How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: Insights with Donald Robertson

Donald Robertson is one of the people who has done most to bring Stoicism into the modern world, partly because he comes at it as a clinical psychologist who sees how closely it tracks cognitive therapy. His book "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" is part biography of Marcus Aurelius, part practical guide, and as he writes, the Stoics can teach you "how to face adversity, how to conquer anger within yourself, moderate your desires" and a good deal more.

This is our second conversation, and we go deep on Marcus: the foundations of his Stoicism, the part compassion played in how he ruled, the long fight between Stoic and Sophistic thinking, the people who shaped him, and his own journaling habit. We also get into the most common ways people get Stoicism wrong, and how it speaks to distinctly modern problems.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Donald wrote a book called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, and this episode we go into that book and figure out really how we can be a bit more like Marcus Aurelius in our own lives. We discuss things such as the stoic training of Marcus Aurelius, the role of compassion in his life, the battle between Stoicism and Sophism, the biggest influences on Marcus's stoic development, how Marcus journaled and reflected on his day, and how we can emulate him, the biggest mistakes and misconceptions we all make when practicing Stoicism. We look at the stoic view of pornography and other modern vices. Donald answers if Stoics ever see themselves as victims of bad situations. We look at the incredible emphasis and techniques that Marcus used to manage his anger. We look at the hardships that beset his life, the level of plagiarism found in stoic text, the interplay of Western philosophy and psychedelics, mysticism and stoicism, and just it has more. If you've ever read Meditations, you like Stoicism, you like philosophy. This is really a packed interview, and I recommend keeping a notebook handy like to present to you Donald Robertson. So for this podcast, I really want to talk to you specifically about the book and Marcus Aurelius rather than like an overall stoic episode, which we kind of did on our first our first conversation. Yeah. So I want to just start like by making Marcus Aurelius kind of like a real person for people. Because I think you did such a good job of this in your book, where he felt like a living person instead of just a statue. That's how I kind of thought of him before, like a statue. But he also was he kept his impressiveness as well as I read your book. So maybe you could just describe what the average day might have looked like for Marcus Aurelius during the time that he wrote his book, Meditations.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Well, during the time that he was writing the meditations, I mean it's interesting, we don't know 100% for certain exactly when he wrote it, but we've got some clues. So without kind of boring you with the reconstruction of that, he probably wrote it, I think, between somewhere between 170 and 175 AD, when he would have been at various legionary fortresses along the northern frontier of the Roman Empire during the first Marcomanic War. So he was commanding the troops at that time, we believe. And he he seems to say that at various points in the book. He mentions at one point that he's writing it at Carnuntum, which is actually the place in Austria I visited recently. There's a huge archaeological park there, the ruins of what was once a major Roman legionary fortress where Marcus stationed himself for some of the war, perhaps for much of the first Marcomanic War. So he would have been in his role as emperor and also as commander-in-chief, as a general overseeing mainly these these military camps where the legions were based. And he would have been involved with the military and he would have been overseeing the overall strategy of the war. But I think when we talk about that, we kind of imagine a lot of battles taking place, which is what happened. But I think Marcus would have also been involved a lot of the time in diplomacy, and so he would have been writing a lot of letters and speeches, he would have been involved in a lot of complex negotiations with the many different tribes that the Romans were fighting along the Danube. And really, there was a Marcus was something of a workaholic and very much involved in the administration of the Roman Empire, so as well as kind of the battles, there was a lot of administrative stuff, a lot of legal stuff, um, a lot of diplomatic stuff that he would be engaged in.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Right, okay. Uh, how accurate is you know the film Gladiator, how accurate is that depiction of Marcus Aurelius?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Oh, not very accurate. Uh like I mean, you know, we all love it, right? Who doesn't like Gladiator? But um, and you know, in what sense, you know, maybe it gives a maybe it gives a kind of glimpse of of what his character might have been like, um, and there's there's kind of allusions to the truth. Um, but I mean the main thing is that Commodus in the movie is his successor and murders Marcus Aurelius in order to take power. Um, because in the movie Richard Harris, Marcus Aurelius says, I think that he's gonna appoint Maximus, Russell Crowe, instead, as an interim ruler to return to a republic, and that's largely fictional, though there's kind of even in that like a little glimmer of truth. Maximus's character is a little bit like um Marx Aurelius' uh son-in-law, Pompeianus, one of his senior generals, and he was appointed to kind of uh be a mentor or supervisor to Commodus. Um, but Commodus was already emperor when Marcus Aurelius died. In fact, he'd been emperor for about three years, um, and so Marcus instigated at the beginning of his reign this thing where he ruled jointly. For the first time in the history of the Roman Empire, they had co-emperors, and he ruled alongside his adoptive brother Lucius Verus at first, and Lucius Verus would have therefore been seen as Marcus's likely successor in a sense, um, because he was about nine years younger than him, so they was expected to outlive him, he was a lot healthier, but he died prematurely, perhaps from the plague. And so later, Marcus then appointed Commodus as co-emperor, and so they were already ruling together for several years before Marcus died, and Marcus is unlikely to have been murdered, he's much more likely to have died from the various ailments that he he suffered from or from the plague.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

So was Commodus uh Marcus's only son?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

No, he had actually thirteen children altogether. Um if I remember rightly, he had about four or five sons, and we don't we're not 100% sure exactly how many children he had, actually. Some of them probably died very young, but it was believed he had about thirteen. And Commodus was his only surviving son, though. Uh and Commodus actually was appointed when he was very young. I think Commodus was about four or five when he was appointed Caesar, so the official successor. Um and that's that's surprising. Um, and it's probably because it was during the Marcomanic War, and it seems likely that the Senate wanted Marcus to appoint a successor early on to try and stabilize the empire and reduce the the risk of civil wars and arguments over the succession and stuff. Um but Marcus also appointed his other one of his other sons, Marcus Anias Verus, who was a bit younger than Commodus, I think he was a year younger than Commodus, as Caesar. So there were two boys who were officially designated as his successor, but the younger one also died prematurely, leaving Commodus as the only successor. And so actually, Marcus seems to have made various shifting arrangements throughout his reign to deal with his succession. Um often he was thwarted by circumstances and his plans.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

One might imagine that being the son of Marcus Aurelius, that he would have passed on his wisdom. Uh, but you you write in your book that Commodus's character was a little bit questionable. Um you elaborate on that.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah, I mean, as far as we know, Commodus was a bad ruler, and you the thing we have to be a little bit wary of is the Roman histories tend to not be even-handed. Um, they usually kind of go to one extreme or the other. So if they like you, they really like you, if they don't like you, they'll really kind of ridicule you. So Marcus Aurelius maybe is a bit idealised, Commodus maybe seems like he's being a little bit demonized because they've, you know, like they decided that they they didn't like him as a ruler, so they really pour scorn on him. But it seems that he he was a problematic ruler. He wasn't like Marcus Aurelius, he he was probably expected to live up to that example, and he didn't. He seems to have overturned some of the policies that his father uh had in place. He abandoned the the northern frontier, for example, and bribed the enemy tribes. So he went for a quick fix solution, whereas Marcus was more interested in the long-term peace and securing that through careful negotiation. Um, and Commodus went back to Rome to live really um to secure your status as the emperor. I I believe you kind of need the support of the Senate or of the military or of the populace at Rome. And and Commodus seems like he blew the support that he had from the military by abandoning the northern campaign. And I think he painted himself in a corner where he then really had to become popular with the people of Rome, and the way to do that is by throwing lots of parties basically, you know, throwing money at public celebrations and stuff, and the emperor then becomes a bit like a celebrity. And I think Marcus would have been horror horrified by that, you know, that that's kind of the opposite, you know, completely flies in the face of the values of stoicism. It's all about kind of surface and appearance rather than actually being a good ruler. And one thing we're told, I think it's Herodian that says this, maybe I feel like Cassius Dio perhaps and um says something similar. We sometimes think of Commodus looking gladiator, he seems like quite a vile, kind of corrupt figure. He's played by Whackey Phoenix, and uh he plays him as quite a sinister character. But actually, the histories say that he it was more like he was a bit naive and gullible, and he was easily swayed by various courtiers that were around him, kind of trying to manipulate him and stuff. So he's portrayed more as a kind of gullible figure who's gradually corrupted over time.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Okay. Well, what was Marcus Aurelius like as a as a child, as a teenager? Did he go through any kind of major transformation uh into the person that we now think of him as?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Yeah, I mean I think that's one of the things that comes out of the histories. So we have various references to Marcus. You know, one of the reasons I chose to write about him is we know more about him than any other stoic because he was um like very powerful and very famous. So we have histories by Herodian, Cassius Dio, and the Historia Augusta, and then we've got other various bits and pieces that tell us about him. But also the meditations, although in some ways doesn't say a lot of specific stuff about his life, although it's in a sense a per quite a personal uh series of reflections. The first book of the meditations, the first chapter, is all about his uh family members and teachers, and so that gives us a lot of interesting details about his relationships and particularly his childhood and adolescence. So we can re-kind it what it says in there actually is kept quite consistent with what's said in the histories about his childhood and education. So we can kind of paint this picture of a guy, and it looks like he is being implied that he went through certain transformations. And so he came from a very privileged background, but there seems to have been a bit of a clash between his family and the life at court, particularly under Hadrian. So the Emperor Hadrian was kind of Marcus's well, he became Marcus's adoptive grandfather, and it was really Hadrian that decided that Marcus was going to become emperor one day. However, he had to appoint an interim emperor to succeed him because Marcus was only a young boy when Hadrian died, and so Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian, and he was became Marcus' adoptive father, because Marcus's real father died when he was very young. We believe he died when he was about three or four years old, and so he was brought up by his father, and his mother, his paternal grandfather, um, and then subsequently by uh Antoninus, uh, who went on to become the emperor after Hadrian. And so Marx's life changed a lot, right? He he started off uh as this boy who had lost his father, being brought up by um a very wealthy uh Roman matriarch, um, his his mother owned a brick and tile factory outside Rome, came from a very wealthy and powerful family, and his grandfather was a very accomplished Roman statesman and a friend of Hadrian, so a powerful family, but they had very old-fashioned Roman values, um, and so they valued simplicity and plain speaking. They had values, particularly his mother, that seemed to have been pretty consistent with the values of Stoicism. And his mother was an educated woman, and it it's implied by Marcus that she was friends with a guy called Junius Rusticus, who went on to become Marcus's main Stoic teacher. So we could speculate it may be that it was partly Marcus's mother who pointed him in the direction of Stoicism. It seems like she may have known some Stoics, and perhaps it was partly her idea that these men would go on to become her son's mentors and teachers. And she certainly is described as having similar values to the Stoics, although not necessarily a student of philosophy herself. And then Marcus was kind of brought into the court of Hadrian, and Hadrian was a much more pretentious and fickle character. Um he was uh kind of more in line with the culture of the second sophistic. Um the you know the the guys, the intellectuals that Hadrian was interested in were more kind of showy, they gave elaborate speeches and stuff like that, it was more about appearances, and and this didn't really sit comfortably with Marcus. So Marcus had to be educated in rhetoric by men who were essentially uh Roman uh era Stoics, uh Herodes Atticus and Marcus Cornelius Fronto, who were the two leading Greek and Latin rhetoricians of his day, um, two of the leading teachers in the known world. And so they educated Marcus uh in the sophisticated use of language, um, in Greek and Roman culture, um, and he there was a contest, there always has been a contest, all the way back to Socrates, between uh sophists or rhetoricians and philosophers. So the sophists place much more value on the appearance of sophistication and culture, on persuasion, on impressing crowds and literally winning as much applause as possible, kind of being a celebrity, making a good positive impression. Whereas the philosophers were more concerned with getting to the truth and uh you know dealing with genuine honesty and wisdom. So philosophers tend to prefer plain speaking and simplicity and conciseness, and the sophists tend to prefer more elaborative, more emotional, more manipulative ways of communicating. And Marcus was kind of initially tempted by that, but gradually he and it seems to have been a slow process, he was gradually won over to dedicate himself more fully to Stoicism, and he was persuaded to do that by Junius Rusticus, seemingly his mother's friend, who became his right-hand man at Rome. Junius Rusticus, when Marcus became emperor, um he was appointed uh urban prefect, so he would have been in charge of the administration of the city of Rome. And uh my belief, incidentally, is that Marcus, after he left Rome to go and command the troops in Austria and uh uh in the Balkans, he he probably continued to write letters to his stoic teachers back home in Rome. And it's believed, we're not really sure about this, but it's believed the best estimate is that Junius Rustic has died around 170 AD, which is round about the time we believe that Marcus started writing the meditations. So a neat interpretation, although there's a bit of speculation involved here, would be that this guy had been studying philosophy and had these great philosopher mentors, suddenly had to leave home for the first time and go to this foreign land and uh you know live in a military camp. He probably carried on writing letters to his stoic teachers and mentors, and then when his main mentor died, perhaps he carried on writing, but this time to himself, taking over the role of becoming his own therapist, his own mentor in the absence of Rusticus following the loss of his most important teacher. And that's where the meditations comes from, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

