The Art of Manliness - The Making of a Stoic Emperor

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:11.080 perhaps you've read marcus aurelius's meditations a book many turn to to learn

00:00:16.160 and internalize the teachings of stoic philosophy but what do you know of the

00:00:19.920 man who penned that seminal text here to help us get to know the philosopher and

00:00:23.680 ruler is donald robertson a cognitive behavior psychotherapist and the author

00:00:27.580 of marcus aurelius the stoic emperor drawing on the meditations three ancient

00:00:32.740 histories about marcus's life and character and a cachet of private letters

00:00:36.220 between him and his rhetoric tutor donald impacts how marcus's life shaped

00:00:39.860 his approach to stoicism and how stoicism shaped him we discuss marcus's

00:00:44.260 childhood and influences his idea of manliness the surprising

00:00:47.840 significance of who he does and doesn't mention the meditations and how he used

00:00:51.700 that journal as a kind of father figure we also discuss how marcus may have

00:00:55.420 undergone training modeled on the spartan agoge how he came to attention as a

00:00:59.200 successor to the emperorship how he got turned on to stoicism as medicine for the

00:01:03.100 soul and how he used the philosophy to deal with its tumultuous rule after show's

00:01:07.660 over check out our show notes at awim.is slash marcus

00:01:10.420 all right donald robertson welcome back to the show hi brett it's a pleasure i'm looking forward

00:01:26.680 to it it's good to be back so uh you are a cognitive behavior psychotherapist you're also

00:01:31.200 a student and teacher and writer about the philosophy of stoicism and you got a new book

00:01:38.040 out called marcus aurelius the stoic emperor and it's a biography of marcus aurelius so if people

00:01:43.860 have seen gladiator they've seen marcus aurelius and if they've read stoicism they know about marcus

00:01:48.660 aurelius's meditations you start off the book with this line which i i thought was really compelling

00:01:54.480 you said marcus aurelius did not have a heart of stone why did you start off the book with that line

00:02:01.560 well actually for two reasons one is the yale university press who commissioned me to write the book

00:02:07.880 wanted me to write a biography that was more in a narrative style rather than one that was kind

00:02:14.000 of more dry and academic so it's a little bit like writing a movie screenplay we wanted to make it

00:02:19.600 engaging right so there's little elements of historical fiction in terms of the style so it's

00:02:25.260 historical biography but one that reads a little bit more like a story and that can be a challenge

00:02:31.580 with marcus's life so i wanted to kind of get into his emotions right from the outset and frame the

00:02:37.080 whole thing as being a little bit more personal a little bit more to do with his psychology but

00:02:42.220 there's another reason why i did it which is when i wrote this book what first there are several

00:02:47.560 biographies about marcus that are pretty good but what always frustrated me about them because people

00:02:52.160 often ask me about where can i get a good biography of marcus aurelius was that the other ones don't

00:02:56.380 really talk about his philosophy as much as i would have liked and right out of the gate i wanted to

00:03:02.840 address the most common misconception about stoic philosophy which is undoubtedly the idea that

00:03:09.480 stoics are completely unemotional and in fact the word stoic today is used to mean someone that has a

00:03:17.820 stiff upper lip or they're unemotional and that's kind of a corruption of the original meaning of the

00:03:24.660 word so does it in order to distinguish them we usually write lowercase stoicism to mean being

00:03:32.200 unemotional but when we're talking and writing about the philosophy we usually capitalize it

00:03:36.780 in order to clarify that they're really two different things and i'd say that the idea that

00:03:42.020 stoicism is about kind of suppressing or concealing unpleasant or embarrassing emotions the problem with

00:03:49.100 it is that it's based on an overly simplistic view of what emotions are whereas the ancient stoics one of

00:03:55.160 the most interesting things about them is that they had a much more sophisticated theory of emotion

00:03:59.620 yeah and you describe you can call them outburst of emotion that marcus displayed throughout his life

00:04:05.460 when his favored tutor died he cried and he started to beat his chest and tore his clothes in grief and

00:04:13.020 that's not something you'd expect from the way stoicism is portrayed today particularly on social media

00:04:17.440 where it's you know these statues and it's all about grit and determination um marcus that's not how he

00:04:23.800 practiced stoicism well in the ancient world actually displays you know one of the one of the

00:04:28.700 interesting things about human behavior and psychology is that expressions of emotions can vary quite a lot

00:04:34.620 from one culture to another and in ancient greece and and in rome to a slightly lesser extent but still

00:04:40.940 it's the case people would express emotions often in a more animated way than we do today so it's pretty

00:04:48.720 common to hear particularly in greek literature about people pulling their hair beating their chest

00:04:54.400 beating their head in grief whereas we tend not to be so partly it's a cultural difference they're

00:04:59.900 naturally more expressive in the ancient world but i should let me dive right into what the difference

00:05:05.320 is here between how the stoics thought about emotion and how self-improvement authors sometimes think

00:05:11.620 about it today so our default view of emotion is what psychologists sometimes call the lump theory or the

00:05:17.780 hydraulic theory of emotion the emotion is just like a blob of energy or something and it builds up and you

00:05:22.880 can suppress it or you can vent it but the stoics think of emotion in terms of it being composed of

00:05:30.880 voluntary and involuntary aspects of cognitive and behavioral aspects so they see it more like a kind

00:05:39.020 of clockwork mechanism and we can dissect it and understand the ingredients that go together to make

00:05:45.440 an emotion and the stoics believed that the involuntary aspects of emotion which they saw as kind of

00:05:51.540 reflex like uh that we should view with indifference and accept but the real thing that they were

00:05:59.260 concerned with was what happens next how we would respond to the grief of losing someone that was

00:06:06.380 really important to us for example and they're very concerned for instance that we don't indulge in

