess worldly power or not.

Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were, to borrow Epictetus’s metaphor, assigned difficult roles by the author of the universe. What defined them was how they managed to play these roles, which neither of them, Marcus especially, would ever have chosen.

Consider the first action that Marcus Aurelius took in 161 AD when his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, died. When Octavian had become emperor, Arius Didymus, his Stoic advisor, had suggested that he get rid of young Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. “It’s not good to have too many Caesars,” the Stoic had told his boss, joking as he suggested murder. Nero had eliminated so many rivals that Seneca had to remind him that no king had it in his power to get rid of every successor. Marcus Aurelius found himself in an even more complex situation. He had an adoptive brother, Lucius Verus, who had even closer ties to Hadrian’s legacy.* What ought he do? What would you do?

Marcus Aurelius cut this Gordian knot with effortlessness and grace: He named his adoptive brother co-emperor.

The first thing Marcus Aurelius did with absolute power was voluntarily share half of it. This alone would make him worthy of the kind of awe that King George III felt upon hearing that George Washington would return to private life—“If he does that, sir, he will be the greatest man in the world”—but it was just one of several such gestures that defined Marcus Aurelius’s reign.

When the Antonine Plague hit Rome, and the streets were littered with bodies and danger hung in the air, no one would have faulted him for fleeing the city. In fact, it might have been the more prudent course of action. Instead, Marcus stayed, braving it like the British royal family during the Blitz, never showing fear, reassuring the people by his very presence that he did not value his safety more than the responsibilities of his office.

Later, when due to the ravages of the plague and those endless wars, Rome’s treasury was exhausted, and Marcus Aurelius was once again faced with a choice of doing things the easy way or the hard way. He could have levied high taxes, he could have looted the provinces, he could have kicked the can down the road, running up bills his successors would have to deal with. Instead, Dio Cassius tells us, Marcus “took all the imperial ornaments to the Forum and sold them for gold. When the barbarian uprising had been put down, he returned the purchase price to those who voluntarily brought back the imperial possessions, but used no compulsion in the case of those who were unwilling to do so.” Even though as emperor he technically had unfettered control over Rome’s budget, he never acted as such. “As for us,” he once said to the Senate about his family, “we are so far from possessing anything of our own that even the house in which we live is yours.”

Finally, toward the end of his life, when Avidius Cassius, his most trusted general, turned on him, attempting a coup, Marcus Aurelius was faced with another test of all the things he believed when it came to honor, honesty, compassion, generosity, and dignity. He had every right to be angry.

Incredibly, Marcus decided the attempted coup was an opportunity. They could, he said to his soldiers, go out and “settle this affair well and show to all mankind there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.” It was a chance “to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.” An assassin would soon enough take down Avidius, hoping almost certainly to impress himself to Marcus, and in the process revealing just how different a plane Marcus Aurelius was operating on. As Dio Cassius writes, Marcus “was so greatly grieved at the death of Cassius that he could not bring himself even to look at the severed head of his enemy, but before the murderers drew near gave orders that it should be buried.” He proceeded to treat each of Avidius’s collaborators with leniency, including several senators who had actively endorsed this attempted coup. “I implore you, the senate, to keep my reign unstained by the blood of any senator,” Marcus later appealed to those who wanted vengeance on his behalf. “May it never happen.”

His dictum in life and in leadership was simple and straightforward: “Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” No better expression or embodiment of Stoicism is found in his line (and his living of that line) than: “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.”

Yet there is, in studying Marcus’s life, an impression that he was somehow different, made of special stock that made his many difficult decisions easier. The common perception of Stoicism only compounds this—that somehow the Stoics were beyond pain, beyond material desire, beyond bodily desires.

But Marcus would not have accepted this explanation, for it sells short the training and the struggle he experienced as he worked to get better. “Alone of the emperors,” the historian Herodian would write of Marcus Aurelius, “he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.”

And underneath this learning and character, he was still a human being.

We know that Marcus Aurelius was brought to tears like one, that he felt the same pain and losses and frustrations that everyone feels. We’re told quite vividly by the Historia Augusta that Marcus wept when he was told that his favorite tutor had passed away. We know that he cried one day in court, when he was overseeing a case and the attorney mentioned the countless souls who perished in the plague still ravaging Rome.