So, yeah, the the I I wanted to ask you about the writing style of the meditations. Um because typically when people journal, you know, journaling is a really great practice. I I really find a lot of value in it. I kind of just like analyze certain events or maybe just give like a the skeleton of what's happened. But Marcus Aurelius' style of journaling is is quite unusual in meditations. Uh, what do you think he was like thinking and what was his aim when he was writing?

SPEAKER_00 18:03

I think this is probably a fairly sort of established you know style of writing that he's engaged in. He's trying to be concise because that's very much the Stoic style, influenced by the laconic style of speech of the Spartans. That's where this kind of original idea came from. And funnily enough, we know that the word laconic, which we use today to mean concise and pithy, comes from Laconia, the region in which Sparta was located. So that that's a way of speaking that was associated with the Spartans, and throughout Greek history and Roman history, that that's where this idea came from, and then it kind of became associated in a way with the Stoics. So Marcus was kind of trying to aim for this brevity in his own thinking and speech, and so we see in the meditations lots of these short aphorisms trying to capture key philosophical points, you know, in a couple of sentences, and by the way, in a couple of places, he tries to capture uh philosophical maxims even in just a couple of words, like he's condensing things down almost to a symbolic level, just into a couple of words sometimes. At one point, for example, he says the cosmos change uh life opinion, like and he's actually alluding in that that sentence, that little saying to the philosophies of Epictetus and Heraclitus. He's doing it in a very kind of compressed manner. We know this by the way, because Cicero, in a speech that survives called Pro Marino, is talking about the Stoic Cato the Younger, and he says your lot imitate the way of speaking of the Spartans. So we have Cicero explicitly stating Stoics to him sound like Spartans, they speak laconically.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

And when Marcus was was writing, you say that he was trying to be his own therapist, uh, and in the book you you say that he might have been almost having imaginary conversations with his Stoicism teacher.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Yeah, um I mean I should say by the way, sometimes people kind of bulk at the idea of therapy, but usually that's if they they haven't really got far into the early um stoic literature because the Stoics actually call what they do therapy. Um, Chris Ipus wrote a book called On Therapeutics, and in fact it was a very common um idiom in ancient Greek to refer to philosophy as a medicine of the mind or a therapy of the mind or psyche, so they virtually call it psychotherapy, they use the medical metaphor or medical model to describe philosophy. And actually, at the beginning of the meditations, Marcus straight up explicitly says that Junius Rusticus taught him that he required therapia or therapy for his character. So we know that Rusticus was doing a kind of stoic therapy with him because he actually straight up explicitly says that in the meditations. Um and the so the the the process that that went through, um we don't have a clear description of it, but actually we have a book by Galen who wasn't a stoic but had studied the Stoics called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul's Passions. And in that book, Galen says he's drawing on Chrysopus and Xeno, and he describes a kind of process of philosophical mentoring or therapy that sounds like it could be the the type of relationship that that Marcus had with Rusticus.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

You you said in the book, which I found quite astounding, that roughly 1% or less than 1% of Stoicism writings have survived.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

That's a very rough estimate, by the way. But wait funnily enough, it was John Sellers, who you you might be familiar with, he's a a professor of philosophy at um King's College in London, and he's part of our modern stoicism team. I remember I had a conversation with him once, and I said, John, like how how much of this literature, you know, if you had to put a figure on it, and off the top of his head, he said, I don't know, like probably less than one percent. And I would say it's a very kind of rough approximation. That's like that sounds about right to me.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Do you think that uh like because so much of it hasn't survived that we Are missing significant aspects of this philosophy, or do you think that we've done a pretty good job of mapping it together well?

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Well, you know, let me kind of give a sort of qualified response to that. Common sense, like, tells me that if we're missing that much of it, there must be some pretty significant things that we we just don't know about. You know, that there's bound to be some stuff that would surprise us or that would be a revelation to us. And on the other hand, the we do have a reasonable you know body of literature that survives. We've got and and it's quite diverse as well. So we we have these personal reflections of Marcus, we have transcriptions of uh di discussions with students from Epictetus, we have a summary of key points from Epictetus written down by Ariane and edited by him in the Encaridian, and then we have these letters uh from Seneca addressed to Lucilius and various other people, and a kind of mentoring sort of relationship, a consolation type relationship in some cases. So we've got these sort of different perspectives on stoicism, and they're pretty consistent, like you know, and the other fragments and bits and pieces and commentaries that we have are also fairly consistent as well, and there's some kind of replication and overlap between them. So that gives us a bit of reassurance that we're probably kind of privy to some of the main points in the in the philosophy. Like Seneca says a lot of things that confirm what you would take the key elements of Stoicism to be by reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius as well, they're clearly describing the same philosophy. So, you know, we we probably know most of the fundamentals of it. We can recognise Stoicism when we see it, that's for sure. Um, but there must be other things that we're missing, and then actually the other thing that's quite strange about this is that because classical authors often don't they don't you they don't use quotation marks, right? And they they don't normally have a formal means of citation. Um so in many cases they'll quote other authors and we can't tell that it's a quotation. Like they might say, as Heraclitus once said, you know, but usually they'll just kind of quote other authors and not even flag up that it's a quote at all. And we we can see Marcus doing that, sometimes quoting Epictetus, and you know, there may be places where we think Marcus has written a passage, it may be a direct quote from Chris Ipas or from some other unknown stoic author for all we know. For all we know, most of the meditations might be quotes from other authors. Um you know, there's probably I think it's a safe bet that more of that book is either consists of paraphrases or quotations from Epictetus than we currently realise. Because we only have half of Epictetus' discourses, and Marcus quotes from him more than from any other author. And there are bits where he attributes sayings to Epictetus that are not in the surviving discourses. So it looks like Marcus had read all eight of the discourses, including the four lost ones. So there's probably other bits where Marcus is paraphrasing or quoting Epictetus that we don't even recognise.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Wow, it's so it's so cool that there are like these missing books. Um do you think they're gonna show up or do you think they're long gone?