00:06:11.940 excessive rumination about negative emotions and that's the same in modern psychotherapy we make the

00:06:18.540 same distinction so there are automatic emotional responses and then there are what we call strategic

00:06:24.340 or voluntary ones and most of psychotherapy revolves around getting people to maintain this distinction

00:06:30.080 and to learn to accept unpleasant feelings but to take more responsibility for the way that they

00:06:35.860 process them or respond to them okay so this is a psychological biography of marcus aurelius and what you do is you

00:06:42.040 look at his entire life to see how his upbringing how his childhood how his education and then how his

00:06:50.040 experience as an emperor in general shaped his psychology and then how stoicism also shaped his

00:06:55.860 character and shaped his psychology and i think by digging into this you can get some really good

00:07:00.280 insights that are applicable to yourself at least i got a lot of great insights let's start with marcus's

00:07:05.400 childhoods and his parents who was his father and then how did his father's life and death

00:07:11.100 shape marcus's character and view on life well first of all we know very little about his father

00:07:16.600 so there's some things we know a lot about and then there's other things we know little about but i

00:07:21.880 think if you're a good biographer you're very careful sometimes you can make a little bit go

00:07:26.560 a long way or at least make it go a bit further so marcus's father died we believe when marcus was about

00:07:33.240 three or four years old and he was a prietor so he was a senior roman magistrate that's about all that

00:07:40.720 we know about him really we don't know why how he died but we know that marcus's grandfather

00:07:45.660 was a thrice consul so a really really senior roman statesman but like one of the most senior most

00:07:52.680 powerful men in the senate so we can infer that marcus's father was probably on a career path

00:07:58.780 to become a senior roman statesman but he had it cut short that's the story of marcus's father if you

00:08:04.680 like he's a guy that was heading to the top but for some reason he died prematurely where he was

00:08:10.180 still at a relatively early stage in his career and the other consequence of that is that marcus

00:08:16.160 you know would normally have been brought up by the men in his family and he was for a while but his

00:08:22.340 mother took responsibility for raising him on his she never remarried so we'll come back to her in a

00:08:28.580 moment i guess but what marcus says about his father is that from what he can remember which can't be

00:08:34.840 much or what he's heard about this man he was renowned for modesty and funnily enough manliness

00:08:41.420 so i guess it's very relevant to your podcast but marcus says later in the meditations that by

00:08:49.180 manliness he doesn't mean anger or aggression but he means something more like the strength of character

00:08:56.880 that would be required to exhibit kindness to other people and the reason he's saying that is that in

00:09:03.260 roman society there were probably many people that thought of manliness in terms of kind of aggression

00:09:08.640 and violence and stuff like that more than marcus did so marcus probably thought his father was a

00:09:14.120 modest and kind man and clearly someone that he admired on the basis of his reputation and wanted to

00:09:20.800 emulate but again the real story here is that he lost his father so he was left he's a young guy

00:09:27.440 who's got a lot of responsibility in his shoulders and has no father figure and we can see that he

00:09:33.560 spends the rest of his life looking for a replacement father figure and he finds several but we'll come

00:09:40.200 back to this later but the book the meditations in a sense i think becomes a substitute father figure

00:09:46.020 for him in a way this idea of manliness you talked about he used a greek word for it a rinikos

00:09:53.820 how did its meaning differ from the latin word for manliness it's veer i mean you pronounce it weir

00:10:00.180 too what's the difference well funnily enough marcus's conception of manliness is probably more

00:10:05.740 influenced by greek culture and philosophy i would say i think that might be the kind of perception

00:10:10.660 of it among his peers it's a more cerebral more philosophical view of what constitutes manliness i mean

00:10:18.620 marcus is a guy who's fixated on self-improvement and developing strength of character

00:10:23.700 but he views funnily enough having said that he doesn't think anger or aggression is manly

00:10:30.880 he's a guy that admits that he had an anger management problem in his youth so as a young

00:10:36.400 guy he had anger but he saw his greatest achievement in a way in terms of the fact that he was able to

00:10:43.240 master his angry feelings and transcend them and it was stoicism that helped him to do that

00:10:48.560 okay so marcus's father died when he was three or four but had a big impact on him he was always

00:10:54.180 searching for a father figure he had we'll talk about some of these father figures that he had

00:10:57.580 even say his meditations his journaling was a substitute father figure for himself and then

00:11:03.320 also this i love this idea of the cerebral type of manliness virtue of manliness that he got from his

00:11:07.700 father but he said his mother probably had a bigger impact on him who was his mother and how did

00:11:13.440 she help shape what would become one of the great stoic philosophers well i'm going to be honest about

00:11:18.760 this brett like his mother really interests me his mother's a pretty cool lady like his mother is

00:11:26.620 unusual in the sense that many women in greek or roman society had a very subordinate role where you know

00:11:34.560 we don't really hear as much about them in history marcus's mother was a powerhouse like she was one of

00:11:40.660 the wealthiest and most powerful women in rome she came from an elite roman family with a long history

00:11:47.260 she was a kind of magnate in the construction industry she owned brick and tile factories and

00:11:53.880 clay fields we have many bricks that archaeologists have found today with her name stamped on them

00:11:59.420 if you can imagine that not how we often think of women in ancient society but also she was a high

00:12:06.840 without question she was a highly highly educated woman most elite romans were bilingual in latin and

00:12:13.960 greek so marcus wrote the meditations in greek for example but marcus's mother was not only fluent

00:12:20.920 but adept at the greek language so she must have been completely immersed in greek literature and she

00:12:28.200 seems to have been the sort of woman who surrounded herself with a an intellectual circle who had the kind of

00:12:33.580 intellectual salon as it were and so marcus grew up in this household where it would have been common

00:12:40.640 for some of the the most famous intellectuals of his era to pop around to visit his mum if you can

