Balancing Power As An Emperor | Donald Robertson PT 1

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2:57Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:51Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I remember very vividly reading meditations for the first time and going, wow, what is this? I want to know everything about this. And so I think the first thing, because I remember I bought The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt along with it, which is this amazing Edmund Morris biography of Theodore Roosevelt. And I don't think I knew that philosophy that good existed, and I didn't know that biographies that good existed. So after I read Mark Sturlus, I thought I'd really love to read a biography of this guy, right? I'd seen the movie Gladiator.

4:30I know that's not real, but I want to read a biography of Mark Sturlus. And I couldn't find one. There really isn't any. There's some great biographical essays, which Gregory Hayes talks about in his intro to Meditations. There's some older books. There's, you know, some little profiles of him, but there's no great singular biography of Mark Sturrilis. And I had to wait almost 20 years for a great biography of Mark Sturrilis, which I just read. My friend Donald Robertson's book, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, just came out from Yale University Press. And it's incredible. And I told him this when I read it.

5:10We immediately started carrying it in the store. I've written a bunch of daily Stoic emails about it. It's just awesome. And I'm so happy that he did it. And I'm glad he did it so I don't have to do it and I can tell you about it. It's a wonderful book. We ran an excerpt of it on the podcast a couple months back. But I asked if Donald would come out. He lives in Greece, so that was no easy trip. But he was in the United States and he came by. We had a wonderful conversation about this sort of joint fascination of ours, this man who was the most powerful man in the world. And as Matthew Arnold said in one of those essays about Marcus, that he proved himself worthy of it.

5:47What does it take to do that? How does a person do that? And no one is better to answer that question than Donald, because not only is he a great writer, but he's a great thinker about Stoke philosophy. He has another book, which I also love, called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, The Stoke Philosophy of Marcus Rillus, two books that I have enjoyed quite a bit. And anyways, I'll just get into this episode. He has a delightful accent. I always love hearing from him. And we had such an in-depth conversation that I wanted to split it up into two episodes. We spent about two hours kicking things around.

6:20So here is part one of my conversation with the one and only Don Robertson. He has a great substack with us. I'll share you on. You can follow him on Twitter, Don J. Robertson, Instagram, Donald J. Robertson, and grab Marcus Torellus, the Stoic Emperor, and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, the Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Torellus from the Painted Porch or anywhere books are sold.

6:48Well, I think you've done it because my view up until now is that there was not a great biography of Marcus Torellus. I was always a bit disappointed they didn't talk more about his philosophy in most of the other biographies but like I mean Anthony Everett who we were talking about earlier he has a great biography of Nero he has Hadrian he has Augustus there's great biographies of Julius Caesar and there's a million about Cleopatra um there's not been it's it's a weird omission that such a fascinating figure does not have a definitive biography. Well, there's a lot of biographies, but they're all not entirely...

7:31I always felt there was something lacking. Frank MacLinnon's is the most famous one. But that's what, like 50 years old? Yeah, and it's an odd book because it's got really long digressions in it. Like it's much longer than it needs to be. But also he's really negative about stoicism. And you can see people get kind of disappointed. by that when they read it because they're mainly reading it because they're into stoicism yeah yeah i mean there's two great biographies of seneca the james rom and the emily wilson yeah but there really isn't not like not only yeah there's not even great sort of historical ones but there isn't there there's a number of really good essays on marcus aurelius like just incredible essays there's the matthew arnold one is it brand blanchard has a great one uh there's that Ernest Renan has one.

8:22There's like great, like they'll capture him in five to 10 ,000 words, like an extended essay. Yeah. But like a full book length treatment of one of the most fascinating figures who ever lived seems a strange, you know, omission of history. Yeah. I'm, I kind of, I got invited to write it as well. So it wasn't really something that I was kind of planning to do. Yeah. And so I wasn't entirely sure how it would turn out when I started it. But, yeah, you know, I was interested in the psychological angle on it and, you know, the things that appealed to me about him. What are they? Well, like, I was interested in how his philosophy helped him to cope with the problems he was facing, basically.