SPEAKER_00 25:50

I I mean, you know, every so often something turns up, right? And uh, you know, the there may be there may be more discoveries, but we've probably exhausted most of what we're we're gonna find. You know, maybe maybe we'll be lucky and some other things will turn up in the future. Um like there are um badly damaged scrolls that are unreadable that contain some some Greek philosophical text that maybe one day technology will uh will allow us to read. Um, so that there's also that possibility. Oh, by the way, as an aside, I'll tell you here's a little obscure bit of trivia for you. I think one of the most famous passages in the meditations, and uh let me know how you feel about this, but it seems to me perhaps the most famous passage in the meditations is the first passage in book two, two point one. And Marcus says every morning when you awaken, tell yourself that you'll meet uh liars, uh meddler, meddlesome people, treacherous people, and so on, and he's preparing himself in advance for for meeting difficult people, and people think of that as kind of reflecting his personality and so on. It's easy when you're reading that to think this is something that Marcus is coming up with, and he's doing a lot of people don't realise there's a passage in Seneca's On Anger that's very similar and uh and written earlier. Now, Marcus had read Seneca, um, there's not much indication that he'd really read his philosophical writings. He may have read political speeches by him, we don't know exactly what, but he never mentions Seneca anywhere in the meditations, and it's also possible that both Seneca and Marcus have read that in another earlier Stoic source. So maybe that they're they're both kind of paraphrasing another unnamed author. Um so again, this this is another oddity about reading the Stoics. You know, it may be sometimes one of them, like Marcus, is quoting Epictetus and we don't realise it, or it may be that they're drawing on some of the books that are just completely lost to us. Um but they they often that creates the illusion that they're being more original than they actually are. And and so, for example, sometimes people will read the meditations and they'll say things like, you know, they think Marcus Aurelius was doing some sort of like psychedelic drugs, or you know, that he was an opium addict or something because he seems kind of spaced out, he's talking about the cosmos and all this. Uh but if you're familiar with the Greek literature, you think, no, he's just reading Greek philosophy, right? He this is the stuff that you'd expect a stoic to be talking about. It's not he's not pulling this out of thin air, it's not a vision that he had last night when he'd taken some mushrooms or something. You know, he he he maybe he did, but he he certainly took some opium. Like we don't know like how much of a quantity he took, um, but he it seems to have been a very small quantity, but it you know he's he's talking about stuff that all Stoics would have talked about, and uh sometimes people say that they think also from reading the meditations that he seems melancholy, he seems depressed, and again I think that's completely false. Um, he talks about death a lot and the impermanence of things, because that's what Stoics talk about, and Seneca and Epictetus talk about these things as well. That's what you would expect him to be writing about, and actually the the lie is given to that by the fact that we also have other stuff that Marcus wrote. A lot of people don't realise this, but we actually have his private correspondence to Fronto. It was found in the 19th century, and uh so we have a bunch of letters that he wrote uh early on in his reign, probably before, well almost certainly before he wrote The Meditations, and uh and so we get a real, much more direct glimpse into Marcus's personality from those letters, and there he comes across as a very easy-going, extremely affectionate, unusually affectionate, good humoured, um, and also very talented man at uh resolving arguments between people, at handling difficult people, as you might expect from someone whose entire life was dedicated to diplomacy. Um we see in his letters with Fronto that his his character and skills as a diplomat are shining through, even in his personal relationships. But he's a happy, affectionate, kind of very friendly man and doesn't come across as at all depressive.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

The I think that's really good to keep in mind uh about the paraphrasing and the quoting when you're reading the Stoics. Um I'm definitely going to keep that in mind. I hadn't thought of it, um, and I'm I'm really curious to read those letters from Marcus Aurelius and see other sides of his personality. I wanted to ask you how, like, because Marcus Aurelius seems very skilled at dealing with difficult people and he and he writes about this as well in meditations. Uh, what kind of tips could we use from Marcus Aurelius in dealing with difficult people in work or relationships?

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Well, you know, funnily enough, I I'll I'll I'll lay I'll give you a little aside about that actually, about his character. That and we you said right at the beginning, you know, that we were kind of humanizing Marcus a little bit more, and um one of the things that Marcus mentions in passing in the meditations is that he had difficulty controlling his temper. So, although sometimes he seems like this kind of saint-like figure, he he's often been described in that way, he says in the meditations that he was worried at times that he was going to lose his temper with people, and he was frightened of the consequences of doing so because he was a very powerful man, and he'd seen people like Hadrian just order executions and stuff like that when he when he lost it with people, how Hadrian descended into paranoia. And so Marcus, I think, looked at that and thought, I don't want to be like that. And the person he says he lost his temper with the most is actually Junius Rusticus again, his stoic mentor, who was maybe being a little bit tough on him when he was an adolescent and kind of challenging. So, one of the major themes of the meditations, it covers many aspects of stoicism, um, and there are several themes that are really quite explicit and dominate throughout the book. Um, one of them is justice and the brotherhood of man, incidentally, but the other one is anger. It's the meditations to some extent is a book about anger. He he talks about sadness and loss, he talks about worry and anxiety, um, but the emotion that he comes back to most frequently is anger. And partly that's a reflection of the times. The Stoics in general were more concerned with anger than with other emotions, which incidentally is different from modern society. Today, self-help literature and psychotherapy focus more on depression and anxiety, and to a lesser extent on anger. But the Stoics thought anger was really the most toxic emotion, was really the main worry that they had in terms of unhealthy passions. And so, but for Marcus, it's partly a stoic thing, but it's partly also a personal thing. This is something he struggled with himself. And in fact, the very first opening sentence of the meditations, he says that he learned from his adoptive grandfather, who we mentioned earlier, uh, who was also called Marcus Aeneas Ferris, he he learned nobility of character and freedom from anger. And that's the first thing he says in the very first sentence of the book. He comments on how he learned about overcoming anger from his adoptive grandfather. And again, uh, this was a contemporary and a friend of Hadrian. Hadrian was notorious for being very, very volatile and having a very bad temper. Um so I think Marcus would have seen the contrast there between these two men. And so throughout the book, he has lots of tips about anger management and dealing with other people when they're provoking or upsetting us. And in one place, and I think this is incredible, if I remember rightly, it's it's book 11, passage 18. Marcus lists ten separate cognitive strategies for managing anger and dealing with difficult people. Now, I think that's particularly remarkable because it's not a kind of ad hoc thing. That list of ten strategies, which he describes very carefully and concisely, he calls them ten gifts from Apollo, the god of healing, incidentally, and also a patron of philosophy. But he returns to selections from that list repeatedly throughout the meditations. So usually he'll there'll be passages where he returns to maybe three or four of those strategies and and talks about them together, but he keeps coming back to selections from that list. It's clearly not a kind of one-off thing, these are clearly strategies that he's very familiar with that he's he's learned very deeply through years of training and and stoicism. This was drummed into him by his stoic teachers, presumably. And uh I the other thing I think is striking about that is if I've got a room full of cognitive therapists uh as an aside, you know, and I asked them, can you brainstorm a list of cognitive strategies for dissipating anger? I think they would struggle to come up with ten off the top of their head that easily. You know, maybe as a group they might, but individually, I think maybe you know, I'd expect an individual therapist to come up with five, six, seven, ten would be pushing it. But Marcus can list ten that he's very familiar with, and to me, I read into that that this is a guy who has spent a lot of time thinking about these techniques and putting them into practice. He's not just theorizing. This sounds like a guy who really has assimilated this information, and so some of them are kind of simple strategies that might seem obvious to us, and then some of those some of them are a little bit more kind of arcane and might seem a little bit peculiar to Stoicism, and some of them are more specific to anger, some are more generic. For example, he says that when someone upsets you, you should tell yourself it's not their behaviour, it's not the things that they say and do that upsets me, but my opinions about it. Now that's one of the most famous general psychological strategies from Epictetus. It's not things that upset us, but our judgments about them. And Marcus is saying he applies that specifically to anger. But he also says that when you're angry with someone, you should pause and ask yourself whether you're not guilty of doing similar things yourself, or whether under certain circumstances, you wouldn't become capable of doing things that are similar to the crimes that you're angry with the other person for committing. And so that's a little bit more specific to anger, perhaps, um, and again, a kind of obvious strategy, but this is one of the things that he thinks it's very important to actually train himself to do systematically. And he also mentions his favourite strategy, is it will seem a little bit more obscure to many people, and this is the one he mentions most often, and it's the one he mentions first in this list. And he says it's to remind himself that humans are naturally social creatures, and that we are designed by the gods, or we might say today evolved to live in communities and families, and that we have natural pro-social skills and abilities, and that our survival depends on forming bonds and communities and cities and uh supporting one another. Human beings left to their own to live like feral animals in the wild are very weak and vulnerable, and uh our strength comes from our ability to develop culture and language and build cities and form armies and bond together for our mutual welfare and defence. And there's a long, long philosophical tradition of emphasising this point, and Marcus frequently reminds himself of it, and because he's a stoic and he believes we should live in accord with nature, part of that is that believing that humans are inherently social creatures, he thinks we have an obligation to do that well, to do it to the best of our ability, to excel in terms of our family and social relationships. And he thinks that we have inborn abilities that allow us to form friendships and communities, and that we should learn to do that as effectively and as wisely as possible as possible, and therefore all the social virtues of stoicism follow on from that.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

I I really want to review that list. Um on the topic topic of anger, there's something that I wanted uh to get your opinion on. So I I read Seneca's book on anger, and I wrote an article of kind of my my attempt to translate it for people. Um and it seemed to me that the first stage of dealing with anger, Seneca suggested, was just to see how destructive it is, you know, just to see it for what it is. And my friend told me that um it might be unhelpful to see any emotion as good or bad, um, and just to kind of be accepting of them all as natural emotions. Oh, interesting. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_00 39:35