00:12:47.020 imagine that yeah no and something else that she did she was very particular about marcus's education

00:12:53.100 yeah i would say it it's my estimate is that she probably played a role in his education round about the time

00:13:02.820 he began his secondary level of education she brought him back from his paternal grandfather's house into

00:13:09.460 her house so that suggests to me it's probably because she wants to hire the private tutors and that wouldn't be

00:13:15.540 unusual for example we know the emperor nero's mother agrippina chose seneca the stoic philosopher to

00:13:23.240 be nero's tutor so i think it's likely although we can't be certain that marcus's mother chose his

00:13:29.440 tutors now then arguably we can look at who were his tutors what does that tell us then about you know

00:13:35.680 what his parents or in this case just his mother had decided there are a lot of greek rhetoric tutors

00:13:42.240 but also a lot of stoic philosophers teaching him so if that's true his mother was maybe someone who

00:13:48.620 was already interested in stoicism and there's a tiny hint in the meditations marcus mentions in passing

00:13:55.920 a guy called domitius who was a devoted student of stoicism that's all he tells us about this guy

00:14:02.320 but he happens to have the same name as marcus's mother's extended family so that guy might have been

00:14:10.480 an uncle or something so in maybe in his mother's family there already were people who were devoted to

00:14:16.860 stoicism so you mentioned that he had several tutors in his childhood in his young teenage years yeah

00:14:23.000 there's one marcus talks about in his meditations but it's an unnamed tutor but marcus speaks really

00:14:28.920 fondly of him that's quite cryptic and i i mean again if you do if you're really a kind of careful

00:14:35.500 thorough biographer you know often it's what people don't say that can be most revealing

00:14:41.180 especially with romans what romans didn't say that's something they're far more sensitive to

00:14:47.200 than we are today so in the meditations he's naming all these family members and tutors that really

00:14:53.000 influenced him and it's interesting who he doesn't mention so he doesn't mention herodes atticus

00:14:58.760 anywhere herodes atticus was the most famous intellectual of the era he was a family friend

00:15:05.960 of marcus's mother he was brought up for a time in her household her grandfather's household and he

00:15:13.260 was a great sophist and famous writer he was like a billionaire philanthropist and he was marcus's greek

00:15:19.220 rhetoric tutor and he doesn't mention this guy which is incredibly insulting in the eyes of ancient

00:15:25.040 romans it's almost like what they call damnatio memoriae so damning somebody by erasing them from

00:15:31.520 history all a little bit like you know when we talk about cancel culture and stuff today you know

00:15:35.960 marcus in a sense kind of cancelled herodes by not mentioning him or acknowledging him at this point

00:15:40.860 and yet he mentions to make it worse to rub salt in the wound he mentions this guy whose name he can't

00:15:46.760 even remember so our best guess is this is a slave or a freedman a former slave in his great in his

00:15:56.360 grandfather's household probably when marcus was under the age of about 10 or 12 and around about the age

00:16:03.520 of his kind of elementary school education and yet this guy isn't a philosopher but marcus says he

00:16:09.860 learned more from him in terms of life lessons than he did from the greatest intellectual of his

00:16:16.520 era that would have been incredibly insulting to herodes atticus and marcus you have to remember

00:16:22.660 is sitting on the banks of the danube and his praetorium and his hq and command of the legions

00:16:29.520 writing i remember when i was a little kid this guy taught me not to support the green or the blue

00:16:37.260 teams in the horse racing or one side or the other in the gladiatorial contests and that's clearly a

00:16:45.120 metaphor brett because he's not at the gladiatorial games or at the circus maximus when he's writing it

00:16:51.920 he's negotiating with germanic tribes and so he's clearly saying don't take sides in political

00:16:59.840 arguments try and be bipartisan try and view things independently in a detached way and kind of avoid

00:17:07.220 getting sucked into partisan bickering why did marcus snub that tutor herodes why yeah um do you know

00:17:15.700 he was a horrible man if you want the long and short of it he went on trial for kicking his pregnant wife

00:17:21.460 to death oh wow for example yeah pretty bad right he was a horrible controversial figure he lunged at

00:17:27.580 marcus at one point during a trial later in life and the praetorian prefect drew his sword like he came

00:17:33.760 close he came within a hair's breadth of getting run through for like lunging forward as if he was

00:17:39.740 going to throttle the emperor and again it's an interesting anecdote because we're told marcus

00:17:43.520 kind of just stood up very calmly and brushed it off so the stories we're told about marcus reflect

00:17:49.080 this idea that he was perceived as somebody who was really unfazed even by you know somebody

00:17:54.920 unexpectedly lunging at him in court as if they were going to throttle him yeah i think it's interesting

00:17:59.980 this the ancients this is you see this across cultures the greeks romans and other ancient

00:18:05.260 cultures they really understood the power of ignoring someone because when you ignore someone

00:18:10.560 you destroy them like you basically annihilate them their sense of self yeah it's kind of savage of

00:18:15.640 marcus it's very subtly savage he also had a painting instructor that seemed to teach more philosophy

00:18:21.900 than painting tell us about this guy and what did he teach marcus about voluntary hardship so this is

00:18:26.680 probably his next main tutor probably around about the age of 12 and we know this guy's name he's

00:18:33.280 called diognetus so that gives us a little fragment of evidence because that's a greek name not a roman

00:18:37.700 name so that wouldn't be unusual this guy probably traveled from a greek-speaking country probably greece

00:18:44.200 could have it might have been egypt or asia and asia minor or something and he's a painting master

00:18:48.640 he marcus makes absolutely no mention of this guy teaching him anything about painting interestingly right

00:18:54.260 that already makes him a cool guy like an interesting guy so what marcus says is this guy introduced me

00:18:59.820 to philosophy so it sounds like his early tutor kind of gave him some of the life lessons and