9:07I mean, in a way, it's really simple, right? Same reason that most people today are interested in him. You know, that was what I wanted to know. I didn't want to know all the kind of minutiae about what it was like being a Roman emperor and stuff like that. I wanted to know why did this guy write the meditations? How did it help him? What were the problems that he faced? Basically, people are interested in Mark's release because they're looking for a role model, right? Yes. Essentially. And then I think they're disappointed maybe in some of the historical accounts of him because they don't get a role model from it.

9:37Yeah. Is it, I've been raving about this biography, Anne Rowe wrote a biography of Pontius Pilate. Oh, really? Yeah, I'll give it to you in the bookstore. And you wouldn't think that would be a person who you could write a great biography because he's a villain, but two, because there's just not that much information about him. And I always wondered if that was the trick about Marcus Aurelius too, which is we know a lot about what Marcus Aurelius thought, but the historical record about him is relatively thin, if only because he wasn't a villain. You know, if he had been much worse, I wonder if we would know more about him.

10:19Definitely. So in the surviving Roman histories, particularly in the Historia Augusta, one of the challenges is that because Marcus is a good emperor and because he's very rational and he's very temperate, he's in a sense the least exciting character in his own story. and the other characters that surround him, particularly Hadrian and Lucius Verus, and to some extent Avidius Cassius, are much more colourful and larger than life because they do crazy, violent, self-indulgent things. Yeah. And so everyone remembers that. And Marcus is at the centre of this, acting normally and being very reasonable.

11:03Well, I'm just thinking about this right now because he talks about it in meditations you know there's this repeated effort by marcus to convince himself that he doesn't need to do great deeds that he doesn't need to conquer foreign lands that he doesn't need to worry about becoming famous that his posthumous legacy is worthless and so he's just kind of present and trying to do a good and balanced and as you said, temperate job in very difficult circumstances. But history is written not just by the victors, but by the hungriest and the most legacy-obsessed individuals. So if Marcus had seen his life as needing to be this monument to his achievements, that if he was Julius Caesar weeping at the foot of an Alexander the Great statue, you know, lamenting the paucity of his accomplishments, that would have propelled him to go and do things, not just wage wars, but build temples.

12:12He wasn't trying to build, you know, this impressive resume that would resound through history. And then we look, the result is that we don't know as much about him as we do about the desperate, bad, egomaniacal figures of history. Yeah. And that helps. It helps that they're around him when I'm writing the biography, because then I can put him in a setting and describe how he would be thinking about their behavior. Yeah. Because he tells us in the meditations. so even if he's not doing these crazy colorful things like it the way to the way i approached writing the biography was to look at his relationship with these more colorful characters in a little bit more detail yeah and to do a little bit more research into hadrian and lucius various and avidius cassius so that i could talk a little bit more about marcus's social environment if you like and like what i imagine he would be saying to himself based on the meditations for example, you mentioned Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and that's a really good example, because Marcus mentions them in the meditations, but only to say he doesn't particularly admire them or look at them as role models.

13:26He looks to philosophers more because of their spiritual or psychological achievements, their moral achievements. And you could argue that Antoninus, who Marcus Aurelius thinks is like the greatest emperor ever, is there's basically nothing on Antonides. I read one biography that was written in like the 1800s, I think, and it's pretty dense. Both of them are boring, effectively. And because they're boring, what's actually great about them gets sort of thrown out with the bathwater. We just don't, because they weren't waging these wars of conquest or they weren't, you know, memorializing their greatness or ghostwriting these memoirs, you know, like Julius Caesar.