We can imagine Marcus cried many other times. This was a man who was betrayed by one of his most trusted generals. This was a man who one day lost his wife of thirty-five years. This was a man who lost eight children, including all but one of his sons.

Marcus didn’t weep because he was weak. He didn’t weep because he was un-Stoic. He cried because he was human. Because these very painful experiences made him sad. “Neither philosophy nor empire,” Antoninus said sympathetically as he let his son sob, “takes away natural feeling.”

So Marcus Aurelius must have lost his temper on occasion, or he never would have had cause to write in his Meditations—which was never intended for publication—about the need to keep it under control. We know that he lusted, we know that he feared, we know that he fantasized about his rivals disappearing.

It was not all emotions he worked on domesticating, but the harmful ones, the ones that would make him betray what he believed. “Start praying like this and you’ll see,” he wrote to himself. “Not ‘some way to sleep with her’—but a way to stop wanting to. Not ‘some way to get rid of him’—but a way to stop trying. Not ‘some way to save my child’—but a way to lose your fear.”*

The wife of George Marshall, another great man of equal stature, in describing her husband would capture what made Marcus Aurelius so truly impressive:

In many of the articles and interviews I have read about General Marshall the writers speak of his retiring nature and his modesty. . . . No, I do not think I would call my husband retiring or overly modest. I think he is well aware of his powers, but I also think this knowledge is tempered by a sense of humility and selflessness such as I have seen in few strong men.

If Marcus had naturally been perfect, there would be little to admire. That he wasn’t is the whole point. He worked his way there, as we all can.

It should be noted that Marcus himself would not want us to be shamed by his example but be reminded of our own capacities. “Recognize that if it’s humanly possible,” he said both to us and to himself, “you can do it too.”

Marcus Aurelius managed to not be corrupted by power, managed to not be afraid as he faced a terrible epidemic, managed to not be too angered by betrayal, nor utterly broken by unfathomable personal tragedy. What does that mean? It means you can do the same.

At the core of Marcus Aurelius’s power as a philosopher and a philosopher king seems to be a pretty simple exercise that he must have read about in Seneca’s writings and then in Epictetus’s: the morning or evening review. “Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand,” Epictetus had said. “Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”

So much of what we know about Marcus Aurelius’s philosophical thinking comes from the fact that for years he did that. He was constantly jotting down reminders and aphorisms of Stoic thinking to himself. Indeed, his only known work, Meditations, is filled with quotes from Chrysippus, allusions to themes from the writings of Panaetius and Zeno, stories about Socrates, poems from Aristophanes, exercises from Epictetus as well as all sorts of original interpretations of Stoic wisdom. The title of Meditations, which dates to 167 AD, translates from ta eis heauton, “to himself.” This captures the essence of the book perfectly, for Marcus truly was writing for himself, as anyone who has read Meditations can easily feel.

How else can we understand notes that reference, without explanation, “the way [Antoninus Pius] accepted the customs agent’s apology at Tusculum,” or even more obliquely, speaking of moments of divine intervention, when he writes only, “the one at Caiteta.” These were moments far too insignificant to have made the historical record but that influenced the author, the man, enough that he remembered them decades later and was still mulling them over.

Meditations is not a book for the reader, it was a book for the author. Yet this is what makes it such an impressive piece of writing, one of the great literary feats of all time. Somehow in writing exclusively to and for himself, Marcus Aurelius managed to produce a book that has not only survived through the centuries, but is still teaching and helping people today. As the philosopher Brand Blanshard would observe in 1984:

Few care now about the marches and countermarches of the Roman commanders. What the centuries have clung to is a notebook of thoughts by a man whose real life was largely unknown who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of the morrow, but something of far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by.

The opening pages of Meditations reveal that spirit quite well, for the book begins with a section entitled “Debts and Lessons.” Across seventeen entries and some twenty-one hundred words (a full ten percent of the book), Marcus takes the time to acknowledge and codify the lessons he had learned from the important people in his life. In the privacy of these pages, he recognized his grandfather for his courtesy and serenity of temper; his father for manliness without ostentation; his mother for piety and generosity; his tutor for instilling a positive work ethic; the gods for surrounding him with good people. He even thanks—not to put too fine a point on it—Rusticus for teaching him “not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of The Simple Life or The Man Who Lives Only for Others.”

Why was he writing this if it would never be seen? If the people would never fully know what they meant to him? Marcus explains:

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind.