Yeah, I disagree with your friend. They so also I would say that or a half, I I I think what's missing from that is a distinction. So I would I half disagree with your friend because I think there's a distinction between two different types of anger that are required to make sense of that, and the Stoics make that distinction, Seneca makes that distinction. I'll come back to that in a moment because I what did I wanted to say something else there about on anger? It slipped my mind for the moment. Um but this is a on anger is very interesting because obviously Seneca goes into this in a lot of detail, and the way he describes managing anger actually is consistent with what Marcus says, but Marcus kind of lists a whole bunch of other techniques, so that you'd think maybe Seneca had exhausted the whole subject of stoic anger management because he writes a lot about it, but there's more in Marcus, and that there's more also what seemed like key points, interesting points. Um, this idea that we should see anger as destructive is definitely one of the main things that Seneca emphasizes, and actually Marcus emphasizes it, probably all Stoics emphasized it, and actually it fits into a kind of wider and more fundamental stoic psychological doctrine or strategy, and that is to say, um, like much like the Stoics say, and remind themselves it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about things, they usually link that to another observation, which is that our passions, such as anger, do us more harm than the things that we're upset about. And this is a so this is a very closely associated general principle that they employ. So Marcus would say one of his strategies is to remind himself that anger our own anger does us more harm typically than the the stuff that we're angry about. Because the stuff we're angry about might be insults or physical losses or injuries, you know, but those are all superficial things as far as Stoics are concerned, whereas anger hurts our very character, like, and so it gets us much deeper than anything else, anything external ever could, because anger penetrates to the very core of our being and damages our character itself. Um so if we look at it that way, as Stoics, it's much more harmful than the things that we're actually angry about, ironically. And so that that ties in with this idea of seeing anger not just as is harmful, but also as from the Stoics' point of view, very unnatural. You notice that Seneca talks a lot about how when people are angry their faces are distorted and ugly. So it's important for the Stoics to say this because they think what is truly natural is beautiful and harmonious, and what's unnatural or against nature is kind of ugly and dissonant, and you know that we kind of sense at some level that there's something malfunctioning or or wrong about it when someone flies into a rage. Now, to make sense out of that, you have to make a distinction which Seneca actually makes, and which Epictetus also carefully makes. Marcus doesn't make it as clearly, but it's implied in some of his passages, and it seems to be therefore something that kind of runs through the whole of Stoicism, and that's the distinction between the propathei and the fully blown passions. So the language of Stoicism tends to confuse people. When the Stoics talk about passions, they're mainly talking about unhealthy emotions and desires, but they're talking about desires that we're already kind of indulging in at a conscious level. Um, so they're not talking about the kind of anxiety that you would have if somebody walked up behind you and bust a balloon and gave you a shock. That's a that's a propathea, um, an involuntary emotional response. That's not the kind of passion that the Stoics are talking about. When the Stoics talk about passions, they're talking more about when you get depressed or you ruminate about something or you worry about something, and it's kind of a conscious process that takes place over time and you're indulging in it, so there's a voluntary component to it, right? And this is actually a distinction that's very important to me because it's fundamental also to modern cognitive theories of emotion. So when you have an emotion like anxiety, you can divide it into stages. And the initial stage is what we often describe as automatic in modern psychology, it's reflex-like. So, you know, someone insults you and you kind of have uh your heart rate goes up, maybe you feel your blood pressure rising, and there's maybe thoughts and images that just pop into your mind automatically, triggered by what they said. But then there's a stage of taking over voluntary involvement with it, or what we call strategic thinking, deliberate thinking, where you start to chew over what they've said, and at that point you can go in one of two directions. You can start to tell yourself, look, they don't really understand what they're talking about. You can say, Who cares what they're saying anyway, they don't really understand me. Or, you know, you can cope with it, you can damp it down, you can reappraise it in ways that would reduce your anger or anxiety, or you could make it worse. You could ramp it up. You could start dwelling on other things that they've said or that they might have said. You could say to yourself, I can't believe it. How dare they? How could they? I'm going to get them back. And you could visualize ways that you could respond aggressively to them. So now we're doing it voluntarily. What started off as an automatic reflex like reaction has kind of been handed over to us, and we are given this raw material, and we can kind of mould it in one direction or another. And if we're not careful, the Stoics believe that we'll we'll carry on moulding it in the negative direction. Our kind of inclination, if we're not careful, is just to keep magnifying it, dwelling on it, drawing it out and exaggerating it. Whereas with training, we can learn to do the opposite. And that's exactly how we think about cognitive therapy. There's this voluntary stage that occurs, and in cognitive therapy, that's where we're intervening and saying, okay, let's just start responding differently to this initial flash of anger or anxiety. So, what your friend said is that it might be unhealthy to view negative emotions as being good or bad. You know, maybe we should just view them with detached indifference. And I would say the Stoics want us to do that in response to propithei, to the involuntary initial flashes of emotion. Seneca talks about those as first movements, and he says they're not even worthy of the name anger. So he makes a kind of terminological distinction. He says, I'm not even going to call this anger, but it's kind of the precursor of anger. Um it it it this is a kind of emotional response that an animal might also have. But he says the type of anger I'm mainly concerned with is specific to human beings, and that happens next when we dwell on things and exaggerate them. Like it's under voluntary control, it involves conscious strategic thinking. So the initial flash of involuntary anger, if someone walks up to you in the street and spits in your face, you're probably going to feel angry, shocked, maybe even anxious, right? But it wouldn't it would be natural to feel a burst of anger and defensiveness in a situation that's confrontational like that. Um you perceive a rule as being transgressed. If they insult you out of the blue, you you know, you're probably going to feel angry. Same as if you strike an animal, you know, it's either going to feel frightened or enraged. So we share this reflex-like response with animals. And we can modify it to some extent over time, but but largely it's an involuntary response. And so for the Stoics, it's an indifferent. And it would be of fundamental importance to their philosophy, therefore, not to view it as bad. To view it as neither good nor bad because it's not up to us. It's something that happens to us rather than something that we are doing. It's an event rather than an activity we're engaged in, therefore it's an external and classed as an indifferent, neither good nor bad, neither helpful nor harmful. It's just like the weather. It's an event in our environment, it just happens to be inside our body, but it's being imposed on us. What happens next is how we respond to it. So if I then think this guy's an effing idiot, how dare he? And I kind of start exaggerating things, drawing them out, I'm using rhetoric to describe it to myself. Now that's something that I could stop doing, I could do differently. And the Stoics would say, now this is a passion, like this is a vice, it's a voluntary response, and what I'm doing is foolish, um, and it's reckless, like maybe cowardly in a sense, and being impatient, I'm being hostile, so I'm exhibiting certain vices, and that's bad, and I should stop doing it. And the Stoics don't have a problem judging that as a vice or as a bad thing because they think insofar as it's happening in the present moment, I could just stop doing it. And the alternative, which would be to exhibit kindness and empathy and patience, they don't have a problem viewing as good because that's something that we could potentially at least attempt to undertake. So they they would say the involuntary part we view with detached indifference, but the voluntary component we distinguish between good and bad ways of responding. And I I think that's not problematic, that's a healthy way actually of parsing things, and it's similar to the way that we we might have clients thinking about it in modern cognitive behavioral therapy.

SPEAKER_01 49:01

I think that's a really important distinction. I hadn't thought of thought of it like that before, but there is a component of anger that you almost create consciously after the initial like first movements of it.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

Oh yeah, people spend hours thinking about it, don't they? Ruminate we call it rumination when people sit and chew over things and dwell on it, and that's voluntary. Um, you know, they could they could stop doing that. And actually, if you were sitting thinking all afternoon about what a uh an asshole your boss was, and how dare he and stuff, um, and I came along and said, Hey, you know, like I I've just won a ticket to go to free to this amazing concert. Do you want to come along with me? Then you know you'd be capable of stopping thinking about what an asshole your boss is and going doing something else instead, because it's under voluntary control. There might be aspects of it that pop into your mind, but you can choose to sit in an armchair and really absorb yourself in it, or you could choose to go and do something else instead and minimize the amount of attention that you're allocating to it, and you could stop the conversation that you're having with yourself about it. So we have to distinguish between the things that you're saying voluntarily, and then these kind of automatic thoughts that just pop into your head, they're going to continue to some extent, but you don't have to continue with the conversation that you're having about them.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