14:15We know about Julius Caesar because he not only, you know, invades Gaul, but then he writes this book about it. Cicero wasn't just content to be a great orator. He needed to write the first draft of history about what a great orator he was. And so there's this kind of publication bias of history that favors the loudest, most aggrandizing individuals. And then we snub the sort of quiet greatness. Yeah, that's definitely the case. I mean, Marcus is unusual. I mean, maybe we'd be much more interested in Antoninus Pius if he'd written a book like The Meditations. So you're right. he it's like it reminds me of that expression no news is good news yes right so Antoninus's reign was fantastic the senate thought because nothing much happened yeah there weren't any major wars like everything was really stable and Marcus might have been remembered in the same way um as a kind of two-dimensional character if it wasn't for the fact that by chance we've got this amazing window onto the soul of one of the most powerful men in history, which is, you know, it's almost mesmerizing to think about the fact that we get to peek inside his mind, basically, and see what he's thinking.

15:36Yeah, we have the innermost thoughts of, like, typically someone who is quiet and eschews the spotlight and wants to focus on just being a good person and defers credit and all of these things, you know, typically they're never even going to make it to a position that is so prominent that by definition you become famous. Like that you're, and certainly today where these offices, you have to seek that office out and fight for it and claw your way to the top. So Marcus is really this fluke of history in that. Yeah. Very rarely would, would the most powerful, important and famous person in the world get there by accident.

16:17And because Marcus gets there by accident, you know, we do have sort of a lone example of like what a good person in that job would feel like and do and be motivated by and think about. But there's not really that many other circumstances. I've been writing about Harry Truman a lot. Harry Truman's like a regular guy that ends up president of the United States of America kind of by these set of circumstances. And by the way, I've been looking for it. One of his biographers, Merle Miller, is talking to Truman about his love of ancient history. And Truman goes back to his room and he brings back his copy of Meditations, which is covered in all these underlines and about the four virtues and all this stuff.

17:07And I've been trying lately to go like, well, where is this? I asked the Truman Library if it's there. I want to know where this book is. That's awesome. Because it would be cool to see. But there's not many examples like that, because typically the people that end up as Caesar or general or what insert prominent position, they didn't get there by accident. It was important. Marx Reuss talks about the dangers of ambition. And by definition, to get those things, you have to be very, very ambitious. Well, actually, you made me think of something that I would... Sometimes when you're writing a biography, you try and say things that are probably true historically.

17:47Yeah. But then there's things that it's tempting to speculate about, right? And you think, I have no idea whether this is true or not. But I just kind of have a hunch. So I have a hunch that Antoninus Pius was selected by Hadrian as emperor because the Senate told him, we want this guy as your successor. And you've already made such a shambles. of your previous so he appointed lucius verus's father first of all yeah and then that guy died prematurely um and everybody seemed to have been panicking at that time about the succession and then he picks this complete opposite character like somebody who's the ideal emperor the senate seemed to largely like adore him and see him as one of their own like the perfect guy safe pair of hands perfect guy for the job and unlikely picking away for someone like Hadrian.

18:39I think he'd made a mess of things and the Senate had persuaded him, this is the guy that we want in power. So the reason that we get this relatively unambitious, ordinary guy is because something's gone wrong with the succession and people have stepped in and said, no, we need to kind of ground us again and put somebody in position who's trustworthy and you know not not just one of hadrian's kind of crazy yeah not not a uh a clone of hadrian but the opposite of hadrian yeah and and i think uh somewhat akin to where we are politically now it's like he's supposed to do the equivalent of a single term he's supposed to last only so long and then he surprises everyone by being emperor for the next 20 years yeah so it's this it's a second fluke in that Marcus gets a really long runway to train on the job instead of, you know, being thrown into it.

19:41Yeah, and that's unusual. So he's definitely, I suppose in a sense you could say that Marcus Aurelius becomes, on the one hand, he seems unwilling to assume office. He sounds like he wanted to be more of a scholar, but he then becomes essentially a career politician unwillingly. And not only that, I guess another thing when you're writing a biography is you notice little details that people tend to get slightly confused about or slightly wrong. So we think about Marcus as becoming emperor when he assumes the title Augustus and he accedes to the throne. But the position of Roman emperor is composed of multiple titles and powers.