What Marcus was using this writing for, then, is for the true intended purpose of Stoicism—for getting better, for preparing himself for what life had in store. In Book Two, he opens by noting that the people he will meet in the course of the upcoming day will be surly and rude and selfish and stupid. Was this to excuse himself from good behavior? Or to justify despair? No, Marcus wrote, “no one can implicate me in ugliness,” nor could they hurt him or make him angry. He had to love people—the people. He had to be ready . . . and be good.

Indeed, one of the most common themes in Marcus’s writings was his commitment to serving others, that notion of sympatheia and a duty to act for the common good, first advanced by Zeno but carried on by Chrysippus and Posidonius in the centuries since. The phrase “common good” appears more than eighty times in Meditations, which for a Stoic makes sense but is surprising considering how nearly all of his predecessors viewed the purpose of the state. Yet here we have Marcus writing, “Whenever you have trouble getting up in the morning, remind yourself that you’ve been made by nature for the purpose of working with others.”

But he did have to remind himself of that regularly, as we all must, because it is so easy to forget.

Marcus used this private journal as a way to keep his ego in check. Fame, he wrote, was fleeting and empty. Applause and cheering were the clacking of tongues and the smacking of hands. What good was posthumous fame, he notes, when you’ll be dead and gone? And for that matter, when people in the future will be just as annoying and wrong about things as they are now?

“Words once in common use now sound archaic,” he wrote. “And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus . . . Scipio and Cato . . . Augustus . . . Hadrian and Antoninus and . . . Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend and soon oblivion covers it.” Alexander the Great and his mule driver, Marcus writes, both died and both ended up buried in the same cold ground. What good was fame or accomplishment? It didn’t hold a candle to character.

At Aquincum, the Roman camp near present-day Budapest where Marcus Aurelius visited the Second Legion and is believed to have written parts of Meditations, archaeologists have uncovered a larger-than-life limestone statue of an emperor in a toga. At first glance it looks like the head has been broken off. But a closer inspection reveals that the head was designed to be replaceable. The statue was part of a shrine for the cult of the emperor, and they wanted to be able to swap the head out each time a new one took the throne.

Knowing that he was only a placeholder helped Marcus prevent his position from going to his head. He built few monuments to himself. He didn’t mind criticism. He never abused his power.

Hadrian once got angry enough that he stabbed a secretary in the eye with a writing stylus. Of course, there were no consequences. Marcus could have taken advantage of this freedom to behave as he liked. Instead he kept his temper in check, refused to lash out at the people around him, even if they would have let him get away with it. “Why should we feel anger at the world,” he writes in Meditations, cribbing a line from a lost Euripides play, “as if the world would notice.”

It cannot be said, for all his dignity and poise, that Marcus was a perfect ruler. No leader is, nor would Marcus have expected he could be. He must be faulted for persecutions of the Christians under his reign—a stain on both him and Rusticus. Yet even here, he was considered by Tertullian, an early Christian writer who lived through the last years of his rule, to be a protector of Christians. Although he made some minor improvements in the lives of slaves, he was—like all the Stoics—incapable of questioning the institution entirely. For all his talk of being a “citizen of the world,” and his belief in a unity between all dwellers on this planet, he regarded large swaths of the world’s population as “barbarians” and fought and killed many of them. And of course, for a successor, he ultimately chose—or was forced to choose, as only the second emperor since Augustus to have a male heir—to pass the throne to his son Commodus, who turned out to be a deranged and flawed man.*

It’s unfair to compare Marcus only to his own writings, or to the impossibly high standards of his philosophy. Instead, he should also be looked at in the company of the other men (and women) who held supreme power, which Dio Cassius did well when he observed that “he ruled better than any others who had ever been in any position of power.”

The rule is that sensitive, thoughtful men like Marcus Aurelius turn out to be poor leaders. To be a sovereign or an executive is to come face-to-face with the messiness of the world, the flaws and foibles of humanity. The reason there have been so few philosopher kings is not just a lack of opportunity—it’s that philosophers often fall short of what the job requires. Marcus turned out to have the ivory shoulders, as well as the sharp mind, required for the job. “Don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic,” he reminded himself. He had to take reality on reality’s terms. He had to make do with what was there. For an idealist and a lover of ideas, Marcus was also, like Abraham Lincoln, impressively pragmatic. “The cucumber is bitter?” he said rhetorically. “Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know.” Nothing better expressed his leadership style and his view of progress than this quote:

You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible—and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom.