00:19:04.760 character traits that prepared him to be a philosopher and then this guy at 12 which is in roman culture

00:19:10.580 would be unusually young like if you're going to study philosophy you'd be at least 15 or more

00:19:15.500 normally so 12 is very unusually young marcus is taken to philosophy lectures by this guy now that's

00:19:22.320 weird right because marcus would at this age would be dressed uh recognizably dressed like a child in

00:19:28.200 roman culture he'd have the bulla the child's amulet hanging around his neck he's probably the only kid

00:19:33.940 little kid in those lectures if you can visualize that you know that's that's marcus in a nutshell

00:19:38.980 basically he's kind of precocious little philosophy student but this guy diognetus told him not to listen

00:19:46.860 to charlatans you know sorcerers and so on so he told him look don't fall for superstitious mumbo jumbo

00:19:54.080 he told him not to breed quails for fighting which is an interesting comment now that was like a popular

00:20:00.820 kind of game or a way of gambling in rome so i think the subtext there is he's saying this guy taught me

00:20:07.060 not to get distracted the modern equivalent brett would be sitting in your mom's basement smoking weed and

00:20:14.100 playing computer games all day i guess but this guy's saying to marcus don't don't get sidetracked

00:20:18.640 into playing these silly games and stuff like that you know keep your focus on self-improvement

00:20:24.300 and becoming the sort of person that you want to be in life and you know that that's given extra

00:20:29.220 resonance because as we'll see later there were other people around marcus who did get completely

00:20:33.640 distracted by entertainment basically and gambling and things like that and neglected their duties as a

00:20:39.860 result so he also told him marcus says the other thing i learned from this guy was not to speak freely

00:20:46.420 or complain about freedom of speech but to tolerate other people's freedom of speech which is obviously

00:20:54.840 you know in a way an unusual trait for a roman emperor because if you think of guys like nero and

00:21:00.260 caligula some roman emperors are notoriously intolerant of other people's freedom of speech so marcus

00:21:06.060 said earlier on this guy taught me to put up with other people disagreeing with me for example and

00:21:12.220 we might guess we can read into this and say probably because this guy diognetus said things

00:21:16.980 that marcus didn't like at times maybe he challenged him and marcus had to learn to suck it up and put up

00:21:24.340 with this guy maybe kind of criticizing him trying to you know be quite a challenging teacher

00:21:29.060 but i think what you maybe what you're getting at in terms of like you know that or manliness and so on

00:21:35.360 there's a something else at the end of that section that he says that is notoriously cryptic

00:21:39.480 and i'm sure you spotted it right where he says the other thing this guy taught me is to sleep on a

00:21:45.360 plank bed with an animal skin and everything else he says that belongs to and then the translation

00:21:51.920 will say the grecian discipline but in greek there's a very interesting phrase he says the alenikea goge

00:21:58.480 which translators and commentators latch on to because it's an odd phrase and it connotes the

00:22:06.200 first thing that you would think of when you read that is the spartan agoge yeah so we don't know for

00:22:11.240 sure what marcus is talking about there whether he actually means this guy perhaps a greek tutor

00:22:17.600 taught him to emulate the military cadet training of spartan youths or he might mean maybe a version of

00:22:24.100 this that you find in other greek cities but it we know quite a lot about this training there's a

00:22:30.660 kind of lifestyle or self-improvement training that many ancient philosophers modeled on military cadet

00:22:37.020 training or in spartan education and there's a kind of cluster of things that they refer to

00:22:43.120 like we don't know that much about it but they talk about for example fasting drinking water instead

00:22:51.380 of wine eating coarse bread maybe rye bread or barley bread they mean wearing the trebon this very

00:22:59.500 plain very simple garment that philosophers traditionally wore sometimes they talk about

00:23:04.760 carrying a cane or staff like the spartans traditionally did going barefoot and sleeping on a military camp bed

00:23:13.920 a straw mat on the floor are things that are all typically associated with this alenikea goge

00:23:19.880 so as a 12 year old boy marcus was like yeah i'm gonna do that sign me up this sounds great so he

00:23:25.500 had an interest in self-improvement even as at a young at a young age and it was very much to do

00:23:29.960 with self-mastery right and quite physical but some of these physical trainings trainings in voluntary

00:23:35.240 hardship and so on um to toughen you up i guess basically we would say today were traditionally

00:23:40.920 associated with stoic philosophy and also the cynic philosophy that kind of preceded stoicism

00:23:46.000 we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors

00:23:49.460 and now back to the show so as a boy at some point in his childhood marcus caught the attention

00:24:01.840 of the emperor hadrian yeah that guy yeah that guy tell us about hadrian's relationship with marcus

00:24:08.440 aurelius well it wasn't a good relationship really it's an odd relationship so just to kind of throw back

00:24:14.960 to something we mentioned earlier hadrian is notable by his absence from book one of the

00:24:20.920 meditations so marcus draws up a list of people he admires again in roman culture that's a risky

00:24:25.760 thing to do you're literally saying here's all the people that i admire most and learned most from

00:24:30.140 hadrian doesn't feature on anywhere so that is like a damn damnation memoriae like he's saying i have

00:24:37.140 nothing positive to say about hadrian many people remember hadrian is one of the good emperors

00:24:42.940 and there's some truth in that but at the beginning of his rule hadrian started off with a political

00:24:49.240 purge and the senate always held that against him and towards the end of his life in the last few

00:24:54.820 years of his life hadrian kind of went crazy and really turned into a despot and had a series of

00:25:01.520 political purges including against several members of marcus's family and so i think marcus was

00:25:07.600 probably terrified of hadrian to be honest hadrian made marcus come and live in his villa which was

00:25:13.240 kind of like the sort of ridiculously vast opulent complex that a kind of megalomaniac would would