20:23So it's not really exactly what we would think of today as an emperor. And many of those powers, But some of those powers can be shared and they can be assumed at different times. Marcus gets most of those powers and titles 13 years earlier while he's still serving as Caesar alongside. He's almost like a co-emperor or a deputy emperor to Antoninus Pius for 13 years before he actually becomes fully-fledged emperor himself. And as soon as he does it, he appoints his own co-emperor. Well, I noticed that in the book. That's an interesting point that you made because, yeah, it feels totally unprecedented that Marcus would name Lucius Ferris, who's not really his stepbrother or brother.

21:06It's a very tenuous relationship that they have. They very easily could have been seen as rivals. You know, there's a there's a stoic teacher who advises Octavian. You know, there cannot be too many Caesars and he kills what is actually, you know, his blood relation.

21:29And so it's it feels very unprecedented that Marcus. The first thing that Marcus really does with absolute power is he gives half of it away. Yeah. But you're right. Actually, no. The precedent is he watched Antoninus do that with him for two decades. Yeah, absolutely. you know and he wants to maybe he also wants to make sure that when he eventually dies this younger man has had plenty of experience to step into the position because lucius is younger than him yeah and actually in some ways lucius verus i think was perceived as so the the family trees of roman aristocrats are like spaghetti junction right they're confusing so lucius verus in some ways is kind of like Marcus's son.

22:15Like, he's his adoptive brother, but he's 10 years younger than him, but he marries Marcus's daughter. Right. And Marcus also, when they become emperor, gives him the name Verus, which is Marcus's family name, which is something you would do when you adopt somebody as a son. So he's kind of ambiguous. He's his brother, but he also looks somewhat like a son to him. And I think that kind of feeds into the perception of him as being a kind of a deputy co-emperor. It was clear that Marcus is the senior emperor and his name always comes, Marcus's name always comes first on inscriptions. Like it was clear, although on paper, they're both co-emperors that Marcus is the senior one and Lucius is his junior.

22:59But what it would remind Romans of this idea of having the co-emperor is that they have two consuls in the center. When it was a republic, there was two heads of state. Yeah. And so the idea is that they could veto each other to prevent somewhat, to prevent autocracy. I'm not clear to what extent the co-emperors would have power to limit each other's power. But certainly I think the perception is that it's there to prevent one man's goal. It's probably just better for the soul that there's not one but two, you know? Like, it's not good for anyone to be the most powerful person in the world. Like, that Cold War scholar saying there has to be a countervailing power, you know?

23:47Like, it's not good to have a unipolar world. You need two superpowers or ideally more that sort of check each other or balance each other. It's not good to have the full weight of anything on someone's shoulders. I'm not even just talking about for good governance. I'm just saying, like, it's probably bad for you. Yeah. Like, it's better to be part of a team or a duo. Yeah. And Marcus seems clear about that in the meditations. It's obviously, it's a concern that he has about himself. But you can also, I mean, if you're doing a deep dive into interpreting someone's words, you could think. So these things that he says about himself being Caesarified, that must also apply to Lucius Verus.

24:30Sure. Or Antoninus. Yeah, Antoninus, right? The other people around him, he must have similar concerns about. But Lucius Verus seems like an unlikely pick, because he wasn't particularly good in the role as far as we know. Marcus seems to have wanted him to deal with the military and to think that he was, the perception was that he was younger and he's into sports and stuff. He maybe had some kind of vague military connection. And so he thought, you can be my representative with military, but he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing that. That is, we'll balance all over, but I do, if Marcus has a flaw, it's weirdly, it's his passivity and acceptance of flawed people in roles that they are obviously unqualified for.

25:19Like, there's something to be said about trying to get the best out of people, you know, not expecting perfection of people, playing the hand you're dealt. But there is this kind of remarkable resignation to, well, let's hope it works out with this person. And there is fundamentally something kind of irresponsible about that, to willingly let someone who's unqualified or flawed or whatever handle something upon which lives of many, many people depend. That's definitely one of the most puzzling things about him. And I'm tempted to... I feel like there's more to it than we can be aware of somehow.