But what if some other area of my action is thwarted?

Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately take its place, one that better fits the life you are building.

This seems to be how he thought about the politicians he worked with as well. Instead of holding them to his standards or expecting the impossible—as many talented, brilliant leaders naturally do—he focused on their strengths and was tolerant of their weaknesses. Like Lincoln again, Marcus was not afraid of being disagreed with, and made use of common ground and common cause as best he could. “So long as a person did anything good,” Dio Cassius writes, Marcus “would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention; for he declared that it is impossible for one to create such men as one desires to have, and so it is fitting to employ those who are already in existence for whatever service each of them may be able to render to the State.”

Ernest Renan, a nineteenth-century biographer of Marcus, puts it perfectly: “The consequence of austere philosophy might have produced stiffness and severity. But here it was that the rare goodness of the nature of Marcus Aurelius shone out in all its brilliancy. His severity was confined only to himself.”

Musonius Rufus, some forty-odd years before Marcus was born, had been approached by a Syrian king. “Do not imagine,” he had told the man,

that it is more appropriate for anyone to study philosophy than for you, nor for any other reason than because you are a king. For the first duty of a king is to be able to protect and benefit his people, and a protector and benefactor must know what is good for a man and what is bad, what is helpful and what harmful, what advantageous and what disadvantageous, inasmuch as it is plain that those who ally themselves with evil come to harm, while those who cleave to good enjoy protection, and those who are deemed worthy of help and advantage enjoy benefits, while those who involve themselves in things disadvantageous and harmful suffer punishment.

Could Musonius have imagined—persecuted and abused by five consecutive Roman emperors—that his vision would one day take hold in such a man? That everything the Stoics had spoken of and dreamt about would come true so beautifully and yet so fleetingly? He had said it was impossible for anyone but a good man to be a good king, and Marcus, who had read Musonius, did his best to live up to this command.

Could Epictetus have imagined that his teachings would make their way to the first emperor who would, as Marcus did, make real steps toward improving the plight of Rome’s slaves? Along with his stepfather, Antoninus, he protected the rights of freed slaves and even made it possible for slaves to inherit property from their masters. We’re told that Marcus forbade the capital punishment of slaves and made excessively cruel treatment of them a crime as well. Was it the story of Epictetus’s broken leg that inspired him? Was it the Stoic virtue of justice that compelled him to care about the less fortunate? While it’s disappointing that Marcus lacked the vision to do away with the institution entirely, it remains impressive anytime someone is able to see beyond or through the flawed thinking of their time and make, if only incrementally, the world better for their fellow human beings.

These would not have been easy decisions, nor uncontroversial ones, but he made them, as a Stoic must. Forget protests. Forget criticism and the agendas of the critics. Forget the hard work it takes to enact something new or pioneering. Do what is right.

Come what may.

It is obvious in retrospect that Marcus used the pages of his journal to calm himself, to quiet his active mind, to get to the place of apatheia (the absence of passions). The word galene—calmness or stillness—appears eight times in his writings. There are metaphors about rivers and the ocean, the stars and beautiful observations about nature. The process of sitting down, with a stylus and wax tablet or papyrus and ink, was deeply therapeutic for him. He would have loved to have spent all his time philosophizing, but that was not to be, so the few minutes he stole in his tent on campaign, or even in his seat in the Colosseum as the gladiators fought below, he savored as opportunities for reflection.

Also in these pages he was steeling himself against the blows that fate seemed to so regularly target him for. “Life is warfare and a journey far from home,” he writes. It was literally true. Some twelve years of his life would be spent at the empire’s northern border along the Danube River, fighting long, brutal wars. Dio Cassius describes the scene of Marcus returning to Rome after one long absence. As he addressed the people, he made a reference to how long he’d been forced to be away. “Eight!” the people cried lovingly. “Eight!” as they held up four fingers on each hand. He had been gone for eight years. The weight of this hit in the moment, and so too must have the adoration of the crowd, even though Marcus often told himself how worthless this was. As a token of his gratitude and beneficence, he would distribute to them eight hundred sesterces apiece, the largest gift from the emperor to the people ever given. He did not stop there. On his return, he forgave countless debts owed to the emperor’s private treasury, actually burning the documents in the Forum so they could not ever be recovered.