In your book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, I I've read a few books on Stoicism, but the the introductory chapters where you kind of talk about the story of Stoicism and some of the basic Stoic beliefs, I found those to be really informative, and I'd actually recommend if if anyone just wants to get like a really concise but detailed overview of the story of Stoicism and like the Stoic worldview to read that. Um so I really like that, and I I feel like I learned a lot just from those first few chapters on Stoicism. I was wondering if you could explain to people how the Stoics saw the world in terms of good, bad, and indifferent.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Well, the Stoics, and uh I would say as an aside, you know, increasingly as I've studied Stoicism over the years, I've come more and more around to the way of thinking that the Stoics really just saw themselves to a large extent as the successors of Socrates. So a lot of what they're saying is is heavily indebted to Socrates, uh as he's described by Plato and Xenophon, but probably in other authors that are lost to us now. And so like the way that they saw the world is basically in part that they think much human misery is caused, perhaps all real human misery, or most human misery is caused by assigning too much value, good or bad, to things that are not under our direct control. And that we are plagued for some reason by this tendency to get confused about the boundaries of our free will and action. And so we fail to distinguish between the actions that we undertake and the consequences or outcomes of those actions in many cases. So maybe that the actions that we take are voluntary, we can do them or not do them, but the consequences or outcomes of our actions might not be entirely under our control. We might be able to influence them or predict them fairly reliably, but in fact they're never a hundred percent under our control. Even if I choose to open and close my hand, it feels like I've got complete control over that. But if I have uh an accident or a disease or some kind of seizure, I might suddenly find that I'm paralyzed and I can't do it anymore. So the the Stoics think we need to learn to be to make a clearer distinction between where we're actually exercising our leverage and then the things that are merely a consequence of that. Because if we try too hard to control things that aren't under our control, we'll end up inevitably becoming frustrated and confused in life. Whereas if we focus on taking greater responsibility for the things that are directly under our control, we'll become happier, more fulfilled, and more empowered in life. And so the irony is, and I think this is this isn't exactly how I think about uh many problems in modern therapy, particularly anxiety disorders, that people try too hard to struggle with and control things that aren't really under their control, so they're banging their head against a wall often, and often they don't take enough responsibility for things that they actually could change. Um and that you know, we were kind of alluding to this uh a a moment ago when we talked about different types of anger. So people often, when they're anxious, they become really frustrated with uh the fact that their heart is racing, and they might try really hard to relax and force themselves to calm down, and they just perhaps get more uptight and more frustrated because they can't get their heart rate to slow down or they can't get the hands to stop shaking. Because those are things that aren't entirely under their direct control. Whereas at the same time, they might be neglecting the fact that they are choosing to focus attention on their body rather than perhaps focusing their attention outwardly, which might be something that they have voluntary control over. So, this is a slightly more technical thing that we would actually be doing often in therapy with clients, getting them to take greater responsibility for things that are under their control, and learning to be more indifferent and more accepting to things that aren't under their direct control. And that's summed up by the serenity prayer that's used in Alcoholics Anonymous very neatly, um, the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can, and then crucially the wisdom to know the difference between the two, the the wisdom to draw a clear line, and that's lacking. The Stoics would say that distinction between the two gets blurred in most people's lives, and that's where a lot of our problems come from. So that's the I guess the basis of the psychological teachings of Stoicism.

SPEAKER_01 55:06

In this modern society, you see a lot of uh people they they kind of think of themselves as a victim of things. Um, there's just kind of like the victim mentality, I think it's called. But when I read the stu the Stoics, I I feel like they just don't ever see themselves as victims of of external events. And I read Seneca, and he I think he made the claim that like bad things can't happen to good people or people who have virtue. Um I was wondering if you could like explain if this is if this is the case. Do Stoics think that bad things can happen to them?

SPEAKER_00 55:42

This is what I would call, I like to call the Stoic hard line, and that it really does go back to Socrates as well. Um so this is I suppose this is a more challenging part of Stoicism. The Stoics the most schools of ancient philosophy would say that the most important things in life come from within. So Aristotle, for example, and the followers of Plato, and and other schools of philosophy would typically agree that virtue is the most important thing in life. Um, and that you know, health is important, they might say, wealth is important, um, having friends is important, but these things are trivial compared to having moral or practical wisdom. If you're just a foolish, stupid, naive, angry person, you'll ruin these advantages, you'll abuse them, you'll use them badly. Whereas if you're an enlightened individual, if you have self-discipline, if you have determination and insight into your own character, if you have moral and practical wisdom, then you'll potentially flourish even if you're faced with poverty and hardship and hostility from other people. So, philosophers like Aristotle would say, well, look, virtue is the most important thing, but these other things are kind of important as well. The Stoics want to go further than that though. They want to push it further than than Aristotle and establish what I call the Stoic hard line. They want to say that virtue is not only the most important thing, and by virtue they mean a kind of moral or practical wisdom, strength of character that comes from a particular type of insight and wisdom. Um they want to say it's the only genuinely important thing in life. And that Socrates kind of alludes to this idea as well that things like health, wealth and reputation, as they like to sum it up, what we call external goods, the Stoics want to say are really fundamentally neither good nor bad, but rather they're more like opportunities that we have. They're they're at best kind of advantages or disadvantages. Um but Socrates explains this more clearly when he says, Look, you might think that wealth is a good thing. In the hands of a wise man, wealth might be advantageous. It might be an opportunity that allows him to exercise wisdom and do good things. But wealth in the hands of a fool might actually be a bad thing. It's an opportunity to squander his money on drugs and alcohol and get himself into all sorts of trouble, perhaps. So these externals are at best opportunities which become good in the hands of a wise man or bad in the hands of a foolish man. They're just an opportunity for the foolish man to do more folly, like to exercise his foolish foolishness more extensively. And so they're not really intrinsically good or bad at all. And that's the line that the Stoics take very definitively. So they want to say that Socrates' life wouldn't have been improved by giving him more money or giving him more friends or improving his reputation. But in fact, in a way, um the hostility that he faced, the persecution that he faced, his poverty, his physical ugliness and other limitations, if anything, were opportunities for him to strengthen his character and become the hero that he became to the ancient Greeks that uh idolized him.

SPEAKER_01 59:20

Okay. Um so if if say that someone who's practicing Stoicism, or like let's just take an ancient Stoic or take Socrates, if uh let's just say like their house burnt down uh one night, how do you think that they would process that the next day upon seeing it?

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Well Chris reputedly said that to the the wise man uh sickness is no more than if he stumbled and losing his fortune is no more than losing a penny. So there are many examples in the classical literature of philosophers or heroes to the Stoics who went through similar kind of situations and they see these setbacks really in a way as opportunities. Marcus actually says that we should view adversity like a medical prescription, uh is one of his favourite metaphors, this kind of medical model. He said it's like uh Asclepius, the god of healing, is sent as a prescription in the form of misfortune, and if we take this bitter medicine in the right way, it's an opportunity for us to get well by strengthening and strengthening our character, by exercising patience and wisdom and endurance and becoming a stronger person. To put it very crudely and maybe glibly, it's kind of character building potentially in the eyes of the Stoics. Or to put it another way, if we didn't encounter adversity, then we'd just be weak. We would never have an opportunity to exercise strength of character. We have to have some pushback, we have to have some misfortune and adversity in life in order to grow as human beings. Epictetus puts this to his students by saying, Imagine that Hercules had just stayed at home and laid in bed all day. You know, he wouldn't have been worthy of the name Hercules. You know, it would seem ridiculous to a Greek to think of Hercules as being the greatest hero that ever lived, you know, if he just stayed at home and lived in luxury and never actually did anything. But he was persecuted throughout his life. He had to undertake the twelve labours and fight various monsters and so on, and he had a really tough life, you know, but that gave him an opportunity to become a hero. He would never have become a hero if he hadn't had to fight the Nemean Lion and the Hydra and so on. And uh the other metaphor that Marcus uses that the Stoics like in general is a sporting metaphor. So they say that misfortunes, like having your house burned down, would be like uh having a sparring partner in the gymnasium. And so Marcus says, rather than kind of resenting it if you're thrown on the ground, you know, you just think about how best to respond and and and like you know how to get out of a hold and you know, and how to get control of the situation again. You know, you don't get bitter about it or complain about it unnecessarily, you know, you just view it as part of the game of life.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

Yeah, didn't you compare uh the art of living to being like wrestling?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

Yeah, he says it's more like wrestling than dancing, because you have to kind of brace yourself in advance to prepare for the things that life is gonna throw at you. You know, you have to have to ready yourself for somebody hitting you, fate's gonna punch you in the nose. And in this what he means is you stoics need to prepare themselves in advance by doing things like the premeditation of adversity.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:35

In your book, you depicted a really interesting exercise where Marcus was looking into a mirror and imagining the emperors that came before him and reflecting on their mortality near the end of his life. Why why would he do such an exercise and um like what other exercises did they have to contemplate impermanence?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:02

Well, we can call this today, yeah, in using a term that we borrow from the the Romans, we can call this a memento mori. It's a way of reminding himself of his own mortality. So we might look at Vanitas paintings today, and they're kind of intended. You know, they might have a picture of a baby and a skull and a wilting flower, and it's intended to kind of remind us of human mortality. But for Marcus, in a way, it's more immediate because if he looks at a statue of Hadrian, he used to be friends with him, you know, but maybe he's been dead for twenty or thirty years, and actually Marcus might think, well, some of the younger officers under my command have only read about this guy in history books. And they've seen statues of him. But I knew him when I was a kid. And so Marcus is surrounded by these reminders of his own mortality, his own predecessors are now just lifeless statues and abstract figures, ghosts that live only in history books, they've become legends rather than living flesh and blood human beings. And so it's easy, it's convenient for him in a way to look at these statues that he's surrounded by and think, uh one day that's all that's going to be left of me. Pretty soon, I'm just gonna be one of those statues over there. Like, and and there'll be people that have never met me, and when they talk about Marcus Aurelius, they'll be talking about what pops into their mind will be a block of stone, right? Because that will be their only acquaintance with me. So it's it's kind of very tangible and immediate to him, but it happens to be part of a much wider stoic exercise. And the rationale for doing that is that the Stoics, first of all, think that we're all in denial, you know, we're kidding ourselves, and that we need to kind of knock ourselves out, we need to snap out of that and realise that you know we don't know when we're gonna die, you know, kick out by a bus tomorrow. You know, we're we're definitely gonna die. Like we see the everyone else that's preceded us is dead. Like, you know, we there's ample evidence, Seneca says, you know, there's more evidence for that than just about anything else in life. The one sure thing is you're gonna die eventually, you know. Everyone else that came before you is dead. And uh Marcus stands in this line of of emperors, all of them, despite everything that they did and everything that they achieved, eventually, you know, are a pile of bones, um, you know, levelled by death, or buried in the same ground as everyone else. And so he wants to humble himself, he wants to remind himself not to blow things out of proportion, he wants to remind himself to seize the day, to live in the here and now, and to focus on what's under his control from moment to moment and doing the best that he can rather than living too much for the distant future or worrying about how people will remember him in the future. Um he wants it's a trick or a strategy to encourage him to focus more in the present moment and doing the best with what's under his control, and also it's uh the Stoics view it as a trick for to encourage us to be more grateful for the for life uh from moment to moment so that we don't lapse into taking life too much for granted.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:07