26:07It seems like there's got to be more going on there. Definitely, I think his biggest mistake was appointing Avidius Cassius as the governor of Syria because that could, should, looks like it would and did lead to civil war, basically, or the beginning of a civil war. And it was obvious, in retrospect, that that was a risk when he did that. The Romans had a policy against appointing somebody as a governor in their own place of birth. They didn't normally do that. In fact, even when they recruited foreign troops as auxiliary units, they would usually send them to the other side of the empire so that they wouldn't just rebel.

26:53So there's no conflicting loyalties. Yeah, so there's no conflict of interest. and so he appoints Cassius as governor of Syria which is where he was born and he's clearly a guy of, he's very blue blooded he's a descendant of Herod the Great he's a distant descendant of Augustus he's got all of, you know, he would definitely have been perceived as a potential monarch and in the east that was particularly dangerous it was easy for someone to kind of get into a position of being a ruler like a king if they were in command of an army. And so it seems obvious that this guy is going to be threatening to break away, and that's exactly what happens.

27:35So it's puzzling why Marcus... I think my only guess is that he felt he didn't have any choice somehow. The initial mistake was sending him there at all to be a general in command. The best that I can make out is that his reasoning there was that he was a strict disciplinarian, and he had the biggest reputation for that in the army and the Syrian legions were so dissolute, allegedly, if we can believe the Historia Augusta, it kind of, you know, maybe exaggerates that a bit, but it says, like, these troops were in terrible shape, they were undisciplined, so he sends the most notorious disciplinarian in the army to go and try and sort them out.

28:16But as soon as he makes that decision, it's a slippery slope and he's bound to seize power and that's exactly what happens.

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30:33Yeah, it's a pattern in Marcus's life, right? There are these things that he didn't have a choice about. and those end up being catastrophic failures a couple of times lucius ferris being one if it is cassius being one confidence being the the final and most egregious of them and if it happens enough times i feel like it stops being that like it's it stops being uh something life is doing to you and something you are doing and and so yeah there i i i wonder i make up that you know this idea of tolerant with others, strict with yourself, you know, that you got to make it work, that when you're in the ring with someone and they gouge you, you don't take it personally.

31:14You just want, like, there was fundamentally in him, I think, an inability to make hard personnel decisions. And there's a kindness in that. Like, it's hard when you don't want to be the person that fires someone. You don't want to be the judge, jury, and executioner in some cases. I think Marcus struggles. I mean, you could even argue the persecutions with the Christians, which you talk about, as being somewhat overstated. But there was, and maybe he's even using the stoicism as an excuse, an inability to go, hey, I'm the most powerful man in the world. If I'm not going to draw the line here, if anyone has power over this situation, it's me.

31:58And he seemed somewhat reluctant to do that. And a lot of his big, well, if it could have gone otherwise, moments in his life come down to kind of some version of that. Now, I think the only the difference that springs to mind from a modern CEO would be that Marcus wouldn't just be sacking somebody or replacing them in a role. like he'd probably actually for most of these people we're talking about he'd probably have to exile them or more likely have them killed. Yes. You can't just politely tell your son he doesn't get to be the emperor. Yeah. You just hang out and you know like wait in the wings.

32:38So people would have rallied around him probably and tried to use him exploit him as a potential ruler maybe to fragment the empire. But in Avidius Cassius' case, that's what happened anyway. That happened. And then strangely that ends. There's another thing I'd speculate about, actually. I've maybe just touched on it a little bit in the book. There's one case. I think it's the Historia Augusta that says Marcus was not as straightforward as people assume. And it kind of implies that he was more cunning. and he put on this kind of veneer of simplicity and straightforwardness and his dealings with other people.