Marcus may have lived humbly, but no one could say he was not generous to others. In fact, his policies as emperor perfectly adhered to the principles he jotted down one day in his diary: “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”

How exhausting it must have been to be so self-disciplined. Yet there are no complaints in Meditations, no private lamentations or blame-shifting. When Marcus dreamt of escaping his burdens, thought of the beach or the mountains or time in his library with beloved books, he reminded himself that he didn’t need a vacation to recover. He didn’t need to travel to relax. “For nowhere can you find a more peaceful and less busy retreat than in your own soul,” he wrote. “Treat yourself often to this retreat and be renewed.”

As we said, Marcus’s early years were defined by loss, and so were his later ones. There would be one blow after another. In 149, he lost newborn twin boys. In 151, he lost his firstborn daughter, Domitia Faustina. In 152, another son, Tiberius Aelius Antoninus, died in infancy. That same year, Marcus’s sister Cornificia died. Shortly after, Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, died. In 158, another son, whose name is unknown, died. In 161, he lost his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius. In 165, another son, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus (twin brother of Commodus), died. In 169, he lost his son Verus, a sweet boy, during what was supposed to be routine surgery, whom he had hoped would rule alongside Commodus, as he had ruled with his own brother. That same year he lost that brother—his co-emperor—Lucius Verus. He would lose his wife of thirty-five years not long after.

Of Marcus’s boys, five died before he did. Three of his daughters as well. No parent should outlive their children. To lose eight of them? So young? It staggers the mind. “Unfair” does not even come close. It’s grotesque.

How easily this could shatter a person, how easily and understandably it might cause them to toss away everything they ever believed, to hate a world that could be so cruel. Yet somehow we have Marcus Aurelius writing, after all these twists of fate, a note that captures the essence of leadership and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.

—It’s unfortunate that this has happened.

No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.

Marcus held Antoninus, his adoptive father, up as his example always. He was particularly inspired, he said, by “the way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance—without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.” “Accept it without arrogance,” Marcus would write later in Meditations about the ups and downs, the blessings and curses of life, “and let it go with indifference.”

Is there a better encapsulation of that idea of “preferred indifferents” that Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Aristo had argued about all those years ago?

There is no theme that appears more in Marcus’s writing than death. Perhaps it was his own health issues that made him so acutely aware of his mortality, but there were other sources. In his book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Donald Robertson tells us that the Romans believed the burning of incense might protect a family from falling ill. Since he did not flee Rome as many other wealthy citizens did during the plague, Marcus woke up to a surreal-smelling city—a mixture of the putrid smell of dead bodies and the sweet aroma of incense. As Robertson writes, “For over a decade the scent of smoke of incense [was] a reminder to Marcus that he was living under the shadow of death and that survival from one day to the next should never be taken for granted.”

His writings reflect this insight, time and time again. “Think of yourself as dead,” he writes. “You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” On another page he says, “You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.” The final two entries in Meditations, which may well have been written as he lay dying, pick up the theme again. What does it matter if you live for this long or that long? he asks. The curtain falls on every actor. “But I’ve only gotten three acts!” he says, giving voice to that part inside all of us that is scared to die.

Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.

To do this would be the final test of this philosopher king, as it was for each of the Stoics and every human being. We all die, we don’t control that, but we do influence how we face that death, the courage and poise and compassion we bring to it.

We’re told that Marcus was quite sick toward the end, far away from home on the Germanic battlefields, near modern-day Vienna. Worried about spreading whatever he had to his son, and also to avoid any complications about succession, Marcus bade him a tearful goodbye and sent him away to prepare to rule. Even with his own end moments away he was still teaching, still trying to be a philosopher, particularly to his friends, who were bereft with grief. “Why do you weep for me,” Marcus asked them, “instead of thinking about the pestilence and about death which is the common lot of us all?” Then, with the dignity of a man who had practiced for this moment many times, he said, “If you now grant me leave to go, I bid you farewell and pass on before.”

He would survive a day or so more. Perhaps it was in these last few moments, weak in body but still strong in will, that he jotted down the last words that appear in his Meditations—a reminder to himself about staying true to his philosophy:

So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.

Finally, on March 17, 180, at age fifty-eight, he turned to his guard and said, “Go to the rising sun; I am already setting.” Then he covered his head to go to sleep and never woke up.

Rome—and us, her descendants—would never see such greatness again.