00:25:21.500 build and hadrian had parties and probably orgies and stuff there marcus was about 16 at the time and

00:25:28.580 i think he was really freaked out and intimidated by the fact that hadrian commanded him to come and live

00:25:34.480 in this villa where all this kind of craziness was going on hadrian was a physical and psychological

00:25:40.240 mess a train wreck towards the end of his life he was riddled with disease he had a skin disease his

00:25:47.700 limbs were inflamed and swollen and he he was suicidal and lashing out uh obsessed with revenge

00:25:55.700 against his political rivals did marcus take any leadership lessons or maybe on how not to be a leader

00:26:01.880 from hadrian how not to be a leader basically so i should say hadrian selected marcus early on

00:26:09.640 to be his successor so hadrian was also a control freak and he not only appointed his immediate

00:26:15.900 successor but also the next in line to the throne so antoninus pious succeeded hadrian but hadrian said

00:26:22.680 after you you're going to appoint marcus because he's too young at the moment to be emperor so he had a

00:26:28.160 long-term succession plan why did why did hadrian choose marcus i mean it's kind of weird it's i

00:26:34.400 often get confused about how succession worked in the roman empire because you think well it should

00:26:38.900 go from father to son but sometimes people just pick random people why did you pick this guy so what

00:26:44.340 was going on there well hadrian didn't have any kids and one possible reason for hadrian was married

00:26:49.280 but his wife hated him and refused to have any kids by him and hadrian was you know like probably

00:26:57.260 more interested in same-sex relationships to put it tactfully one argument is he wasn't he probably

00:27:03.900 wasn't that interested in his wife so hadrian didn't have children okay and so he had to adopt

00:27:09.020 and he made a real mess of it like he chose another guy initially who died prematurely and so his

00:27:16.600 succession plan was kind of chaotic but then in the end he he put forward quite a um and my suspicion

00:27:22.500 is the senate influenced his succession plan in the end it kind of comes across that way to me

00:27:27.540 but how did marcus first catch hadrian's eye now there's this weird again really cryptic story

00:27:34.160 in the roman histories that we're told hadrian looked at marcus and said i'm gonna call this kid

00:27:41.160 verisimus which is a play on words hadrian loved jokes and puns marcus's family name is marcus annius

00:27:49.720 veris and veris means true or loyal or truthful and verisimus means the most true and so it's a weird

00:27:58.880 play on words we don't know annoyingly we don't know why hadrian said that but marcus would have been

00:28:05.420 roughly seven years old at the time a little kid at hadrian's court hadrian was already preparing him

00:28:12.320 for into enter elite society and marcus's grandfather would have known hadrian very well

00:28:20.160 he would have been one of hadrian's friends or rivals and his name was veris so again if we do a

00:28:26.480 deep dive into this as a kind of like digging like a biographer we might say hadrian seems to be

00:28:31.980 suggesting that this little boy was more truthful than his grandfather so maybe this grandfather was

00:28:38.980 trying to be tactful or diplomatic and then this little kid just blurted something out that the

00:28:43.620 grandfather was too embarrassed to say in front of the emperor now obviously this story reminds us of

00:28:48.640 hans christian anderson's story the emperor's new clothes everyone around hadrian was too scared to tell

00:28:54.940 him the truth but for some reason marcus aurelius said something or did something that made hadrian

00:29:00.280 think this little kid is the most truthful person in rome okay so he picked him as his successor but

00:29:07.300 between that time he had another guy antoninus when antoninus became marcus's adoptive father

00:29:13.320 yeah and then he ruled while marcus is getting ready for his succession and marcus talks about how he

00:29:21.080 learned a lot from antoninus from his example and how he led he basically antoninus did the exact

00:29:26.160 opposite of hadrian and he he was very plain like he he dressed plainly spoke plainly and was

00:29:32.360 philosophical i mean again if we read this like roman rhetoric like latin rhetoric market first of all

00:29:38.920 marcus is like an expert on his adoptive father's character if you can imagine that and he's he's

00:29:46.900 clearly spent a lot of time analyzing and modeling antoninus without question he can sit down he does it

00:29:53.660 more than once in the meditations he sits down and rattles off a huge list of things that he admires

00:29:59.240 about this guy you know think about that for a minute it's one thing to say that you admire someone

00:30:03.740 but imagine being able to go through a list of about you know 15 qualities or like that you can

00:30:09.940 identify that you think are worth modeling about this person he's put thought and effort into this

00:30:15.260 and he's writing this you know maybe a decade after antoninus has died but he's still kind of

00:30:22.240 modeling this guy he thinks he's the perfect emperor basically and he wants to be like him but also in

00:30:27.900 terms of roman rhetoric i in all honesty everything that he says about antoninus sounds glaringly like

00:30:35.580 in brackets after it he's writing unlike hadrian like he chooses things to say that all clearly sound

00:30:43.160 like digs at hadrian to me and he sees this guy's the complete opposite of what hadrian was and it

00:30:50.080 looks like that passage is engineered in that way to be honest so absolutely he thinks i've got this

00:30:55.840 template for how to be a good emperor so the interesting question is why doesn't marcus think

00:31:01.080 we'll just go out and copy what he did then what's the problem well i think the clue is that marcus says

00:31:07.520 that he has problems with his temper and in the meditations it's hard to pick out themes because

00:31:13.600 there are themes in it but most of the themes just come from stoic philosophy right it's hard to say

00:31:18.840 that they tell as much about marcus's character but one of the things he does focus on is his

00:31:24.520 frustration with other people around him and so i think marcus hated the courtiers and senators he thought

00:31:34.080 they were a bunch of hypocrites they were disloyal they were conniving you know kind of like we're

00:31:39.600 used to seeing in dramas historical dramas and stuff like that a bunch of backstabbers and stuff

00:31:44.640 it's kind of how it comes across and so marcus thinks i wish i was more like antoninus but i keep