33:21And I kind of wondered what that was alluding to. And I think it's possible that the story that we get is that Avidius Cassius was just bumped off by two of his senior officers. And then they put his head in a bag and just kind of leisurely stroll out of Syria with this guy's emperors head in a sack to present it to Marcus. Nobody stops them, which seems kind of completely implausible. Like, actually, I think that it sounds... And it sets up the theatrics of Marcus. I can't see. This is horrible. Don't have... It really, it seems like propaganda. And I can't be sure, but it certainly looks more like a coordinated coup that was organised to overthrow Avidius Cassius.

34:16Whether other people just did that because they knew that Marcus would look favourably on them and pardon them and so on, or whether Marcus was involved in planning it, perhaps. I don't know. But certainly Marcus was criticised for being too lenient to Avidius Cassius's family, particularly his daughter and son-in-law and so it's tempting it's a guy called Drunkianus and so it's tempting how would those guys get out of Syria with his head in a bag unless a general or whoever was now in power allowed them to do it and it may have been his son-in-law and that might be why Marcus allowed him to retain most of his fortune and didn't prosecute him and so on I think what you're pointing to is that you can't be the emperor and be a kindly old man.

35:13There is fundamentally some Machiavellian aspect to it. I think of this all the time. Like Warren Buffett presents himself as this nice, frugal philosopher. But you don't become the richest man in the world without also being a shark. And I suspect that as much as Antoninus teaches Marcus about being good and as much as Marcus strives not to be Caesarified and dyed purple, ultimately he's sitting there with a choice going, do I let a civil war go on, let hundreds of thousands of people die, let the empire be torn in half, or do I order a coordinated assassination on a person who is trying to overthrow my reign and murder my family?

35:58at some point he probably gets you know he says what if there's brambles in the path go around you're not living in Plato's Republic he probably does have to make the hard decisions that heads of state have to make and I think you touch on one of the other motives that people are often unaware of in my experience which is but the most historians most classicists seem to be aware of when they're talking about Marcus which is the big fear of the Senate in particular is civil war more than any frontier war because you just send the legions to go and fight in Parthia or Germania. It's so far away, yeah.

36:34But if there's a civil war, well, Julius Caesar, when he had his civil war, occupied Rome and it was evacuated. It got right to the heart of the empire. And so the Senate are terrified of the empire fragmenting. The Romans have experienced many civil wars in the past and they don't want that to happen again. And one of the main things that could cause that is if there are multiple rivals to the throne. So there's a lot of pressure from the Senate to bump off, get rid of potential contenders for the throne. And so, you know, the real puzzle, for example, with Commodus is, in a sense, why did Marcus choose to have so many children?

37:16Because he's then stuck having to choose one of them to be his successor. And he doesn't know if he's going to be any good or not, unless he was just very pious and thought, I trust the gods to give me a son that's going to be a good... No, look, you raise another good point. That's kind of another thing where he's like, I hope it works out, you know? And that's when you're the leader, you can't just hope it works out because other people bear the consequences of your leniency or your hopefulness or your whatever. And yeah, when you look at Marcus as a leader, there does seem to be a bit of...

37:56He certainly grows into the role, certainly learns that he has to make hard decisions, and does, I think, a remarkable job, especially when you... What's that Biden line about? Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to my predecessor. Yeah. You know, when you compare him to the people who came before and after him, he's an incredible emperor. But when you look at just his reign, it does feel like there are moments where firmness or harshness or, you know, more pragmatic decisions were required that I do think, you know, in the Stoic history, there are similar examples. I talk a lot about that moment in Cato's life where Cato is approached by Pompey to make a marriage alliance, and he says, I will not be bought.

38:45And what happens is Pompey aligns with Caesar instead and brings about the destruction of the Republic that Cato then dramatically and selflessly gives his life in martyrdom to. Like, Cato might not have had to kill himself if he'd just been able to stomach a marriage alliance. To compromise more. Yeah. Now, I think to evaluate what happens with Marcus and Commodus. So we've mentioned earlier that he's got this problem. People say, couldn't he just adopt a son? But then what's Commodus going to do? Yeah, something has to happen in a dark room. Yeah, he's going to die. It's a death sentence, basically, right?