And did they like so other than the mirror exercise, was there any like other main ways that they contemplated their impermanence?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:18

Yeah, I mean that they would remind themselves of it verbally. So you could say there's verbal techniques, there's imagery techniques. Seneca says that when he goes to bed each night, he says um I might not wake up uh in the morning. You know, for I sh as I go to sleep, I should think of myself as grateful for the day that I've just lived. For all I know, it might it might be the last day that I've lived. I might not wake up tomorrow morning. And each morning he wakes up, he says he tells himself, you know, this might be the the last morning that I wake up on Earth, the day ahead of me might that I'm about to be embark on might be the last opportunity that I have to spend a day on Earth for all I know. So these are little verbal, kind of ritualistic strategies that some Stoics used. And then there are more visual strategies like the view from above. So Marcus would picture viewing his own uh life and the the whole world and uh surrounding uh as if seen from a uh uh you know high overhead from a helicopter or from atop a mountain, like the gods looking down from Mount Olympus. And he would encourage himself to think of the present moment as just one turn of a screw, as he puts it, one brief instant in the totality of his life, and his whole life is just one brief fleeting moment in the history of the human race. And so by thinking of the totality, we inevitably think of the brevity of our time on Earth, and it it's just it's like a single page in a vast encyclopedia, or or maybe even just a single word or letter on that page when we think about it in the context of the whole history of the human race or the whole history of the universe. So the Stoics like to encourage themselves to think about everything within the total context of time and space, and that inevitably forces us to acknowledge our own mortality.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:06

And you have a guided meditation uh review from above as well, which I'll link in the article.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:12

Yeah, I've got I've done a couple of audio recordings over the years of that actually. That was one of the things that that, as it happens, kind of started um this whole thing actually, you know, not just for me, but um the modern stoicism organization began in a way because I I made that audio recording and some students at Exto University listened to it, and then they thought maybe we could do an experiment where we get people to listen to this recording and live like a stoic for a week. And that became what we call the Stoic Week, which event, which is in its sixth or seventh year now, I think, and then that evolved into uh the organization Modern Stoicism, which runs the Stoicon conference every year, and you know it's it's become a much bigger thing. Now, 8,000 people did Stoic Week last year, um, and it it started off with just you know the idea of what would happen if we took that exercise and made it into a guided meditation recording and put it online, and it's grown and grown and grown each year since then.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:09

It's funny because like meditation apps are so popular, but there it doesn't seem to be a dedicated stoicism meditation app.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

Yeah, I mean people I get contacted by app developers a lot. I think someone messaged me even just a few days ago um doing something like that. But often the the apps don't don't seem to kind of take off or there's different versions going around. But I mean a stoicism app makes a lot of sense. Um the stoic exercises really lend themselves towards being put into a guided meditation format.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:41

Yeah, well, um I I would love to use one myself, so um, yeah, I'm gonna keep thinking on like different ways that that could be materialized. I want to go back for a minute just to Marcus's training. You say that he he first was introduced to philosophy when he was about twelve, but then in his mid-twenties he started taking stoicism much more seriously and started you know doing daily exercises and training. What would that have looked like, that that kind of training regime to becoming a stoic?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:13

We don't know exactly. I mean, we I guess what what evidence we have, we've got a lot of scattered evidence in the meditations and elsewhere, and we can see it throughout the meditations, which is one of our best pieces of evidence, Marcus over and over again saying, every day tell yourself, or you know, frequently remind yourself. He uses these phrases a lot. So it seems clear that he's saying on a regular basis, I literally imagine this thing, or on a daily basis, I say this thing to myself, and that's certainly how it comes across on a close reading of the meditations, and then from looking at Epictetus and other stoic authors, it kind of looks like other Stoics would do that as well. So, for instance, Marcus says that when he wakes up in the morning, um, in order to he does a couple of things in order to help himself get out of bed, he'll remind himself that nature intended him because of part of his stoic theory is that he nature intended him to be active and to exercise wisdom and justice. So he thinks of himself as having this kind of natural obligation to engage with life and to try and exercise uh wisdom, and and it he thinks of that as being the most important thing in life. So he reminds himself of that in the morning to give himself a kind of motive to get up and get out of bed and start living life. Uh, you know, it's it the most important thing isn't just to be cozy or to have pleasure, there's something much more fundamental and important than being comfortable, and that's to develop your character and strengthen your mind. And uh the other thing he'll say is every morning he imagines encountering obstacles and he prepares for them in advance by picturing setbacks and viewing them with indifference and responding to them calmly. So that's a form of what we call stoic premeditation of adversity. He seems to say that he does that each morning. And then on a regular basis, he imagines the totality of space and time and the smallness of his place within it. There's various other things that he he talks about himself doing on a regular basis or in response to particular problems that he faces, such as if somebody potentially offends him, he uses some of those anger management strategies that we mentioned earlier. Um we have that, and then we have things like in Galen and Seneca and Epictetus, um, they talk about the golden verses of Pythagoras, and there's an exercise in there, um, a Pythagorean exercise, but it sounds like it's one that the Stoics assimilated. Um, the Stoics were interested in the older Pythagorean philosophy right from the outset, by the way. We know though that Zeno wrote a book on Pythagoreanism, which is completely lost to us, but the founder of Stoicism was interested in Pythagorean philosophy and wrote about it. And so the later Stoics, the Roman Stoics, we can see have assimilated Pythagorean ideas. You know, maybe that's throughout the whole history of Stoicism, these same ideas were drawn from Pythagoras and his followers. And one of them is this practice of each night before you close your eyes and go to sleep, reviewing the events of the day three times and asking yourself three questions. Uh, what did I do well that I could praise myself for and do more of in the future? Um, what did I do badly that I need to learn how to avoid doing in the future or to change? And and what did I omit or or what could be done differently, what was absent or lacking that I could add tomorrow and begin doing. And so like there's this kind of mental review that happens at uh at the end of each evening. Seneca talks about that in on anger, but Epictetus also tells his students that they should be doing something similar. So that this is another kind of formulaic routine that the Stoics do. And the other one I should mention that they put a lot of emphasis on is role modelling. Um people who like Socrates or Xeno that they think of as exhibiting virtue. And Epictetus talks about that a lot. He he actually says to his students that in any given situation they should ask themselves, what would Socrates do? What would Xeno do in this situation, and refer to that as a template or a role model?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:30

Right, and you you also say that the the first stage of stoic training would have been uh the discipline of desire, um with unhealthy passions, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:40

That's how Epictetus formulates Stoicism. There may have been actually, throughout the history of the subject, it may have been taught in different ways, but we can see how Epictetus is teaching it. And he says, look, the first thing is the discipline of desire and aversion, or the discipline of fear and desire, if you like. We could also call that the stoic therapy of the passions, overcoming our emotions and mastering those, learning self-discipline. And just as an aside, that aspect of Stoicism is the bit that perhaps most closely resembles cynicism, the philosophical tradition that preceded the Stoic. So Zeno was a cynic philosopher before he became a Stoic. And uh actually, Marcus sounds like he may have dabbled in cynic philosophy before he went on to embrace Stoicism. But as it happens, Epictetus talks about this kind of training and strength of character and self-discipline as being the initial stage of Stoicism, and then the later stages of Stoicism are more about learning to act in the service of justice and become more engaged in the world and learning to understand to become more mindful of our thoughts and to uh become more skilled in logic and more capable of questioning our assumptions, which is slightly more cognitive intellectual uh component of stoicism that's kind of perhaps lacking in in cynicism in some other schools of philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:08

One of the kind of um main ways modern stoicism is marketed, I believe, is that uh the kind of like psychological resilience and the kind of uh it's marketed as like a set of techniques that can help you um remain calm when stuff goes wrong. But with Buddhism, there's a lot of focus on training in compassion and there's various visualizations to help you become more compassionate. Are there also um exercises in stoicism or any kind of focuses on on becoming more compassionate?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:43

Yeah, I mean the way that so many people would say that the way stoicism is often presented as a form of self-help it is not quite a caricature, but a kind of watered-down version of stoicism and it misses a couple of things out. It tends to emphasize self-discipline and to ignore um the whole social dimension of stoicism, like um but funnily enough, that you know people get that in Buddhist self-help. Like you all say all the stuff about Karuna, uh, compassion, uh Metabhavana meditations and stuff like that. And that's integral to Stoicism. If you read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, funnily enough, on virtually every page of the book, he's talking about justice, natural affection, cosmopolitanism, the brotherhood of man, and all of this cluster of stoic concepts that have to do with our relationships with other people. And the Stoics think that we can't be fully developed human beings, we can't excel, we can't uh flourish unless we live in harmony to the best of our ability with other individuals and with society as a whole. Like the one way of understanding Stoicism, right all the way back to Zeno, was that the goal was to live a smooth flowing life, as Zeno puts it, to live a kind of, in a sense, a kind of harmonious life, where even if the universe is throwing insults and adversity at you, even if you're persecuted and thrown in prison and your house is burned down, that still somehow the wise man flows through this or past it like water. You know, it's kind of you know, he doesn't get stuck with it, he doesn't struggle with it, he doesn't whinge about it or get bitter about it, he adapts to it like flowing water. And uh, you know, the a big part of that is the way that we integrate with other people, even our enemies, even people that are ignorant or insulting, as Marcus says in that passage 2.1 at the beginning of the meditations, you're gonna meet people that you don't like, that don't share your values, you're gonna meet people that throw obstacles in your way, but the stoic, rather than getting frustrated with them or hating them, or feeling alienated from them, nevertheless views them as brothers and sisters, and he sees them as sparring partners in the in the game of life, and uh you know he feels a sense of oneness with them. The Stoics call it philistorgia or natural affection. You know, this is the key thing is that the Stoic feels at one with the whole of nature and at one with the rest of mankind, and he doesn't feel alienated from or at odds with other people, and Marcus thinks that should be setting alarm bells ringing. If you feel alienated from other people, you feel at odds, like a stranger to them, then something's kind of gone wrong. Because even when he's surrounded by enemies, Marcus thinks the wise man nevertheless feels a sense of kinship or brotherhood with them.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:41