00:31:49.460 getting annoyed with these guys and disillusioned with them so i need to kind of manage that somehow

00:31:54.900 and so he turns to stoicism as a methodology for helping him to become more like his adopted father

00:32:02.520 who he views as the sort of perfect emperor yeah when you read the meditations you can see

00:32:07.000 what marcus's problems are because they keep coming it's like any journal like i look at my journals

00:32:11.960 and i can see well it's like the same issue over and over again and you see with marcus it's basically

00:32:17.020 like ah just people are really annoying you have to accept that people are annoying get used to it and

00:32:21.520 move on with your life so what doesn't he say he like seneca for example talks about greed

00:32:26.640 you're right um seneca is more of a social climber marcus says very little about greed

00:32:32.040 in the meditations like it doesn't really figure as a problem for him like many aristocrats he was

00:32:38.340 born into wealth he didn't have to grasp after it as it were so he doesn't think about money that much

00:32:43.540 he's much more concerned about reputation and about getting irritated anger is his big problem yeah

00:32:51.700 you talk about this dream that marcus had when he learned that he had been adopted by antoninus

00:32:56.540 and would basically he knew like i'm going to be the next emperor i thought this dream was really

00:33:00.860 interesting particularly in relation to this idea of shoulders and manliness in roman culture can you

00:33:07.420 talk about that dream he has this dream that he has shoulders of ivory on the day that he's told

00:33:13.380 that he's being adopted into the imperial family so he's adopted by antoninus but hadrian legally

00:33:18.360 adopted him by the way as his grandson as well so he's completely adopted into the into the imperial

00:33:25.240 family and like he doesn't want to be emperor he's reluctant to become emperor we're told and he

00:33:29.820 has this dream that his arms have turned to ivory and his shoulders have turned to ivory and he's

00:33:36.160 freaked out in the dream and he behaves as if he thinks well they're like doll's arms or something

00:33:41.680 they're not going to work so he sees a heavy object in the dream and picks it up we're not told what the

00:33:46.500 object is and he finds that he can lift it easily like he's got superpowers he's much stronger

00:33:52.160 right and that's reported by several ancient texts but funnily enough they don't offer any

00:33:57.620 interpretation of it so my interpretation is that in the dream what we can safely say is that something

00:34:04.840 that seems like a weakness to him turns out to his surprise to be a strength and i think it's his love

00:34:12.160 of philosophy funnily enough that was initially perceived by other romans as making him unsuitable

00:34:19.260 to be an emperor he's a dork he's a nerd he's kind of bookish and in this dream he thinks maybe

00:34:26.220 the thing that other people see is a weakness and maybe i had assumed was a weakness maybe i wanted to

00:34:31.840 be more like an academic than a ruler an emperor maybe it actually allows me to become a good emperor

00:34:39.440 because it gives me a bunch of tools for self-improvement that would allow me to become more

00:34:43.640 like antoninus you know maybe i could be the philosopher king that plato writes about and

00:34:49.800 epictetus who marcus idolized mentions many times this metaphor of an athlete's shoulders so he says

00:34:57.960 philosophy shouldn't be a bookish academic subject he said don't tell me how many books you've read

00:35:03.680 show me evidence that your character has improved from your daily life he says that would be like

00:35:08.200 someone taking you and showing you the weights and equipment that's in their gym he said no show

00:35:12.800 me that you've developed your shoulders you've been using the equipment and you've transformed your

00:35:16.980 body so this metaphor of having strong athletic shoulders from wrestling and stuff in greek and

00:35:23.680 roman society was meant to be a metaphor for evidence that you've actually done the training

00:35:28.960 so having shoulders of ivory in the dream i think symbolizes marcus saying he's actually

00:35:35.540 internalized his philosophy and transformed his character on the basis of it epic like epictetus

00:35:40.660 saying show me your shoulders show me the evidence that you've become a real stoic i love that so up

00:35:46.660 to this point in marcus's young life he had some stoic training formal stoic training but not much

00:35:53.180 um it was mainly he's learning by example um yeah and but that changed when he became the student of a

00:35:59.900 guy named rusticus yeah why was rusticus marcus's most important tutor for stoicism it's a really

00:36:06.700 good question because he had stoic tutors before that he had a famous stoic tutor called apollonius

00:36:12.360 of chalcedon who came from athens to teach him and he was a guy that marcus admired but i mean now

00:36:19.560 we're really scraping together like fragments of biographical evidence frontal marcus's rhetoric

00:36:25.580 and a letter to him makes fun of the stoic the stoic philosophy classes he was attending and he

00:36:31.460 says like they're really dry and academic you just sit there staring at the window yawning studying

00:36:35.740 boring logic and stuff like that they're completely theoretical there's no homework at all and we might

00:36:41.040 think that's the opposite of what stoicism is normally like but it may be that marcus's early stoic

00:36:46.940 tutors were more into theory and this guy rusticus comes along now he's not greek he's roman not only

00:36:54.760 that he's an elite roman he's a very important statesman he's a roman general he probably had

00:37:03.180 just come back around the time he became marcus's tutor the the date the chronology suggests he must

00:37:08.720 have just come back from fighting in a war in armenia where he would have been a general under the

00:37:15.520 command of the pro consul the senior general a guy called arian who was the student of epictetus

00:37:24.020 who wrote the discourses and handbook of epictetus he transcribed them so he was serving under a famous

00:37:31.160 stoic and military commander and he comes back and gives marcus a copy of epictetus's discourses

00:37:37.720 and marcus clearly thinks this is one of the most important moments in his life now one reason that might

00:37:43.180 be we think oh that's really cool this guy gave him a copy of the discourses and maybe this guy had

00:37:47.280 even met epictetus maybe this guy rusticus like probably knew epictetus's student really well