39:28And the other thing I think we need to consider is who would be the alternative? So the other, we know, because he sees power. Videus Cassius would be one of the main rivals. So what would the Roman Empire have been like if Marcus had adopted Davidius Cassius and appointed him as his successor. Our sources perhaps aren't very reliable regarding his life, but they paint a picture of someone who's much more of a military hawk, much more aggressive, executing large numbers of enemy tribesmen, maybe committing genocide. So it would have been a more violent reign, probably. That's the picture. And no given, right?

40:11No guarantee. So you're essentially stuck with the impossible choice of, do I bet on a stranger or do I hope that my son, like, do I bet on my own flesh and blood and hope that I can make this a success? I mean, that's an impossible choice for a parent to make. Now, he did do something else. Like we're told there's a guy called Pompeianus, who is Marcus's most senior general. Not only that, but Marcus has him marry his daughter, Lucilla, who is kind of Augusta twice over because she is the widow of Lucius Verus. So she was previously married to an emperor and she's the daughter of an emperor. So Pompeianus is kind of overlooked sometimes, but first of all, he's his most senior military commander.

41:04And secondly, he's like a, a hair's breadth away from being emperor in the sense that he's married to Lucilla. Sure. And he's with Marcus. He accompanies him all of the time on his military campaigns. We see him in sculpture depicted by Marcus' side. And we're told that Marcus invited him to become Caesar. We're also told that Marcus appointed him as a mentor to Commodus, almost like a sort of godfather or something like that or to supervise him and kind of keep him in line. But he refused. He declined. Now we don't know why. So there's some report about him having failing eyesight later. So he may have had health problems.

41:51There's some comments about him being unpopular because he was too foreign. Yeah. He was Syrian as well. and I think there would also be a rivalry with Ovidius Cassius. These are the two most senior generals. They both happen to be Syrian. One of them is equestrian so he's from a lower class. He's been promoted like a number of people. Marcus operated a more meritocratic regime partly because of the plague and the war. He lost a lot of nobles that were in senior positions and he replaced them with people from slightly lower down the ladder But that caused some friction with nobles like Avidius Cassius who must have thought, hang on a minute, you've essentially promoted this guy above me.

42:38And I'm related to Augustus. I'm a descendant of Eastern monarchy. This guy is nobody. And he's married your daughter. It's obvious that you're positioning him to become some sort of potential successor. And so I think that's another thing that would have driven out of a kind of indignation of Idias Cassius would have been driven to revolt. So it's puzzling. Maybe Pompeianus thought it's going to cause civil war. I'm not going to be accepted as the ruler of Rome because I'm not. Or maybe like Marcus, he knew it was a terrible job. You know, I think I'm thinking about all these horrible decisions that you're talking about and these horrible moments that are.

43:24And when I read the story, maybe it's true or not, where that Marcus, when he's told he's going to be king, he breaks down in tears because he thinks of all the bad kings. I think he's thinking of this. You know, as a student of history, he knew that it's a job nobody makes it out alive of. Right. It's a job that works on your soul, that's very far from the black and whiteness of virtue, and you're going to have to make impossible moral decisions. And maybe that's why he wasn't attracted to it. Probably would have made him a great emperor, as Marcus did. But I suspect there's some truism in history that the best, the people you, the worst people to have in power are the people who desperately want to have, who want to be in power.

44:16And the best people are the people you really have to draft into it. Because the wanting it and the needing it and the thinking you deserve it is the most dangerous thing. Yeah, the kind of egotism and narcissism maybe that drives a lot of people to pursue power. There's another bit of trivia that might interest you about that, which is Marcus is usually depicted with two generals by his side. Another one is Pertinax, who is a close friend of Pompeianus. And Pertinax succeeds Commodus as emperor. And he came from a much lower class. He's another example of Marcus's meritocracy because his father was actually a slave.