I uh following from this, uh you introduced me to Jules Evans, who wrote his first book on philosophy, and he had a lot of stoic thoughts and ideas in there, and he he said that after he wrote that first book, he kind of found the limits of that way of thinking and approaching life, and then he wrote his second book on ecstatic experiences. And I was wondering if there was anything in Stoicism that that is mystical or um maybe isn't like cold and rational that maybe we don't know about.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:16

There are definitely mystical aspects to Stoicism, and I mean it you know it depends how you define mysticism, but from a modern perspective, almost any ancient philosophy is going to seem kind of mystical in a sense, because it's alien, it's strange, it's a foreign intellectual landscape to us, it's a different world that the Stoic sage inhabits, in a sense, and particularly the metaphysical, pantheistic aspects of Stoicism are going to seem very mystical to us. The Stoics believe that the whole universe is a single living being, you know, for goodness' sake, like that obviously seems like a kind of mystical thing. And Marcus goes on and on about how to paraphrase him slightly, he says that each human being is like a limb, uh, he like the or like the upper and lower teeth, or like the left hand and the right hand of a larger organism. If he'd had this language, he would have said every human being is like a cell within the body of a larger organism. So that definitely sounds like a kind of mystical vision that he's describing. Many people have noted that, and this goes all the way back through the philosophical tradition, particularly to the stoic uh indebtedness to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher that that that influenced them and whose metaphysics they're they're kind of famously drawing on. And one of the things I would say about the kind of ecstatic experiences, though, this is what one of the things I think I've mentioned when I've been discussing this with Jules. It seems to me you can have as many mystical experiences as you like, whether it's through meditation or drugs or whatever, but then the question is what do you do with those experiences and what happens next? You know, some people, like Aldous Huxley or somebody like that, you know, might have a drug-induced mystical experience and they're able to assimilate it, perhaps, and make it into great literature or build a philosophy of life around it. And other people maybe have a kind of mystical experience and it just fries their brain and they don't know how to process it. So I think that's where stoicism and rational philosophy come in, is that we may have these metaphysical, mind-expanding, eye-opening experiences, but then we've got to figure out how we're going to pass and interpret them and how we're going to assimilate them into our daily lives. And having a rational philosophy like stoicism gives us a way of processing stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:31

So that you see them as kind of like a good complement to people who are more drawn to mystical experiences. Stoicism can be grounding and help them interpret the problem.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:41

I think you I think I think so. Like I think if you don't have a rational, grounded philosophy of life, then you're potentially at risk from having, you know, mind-band everyone knows you can have good traps and bad traps, you can have mind-expanding experiences that could be damaging to your psyche, and ones that can actually be empowering and liberating. And so then the question is, well, what's the difference? You know, and I I think you know, reason is the difference. If we can become grounded again and interpret things using practical moral wisdom in a down-to-earth way, like we can take these mind-blowing experiences and actually channel them in a positive direction, or we can go crazy. Like, you know, but philosophy and stoicism in particular, I think, help us to remain grounded and to be able to kind of weather these kind of challenging mind-expanding experiences without being blown away by them. And uh, you know, the people in the ancient world were certainly no strangers to mystical experiences. You know, they would sleep in temples and have weird visions, they took drugs that would induce visions, you know, they believed in the supernatural in a way that we we don't typically today. Um, so they lived in a very different psychological landscape from the one that we inhabit today that had different sorts of challenges from the ones that we face. And they had to, you know, I it was a challenge for them to remain grounded uh in light of some of the things that they saw happening around them that they struggled to understand.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:09

Do you you you mentioned earlier like that Marcus Aurelius took opium, we don't know how much or how often. Uh, do you do you think that uh any of the major ideas in stoicism or like uh Western philosophy was inspired by psychedelic experiences?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:27

It's hard to say. I mean in Marcus's case I would say what no, it wasn't I would say it wasn't directly inspired by it for the simple reason that these ideas already existed long before he came along. So Marcus is is assimilating ideas from an existing philosophical tradition. So sometimes people have read the meditations and thought this comes from his opium use. Well, we know it doesn't, because it already existed. He's just reading other books in Stoicism. It may be that he was particularly drawn to those ideas because they already existed and his opium use gave him experiences that complemented them, but that's not where the ideas originally came from. The ideas were already in circulation. Seneca and Epictetus are talking about the same ideas. Marcus, we're told, took a grain of um like poppy juice. Um that's what Galen says. It was part of a compound called Theriac, um, which emperors typically took, but we don't know how much was in it. Mark Galen says that Marcus complained that it was making him too drowsy, and so they reduced the dose. And that's pretty much all that we know about it. So it kind of doesn't really sound like he was addicted to it, it sounds like you know he was taking a small amount of it, and then he actually asked for the dose to be reduced. But that that's really all the information that we kind of have to go on. Now, were earlier philosophers inspired by mystical experiences, that's really a kind of unanswerable question as well. But what we can say is that there's certainly some kind of sympathetic relationship between the early Greek mystery religions, which you know used kind of sensory deprivation and kind of weird psychodrama, and used fasting and drugs to induce altered states of consciousness. There's certainly a relationship between those and early Greek philosophy, um, like Orphism, particularly Pythagoreanism, was very associated with the uh Elysinian and Orphic mysteries. So, but you know, the problem with the mystery religions is they were secret, so we only really know little fragments about them, and like you know, it's something that's always frustrated classicists that it it's kind of hard to say much about them definitively. So it was probably some sort of relationship, but we don't really know exactly what it was, unfortunately. We can only speculate.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:48

You you meet uh uh I presume a lot of people who are practicing stoicism, um, or you speak to them online. What would you say are the biggest misconceptions or mistakes at the in in the people who are trying to practice stoicism that you see?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:04

Well, there's a bunch. Like the the first one is that they confuse Stoicism with a capital S with stoicism um with a lowercase S. And those are actually two completely different things. So lowercase stoicism is the modern concept of an unemotional coping style, and it's loosely based on the idea of stoic philosophy. So stoicism with a capital S is an entire school of Greek and Roman philosophy, like it's a big, complex, subtle, nuanced subject, it's a historical thing, it's a proper noun basically. Whereas what people loosely mean by lowercase stoicism is just having a stiff upper lip. And you know, those are very tenuously related concepts. So, as we've already mentioned, having a stiff upper lip might actually be in conflict with Stoic philosophy in some ways. So certainly Stoic philosophy means taking control of our emotions, developing self-discipline, so it could look like that, but if it means trying to conceal or suppress emotions that are automatic or involuntary, that's in direct conflict with what Stoicism actually teaches. Because the Stoics would view those emotions as being neutral, indifferent, and natural, and we should accept them, these automatic flashes of anger or anxiety. Whereas lowercase stoicism, having a stiff upper lip, sometimes might mean kind of trying to freeze them out or or or kind of go poker faced or conceal them from other people, as if we're as you your friend said. Like viewing involuntary emotions as if they were bad things, as if they're harmful and kind of struggling with them. And we don't want people to think that because that's bad psychology, it's potentially harmful, and it's in direct conflict with the much more nuanced approach that the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers had. And then the other thing is that we've already mentioned that people think of Stoicism as being about self-discipline. And in some ways they they confuse it with Cynic philosophy, which was a more individualistic, self-discipline focused approach. Whereas Stoicism was a more cosmopolitan, more political, more social philosophy. The Stoics believe that we're inherently social animals and we have an obligation to live in harmony with other people and strive towards a brotherhood of mankind. And that is completely missing from a lot of the modern Stoicism was the precursor of early Christian ethics. So all the stuff in Christianity about loving your neighbour is inherited from Stoicism. To thinkers in that period, they would have seen that as being particularly similar to what the Stoics were saying centuries earlier. But now when people talk about Stoicism, this idea that it somehow might be related to Christian love of thy neighbour is just a completely alien concept because they've they've removed that whole part and they're ignoring it. But like I said earlier, if you read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it's hard to ignore that because it's on virtually every page of the book. I'm often therefore very surprised when people say that they don't think that's in stoicism. I say, go and read the meditations again and just look more closely, because it's it's the main theme of the entire book, that we should live in harmony with others, forgive our enemies, we should avoid being alienated from others, we should try and cultivate a sense of oneness both with individuals and collectively with mankind, um, viewing them as our brothers and our sisters and so on. Um, that's that's the probably the main theme of the entire book. In fact, so that's a misconception that that occurs. Um, and this idea in general that stoics would be unemotional, or like cold, like robots, like uh men of stone, like Mr. Spock out of Star Trek, and so on. And in actual fact, uh the Stoics accept the full range of involuntary, automatic emotions that we share with animals, and they also have a place for healthy emotions like love and joy, and even uh the Stoics think there are healthy feelings of shame or aversion. Like the Stoics think a good man like Socrates would feel a sense of disgust or aversion towards lying or acting immorally, and so there are healthy negative emotions that the wise man would experience. So the the the Stoic sage has a uh a range of emotions, it's just the pathological ones that he's eliminated in an ideal world. So he's certainly not, and the Stoics themselves say that repeatedly our goal isn't to have hearts of stone or to become like like uh metal statues, uh completely unemotional. So this is a prevalent misconception as well. And then I think the other misconception is that all that we know about Stoicism is in Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca, and that's not really true. Um, you know, particularly in Cicero, we have a lot of important literature, particularly I think in Cicero's book De Phinibus, we have our main systematic account of Stoic ethics. Uh, and also we know a lot about Stoicism by looking at the the arguments and the dialogues attributed to Socrates, in which many of the arguments are taken for granted. Many of the arguments are are explained which the Stoics later take for granted and which support some of the conclusions. So if you want to understand the Stoics, I think you need to go back and look at Socrates and Plato and in the writings of Xenophon as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:40