00:37:53.880 and probably got the discourses straight from the horse's mouth straight from the guy that transcribed

00:37:58.580 them but why else would that be so important now there's a clue arian in the preface to the

00:38:05.740 discourses said that they were meant to be circulated in private and they were leaked he didn't intend

00:38:12.280 them ever to be published he says they were only intended for close circle of friends so marcus had

00:38:18.160 never met epictetus epictetus was living in greece and he he probably yearned to meet him he probably

00:38:23.560 felt he'd missed out on this kind of rock star of philosophy the guy's died i'm never going to see

00:38:28.280 him now and he never wrote anything and then this general turns up who'd been fighting in the east

00:38:34.200 and says uh imagine there's a band that you really want to see but you've never seen them live

00:38:39.680 and then someone turns up with a load of bootleg recordings of them and just hands them to you

00:38:44.060 when you're a teenage boy how amazing that would be right maybe marcus thought there were no books

00:38:49.340 from epictetus rusticus says here's a whole here's eight volumes transcribed from his lessons so it's

00:38:55.780 no wonder that marcus became obsessed with epictetus's teachings and then also what rusticus did as you said

00:39:02.780 marcus's earlier stoic tutors probably into stoic you know metaphysics and things like that

00:39:09.620 but rusticus really hit home this idea that stoicism is actually medicine for the soul it's

00:39:15.980 a type of therapy tell us about that idea yeah he says so clear as crystal in the meditations marcus

00:39:21.840 says what i got from rusticus was the idea that stoicism is about correcting your character and also

00:39:28.000 he says therapeia in greek right there in black and white the greek word for therapy but it couldn't

00:39:33.820 be clearer and we know that the stoics wrote books on psychotherapy they had a famous book called

00:39:39.040 on therapeutics written by chris ipas the great scholar of the early store and we have seneca's

00:39:45.480 on anger today it's a book on stoic psychotherapy the stoics were doing psychotherapy like clearly

00:39:51.760 a form of cognitive therapy and he marcus says that's what i got from rusticus now again the

00:39:56.360 implication is he didn't get that from his earlier stoic tutors what's the point in saying i got it from

00:40:01.460 rusticus unless he hadn't got it prior to that so rusticus came along and said stoicism isn't a theory

00:40:07.960 it's a practice it's a way of life and that's what epictetus taught read epictetus and we have to

00:40:15.420 assume if rusticus is giving him epictetus's writings rusticus is probably also teaching him

00:40:20.340 the same stuff they probably discussed the discourses together here's a bit of trivia by the way

00:40:25.200 we have four volumes of transcripts from epictetus's lecture it's called discourses

00:40:31.960 but the ancient sources tell us there were originally eight volumes so half of them are missing

00:40:37.720 but marcus quotes from the discourses we have and also quotes things that epictetus said that we don't

00:40:46.980 have so it's quite likely that marcus had read the missing four volumes of epictetus's discourses he

00:40:53.920 probably knows a lot more about epictetus than we do and you mentioned some of the fragments we have

00:41:00.020 from marcus's writings is that marcus would sometimes he talked about getting frustrated

00:41:05.780 with rusticus and i think it's because rusticus challenged marcus on the problems that marcus

00:41:12.260 had and you mentioned them earlier one was anger but another one was vanity and i imagine they had

00:41:18.180 these sessions where he used stoic plain speaking and said marcus i was watching you in the senate the

00:41:24.160 other day and i saw you do this what's going on there he called him out on his character flaws

00:41:30.060 as a teenager can you imagine and it's a marcus said that the person that he got most angry with

00:41:36.560 is his best friend and his mentor i mean that's really cool like who's the person that upsets you

00:41:43.260 the most in life that kind of irritates you the most my mentor why because he's always challenging me

00:41:49.000 he's always pushing me marcus loved this guy marcus had a statuette of rusticus in his personal shrine

00:41:56.260 like he would sit and pray and pour libations and meditate in front of a statue of rusticus he loved

00:42:03.820 this guy but he also got really angry so you could say he had a kind of love-hate relationship with him

00:42:08.520 because this guy pushed him and challenged him and that's exactly what epictetus says philosophy is

00:42:13.920 supposed to be like epictetus says you go to a sophist like fronto if you want to get flattered

00:42:19.920 if you want your ego massaged go and see herodes atticus but if you go and see a philosopher they're

00:42:25.500 going to challenge you they're going to criticize you and question you because it's like going to see

00:42:30.740 the dentist or the doctor like therapy is sometimes painful it's challenging you're going to be confronted

00:42:38.160 with your weaknesses but if you've got the balls you've got the tolerance the integrity to put

00:42:45.440 yourself through that you're going to come out the other side of it much stronger okay so marcus

00:42:50.700 becomes the emperor becomes a co-emperor with his adoptive brother and he had some issues with him

00:42:55.060 but let's talk about his reign as emperor because as soon as he becomes emperor he faces a bunch of

00:43:02.280 challenges where his stoicism is put to the test the tiber river flooded it created a natural

00:43:07.920 disaster in rome disease destroyed buildings shortly after that a military invasion began

00:43:13.800 with the parthians and then there was a plague that hit rome how did marcus's stoicism help him

00:43:21.500 navigate these problems yeah you missed out the famine and the oh yeah famine earthquakes everything

00:43:26.360 yeah i mean even the roman historians say it seems like you know the gods waited for the stoic to take

00:43:33.760 the throne and then they tested him by throwing everything they could at him and how did his

00:43:39.220 stoicism help him well you could say the meditations tells us exactly how his stoicism helped him it's

00:43:46.440 like a record of what he was doing in order to cope with the pandemic that he faced which was horrific

00:43:54.620 and you know far worse than the one that we've been through and you know with the political intrigue and

00:44:01.220 the wars that he's facing the meditations is a document of that you know and what he does i'll