I've noticed even with myself that I I sometimes judge myself as someone who's who wants to you know improve myself or practice stoicism well. If I'm not calm or if I'm feeling upset, I I get this this thought that's like, oh, you're not doing it right, or you're not doing it well. Um but but but that's not the case, as you as you were just saying, that's almost an opportunity to you know get clearer with how you think and and practice stoicism from that point.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:11

Yeah, and you know what, like there's a couple of good passages that help to illustrate that. Um one of them is in the meditations, and the other one is on anger, which you like you mentioned, you've been looking at recently. And in the passage in on anger, when Seneca says he he uses the Pythagorean technique and reviews his day three times, he says that he interrogates himself. It's this old metaphor that goes back to Socrates of the Alenchus of cross, like you're cross-examining a witness in a court of law. And Seneca says he cross-examines himself, he questions himself about his own character. So he does that quite forcefully, but he also says that he doesn't do it punitively, like he's forgiving towards himself and understanding and empathic, like almost as if he's trying to help a friend. And you know, one of the goals in in classical philosophy generally, and including Stoicism, is to be able to develop genuine self-love and to be genuine friends to ourselves as well as to other people. You know, they might say, unless you can love yourself and be a friend to yourself, you're you're not really in a position to show love or be a friend towards other people. And in a sense, you can understand the goal of stoicism as being a sort of self-friendship or self-love. Um, you know, not just kind of like being in conflict with yourself or hating or punishing yourself, you know, but but learning to do this fine balancing act of accepting yourself while at the same time trying to improve yourself, wanting more while at the same time, you know, accepting yourself for for where you are and forgiving yourself for your flaws. And that the Stoics conceptualise this, they want they want to learn to kind of strike this balance in a nuanced way. And the other thing that helps us understand that is in the meditations where Marcus actually talks about how he would deal with a hostile person. So here he's talking about how he addresses another person, um, and and it's in that passage where he talks about the the ten anger management strategies towards the end of it, he says that he wouldn't speak to them um as if he was trying to embarrass them in front of others or or in a kind of lecturing way, like a strict schoolmaster, but he tries to be friendly and understanding and compassionate and explain to them like why he thinks it's against their own best interests to uh engage in hostility. And that kind of compassionate attitude that he's exhibiting towards other people, I think you know, it it follows that that's the same kind of attitude that the Stoics want to exercise when they're critiquing their own character as well, not in a kind of aggressive, critical sort of lecturing way, but in a more gentle, nurturing kind of stance.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:59

I know uh that the this the Stoics weren't like uh even though they practiced voluntary hardship um and preparation for worst-case scenarios, they they weren't interested in self-punishment and they did make a little room for you know moderate pleasure. Um, like you know, I think Seneca talks about drinking. So I'm just I'd curious to hear your thoughts on like in the modern world, you know, you have video games, pornography, social media, binge drinking. What would uh like a how should a modern stoic approach those kinds of temptations?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:35

Well, the Stoics, you know, again, uh we come back to the sort of like one of the basic principles of Stoicism, which is that the only true good is virtue, the only true evil is vice, and that everything else um is neither intrinsically good nor bad, it's merely an opportunity. So that would include pornography, video games, everything. None of these things are evil. You could if you want to emphasize that way, you know, to kind of redress the balance, if you like, the Stoics are categorically denying that any of these things are intrinsically bad. Pornography, like you know, uh you know, even certain forms of sex act and so on, are not intrinsically evil. And in fact, the Stoics were criticized, they were ridiculed by the philosophers because they denied that incest was intrinsically evil. And they did that probably as part of a commentary on the play Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus accidentally sleeps with his own mother because he doesn't realise who she is, he was abandoned as an infant, and so without realizing it, he sleeps with his own mother and then discovers he's done that and he goes crazy and blinds himself. And the Stoic's response to that is to say, Well, this man is really just a cause of his own misery, um, because there's nothing intrinsically evil about what he did, you know, it wasn't even intentional. Like, so you know, if he was a stoic, he wouldn't be angry with him himself, he would he would just you know accept the fact that he he'd made a mistake and um you know that the act in itself is neither good nor bad, and it was unintentional anyway. So that the the stoic stance would be look, it's not that these things are inherently good or bad, but what matters is the use that you make of them. So it comes back to shifting our perspective, like we focus too much on externals and not enough on the use that we're making of them. Um you know, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it, as it were. If you're using pornography in a way that's compulsive and addictive, then there's probably something wrong about the way that you're using it. But there's nothing intrinsically wrong about the thing itself. You know, there's probably a wise or sensible or moderate way of using it that you know that could be taken to show strength of character and moderation, arguably. Um, but you the real the real concern would be if you look at yourself and think I'm misusing this stuff, I'm using it excessively, or I'm using it in a compulsive or an unhealthy way. Um, you know, of course, there's a bit of a grey area as to how you would judge that, um, you know, and to some extent that's something that everyone would would have to judge for themselves. Um, but it's the use that we make of these things rather than the things themselves that the Stoics think that we should be focusing on.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:21

That's an important distinction. Uh just wanted to ask you one last question. Uh, when you were writing How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and researching it, what were the things that you were, or were you surprised by anything about Marcus Aurelius? Did anything come up for you that that you found particularly notable that you could share with us?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:48

Let me think about that for a second. The only thing that was gosh, you know, I've I've been studying Marcus Aurelius um uh and reading about him for such a long time actually. It's kind of been a piecemeal thing, as it were. A lot little pieces have come together for me over the space of maybe 20 years or so, so it's kind of difficult to pinpoint a specific um revelation that I suppose that changed the way that I I thought about him. Um let me think. I think that the more subtle thing that's changed for me over time is just a very drip-drip gradual thing of increasingly realizing how steeped he is in the preceding philosophical tradition. And I suppose that's inevitable, that's a slow burning thing. That as I've studied the meditations more closely over time, I've gradually come to a greater and greater realization that he's referencing ideas and practices that he learned in school. Like that there's to view it as less and less, if you like, of an original work and to see more and more the connections with things that that came before it. But that that's a slow piecemeal thing. Um other things that um I suppose one of the things that kind of struck me, although this was fairly early on, was that Marcus um in the way that he conducted the I think people underestimate the extent to which Marcus was attempting to implement Stoic philosophy in in his conduct as emperor. So often people struggle to kind of see the connection. Um we don't know that much uh in some ways about his politics, um, but the way that he conducted himself seems to have been, I think, more consistent with the political values and ethical values of Stoicism than many people tend to assume. Um for one thing, he had a certain respect for other nations that perhaps wasn't shared by other emperors or or other Romans in general. You'll notice that throughout the meditations, when he talks about other people and uh his sense of unity or oneness with humanity, he never says with other Roman citizens, which is kind of surprising in a way, um, given his obligations, his position as emperor, he's thinking about humanity in its totality as a whole, not just the Roman citizens that um he's governing. And I I think politically um Marcus saw himself as as being part of something bigger even than the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is as being part of a larger world community, and and he you know he he had extended greater moral consideration to foreigners and so-called barbarians that than other Romans might have. He tried to expand the empire and to assimilate uh foreign tribes into the empire in a way that other emperors might not have, and so that was something that I gradually began to realize about uh Marcus, that his political vision I think is also a reflection of his stoic values.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:21

Hmm. I I have to say that uh reading How to Think Like a Roman Emperor uh completely like unlocked meditations for me. So I uh if anyone's read meditations and didn't get that much from it, I would really recommend reading How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and then going back and rereading meditations um as I think your book kind of like kind of like unlocks kind of hidden gems in that book. Um, so yeah, thank you so much for your time today. Um where can people get access to your book, the audiobook, and learn more about you? And and um I know you have courses as well, you have a course how to think like a Roman Emperor 2.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:03

Yeah, um the course is actually starting today, like pretty much straight after we're speaking today. I'm gonna do the first webinar for that, so I'm quite excited about that. And if people want to learn more about the stuff that I do, my website is just my name, it's Donald Roberts in all one word, and then it's.name rather than dot com. And if you go there, you'll find my blog articles and links to my Facebook group, which has 52,000 people in it now. It's a pretty big group, it's pretty very active. And uh the courses that I run, um, which you can also get to by going to learn learn.donaldrobatson.name is a subdomain of the main website, and there's loads of free courses and uh downloads and stuff there that people might want to check out, um, email courses, e-learning courses, and then you know, also the the like the big course on Marcus Aurelius and another big course in Socrates that I run too.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:00

And are these courses like you you run them like uh you have like intermittently, like you every few months? So how could someone join?

SPEAKER_00 1:45:07

Yeah, they're kind of irregular, like they they run maybe about every three months or so. Like it varies, but uh usually run either the Marcus one or the the Socrates one about roughly every three months or so, depending on you know how busy I am and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:25

Yeah. Wonderful, great. Well, I'll put all the of the links to that in the show notes of this episode. That's great. Uh yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:34

Well, it's been a pleasure speaking to you once again. Thanks very much.