00:44:07.420 sum it up for because i want to give your listeners a few takeaways he would distinguish between what's

00:44:12.740 under his control and what isn't very carefully he would take more responsibility for his own emotions

00:44:18.880 and he would train himself to contemplate things within their wider context and he tried to live

00:44:25.560 consistently in accord with reason in terms of the way that he handled the challenges that he faced

00:44:30.660 so those are very that's a kind of very quick summary of some of the stoic strategies that we see

00:44:35.220 him using over and over again in order to deal with these incredible challenges that he's facing

00:44:40.680 and during these challenges as emperor this is when he started actually writing the meditations correct

00:44:45.860 i i mean long story short there's a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests that he wrote it

00:44:53.600 between round about 170 and 175 ad so during the plague basically and particularly though during the

00:45:05.580 germanic war the marcomanic war um and so this was the journal i mean this again meditations uh it's a

00:45:14.200 book that we all read but they originally it was originally a private journal and marcus basically used it

00:45:20.560 as you said maybe a substitute father figure or maybe a substitute rusticus yeah to challenge

00:45:26.300 himself he would like there's this idea in stoic philosophy you present the problem and then you

00:45:31.260 dialogue over it and that's what he does in the uh his meditations like here's this problem people are

00:45:36.420 annoying how am i gonna overcome this yeah it's a self-improvement workbook if you like i mean it

00:45:43.820 clearly is he literally says over and over again you know every day contemplate this he's talking about

00:45:50.240 uh regular contemplative practices that he's using and he's mentoring himself because the other thing

00:45:57.420 that had probably just happened if we look at the chronology rusticus had just died possibly of the plague

00:46:03.960 like certainly rusticus died round about the time that marcus started writing the meditations

00:46:08.580 so it looks like he now is thinking i don't have a mentor anymore so i'm gonna have to start

00:46:15.920 becoming my own therapist becoming my own mentor by writing this book that can kind of serve as a

00:46:22.780 reminder for me and it's also where is all the content coming from like some of it is paraphrased

00:46:28.700 or quoted from books that he's reading some of it might be this is total speculation but some of it

00:46:34.840 might be him remembering conversations that he's had with rusticus and and other stoic mentors that he

00:46:40.440 are there any takeaways we can take from marcus's journaling because i've journaled before and one

00:46:46.660 thing i noticed the way i journaled it wasn't very effective because what i would do i just ended up

00:46:51.300 ruminating like if you read my journals i just talk about the same problems over and over again

00:46:55.340 yeah and i actually that's why i stopped doing it because like this isn't doing anything for me

00:46:59.600 yeah is there anything we can learn from marcus and maybe from your own practice as a cognitive behavior

00:47:04.340 psychotherapist i had a journal so it's more effective and we don't just

00:47:08.340 carve about our problems all the time i think it's a really good observation journaling is hit and miss

00:47:12.840 we now know particularly in modern therapy the kind of writing exercises don't work that well for

00:47:20.320 certain personality types so there are many clients that are over thinkers if you like prone to what

00:47:26.800 we call rumination in therapy and there's particular mental health problems that are associated with

00:47:31.580 that generalized anxiety disorder to some extent depression some of those clients if you give them

00:47:37.460 forms to fill out in cbt they'll come back the next week with a huge pile of papers that they've

00:47:42.680 been scribbling notes on right so that's what it looks like in practice you go okay like writing

00:47:48.040 stuff down has become a symptom rather than a solution in this case so what marcus does is he tries to be

00:47:53.900 concise he's always he actually says this like he's trying to abbreviate um he's trying to get to the

00:48:00.400 the essence of things frontal in his letters tells marcus to do this he says you need to take the

00:48:07.400 insights from philosophy and practice rephrasing them in ways that are more powerful to try and get

00:48:15.140 exactly the right word to capture the essence of the idea so marcus is quite focused really in the

00:48:22.560 meditations on a handful like you know half a dozen key ideas so you could say it's repetitive

00:48:29.000 but he's digging deeper each time he's trying to really capture the essence of these ideas

00:48:35.040 in language that just hits the nail on the head for him and part of what's going on there is he wants

00:48:40.400 those ideas to really penetrate his soul so he says your soul needs to become dyed with these ideas so

00:48:47.020 he's got the idea it's not just about kind of having a conversation and then forgetting about it

00:48:50.960 you've got to get to the core of the powerful idea and find a way to make it really penetrate

00:48:57.440 into your character so you permanently remember it and he thinks the key is to keep coming back and

00:49:03.400 digging deeper each time and finding ways to phrase it more effectively more accurately

00:49:08.660 i love that well donald this has been a great conversation uh where can people go to learn

00:49:13.260 more about the book in your work well the book they can find from all good booksellers if they want

00:49:18.080 to fight i mean best place to find me these days is on substack i love me some substack so if they want

00:49:23.160 to look me up there they'll find all my videos and podcasts and things that i do they are and also

00:49:27.880 i'm a founding member of an organization called modern stoicism they might want to check out if

00:49:32.360 they're interested in stoicism the website's just modern stoicism.com and i'm also the founder and

00:49:37.400 president of a non-profit based in greece called the plato's academy center which is plato's academy

00:49:44.340 center plato's academy.org if people want to to look that up and find out about the work that we're

00:49:50.140 doing in greece fantastic well donald robertson thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thanks

00:49:54.380 absolutely likewise been a pleasure my guest today was donald robertson he's the author of the book

00:49:59.880 marcus aurelius the stoic emperor it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere make sure

00:50:04.680 to check out donald's substack at donaldrobertson.substack.com also check out our show notes

00:50:09.480 at aom.is slash marcus we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

00:50:14.040 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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00:50:49.520 mckay reminding you to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard into action

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The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

The Making of a Stoic Emperor

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