45:00So he's the son of a freedman in Roman society. So we have this extraordinary situation. I mean, you could even compare it to the American presidency in a sense of how much social mobility is there when the Roman Empire maybe in a sense does more because this guy, his father was a slave. ends up becoming emperor, but he only lasts a few months because the Praetorians turn on him and assassinate him, maybe because they've been corrupted by Commodus. But again, this guy, Pompeianus doesn't become emperor, but his sidekick ends up done. Out of kind of desperation in a way because they need to replace Commodus with somebody.

45:45What you're saying though about, you know, where we could look, so this question about whether power corrupts and how Marcus might have perceived that Marcus is basing a lot of his decisions on reading Epictetus right? So let's pick up Epictetus, flick through it what might Epictetus say about this? Epictetus clearly thinks that power corrupts he says you can't ride two horses at the same time at one point like you can't serve two masters you have to decide whether you want to pursue a life of virtue or is your number one goal to be in politics. And the way he phrases it, he says basically you're not going to be a very good politician if you're number one goal.

46:30Because you're going to have to compromise sometimes and you're going to find yourself in situations where you're going to be doing things that aren't in accord with virtue. You're probably not going to last that long in the kind of cutthroat world of politics because there are other people competing with you who are willing to do anything to succeed. So he said, you know, if you want to be a philosopher, you need to be all in and make it a number one priority. Marcus is immersed in this stuff. Yeah. Like buying into it, reading it, whether we agree with it or not, like that's what's got in his head.

47:04And then he finds himself in the position of emperor, like which Epictetus views as a poison chalice.

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50:20maybe it's the the american or the the english understanding of slavery that i think skews our perception of epictetus when we say he was a slave right because we think they're working in a field somewhere right there's some laborer right epictetus is a slave working for one of nero's highest ranking sort of ministers, secretaries, executives, right? And Epictetus would have been, you know, Epictetus wasn't out back, right? Epictetus was in the court of Nero. He would have seen probably even Seneca at work. He sees what is happening in the emperor's palace. And then later when he leaves, I mean, he basically teaches a generation of the sons of wealthy Romans.

51:11So he would have met their parents. And then most famously, I mean, Hadrian drops in on one of his classes or he gets to meet Hadrian. So Epictetus was not just an astute thinker about the human condition, but has a ringside seat to power and what it does to people and how ambition degrades and corrupts. And so that's really reflected in his writing in a way that would have resonated to Marcus. Well, I'm going to speculate about something else that you said, which is, what did Epictetus do as a slave? And you're right. The lives of many slaves in the Roman Empire were possibly worse than the lives of slaves working in plantations.

51:55If you worked in a mine or something like, your life expectancy was negligible and your quality of life was atrocious. But Because the difference from the transatlantic slave trade was that in Greek and Roman society, people were capturing slaves from other competing civilizations. So you might capture someone who's a schoolteacher or an engineer, right? And often teachers for that reason. And people that found high positions in government were former slaves because they spoke the language and were educated in the technology that was available and so on. And slaves had vastly different values in Greek and Roman society, depending on their resume, essentially.

52:42And so Epictetus would be an expensive slave. And I think he mentions having written letters to Roman officials, if I remember rightly, in Greek. And his owner was Nero's Greek secretary. So I suspect that Epictetus was some sort of scribe or something like that in the household of the emperor, possibly, or in working for his Greek secretary. Yeah, I mean, Epictetus's master is the one who kills Nero, who's so close to Nero when Nero wants to commit suicide. It's he who delivers the mortal blow. Well, I'll give you another bit of trivia about him. Epaphrotitus is his name. I know the name starts.

53:30It's a mouthful. Don't even bother. But he's also implicated in Seneca's death because he's the guy that initially notifies Nero that there's a Piso conspiracy against him that leads to this political purge that culminates in Seneca being executed. So Epictetus, you know, it's possibly he knew Seneca. He's very close to all this stuff going on. You know, his owner was the guy who instigated the purge that led to Seneca's execution. So Epictetus would definitely have had a lot of opinions about Seneca. Another thing people always ask about is how come they never mentioned Seneca's name. No Stoic mentions Seneca's name.

54:19Not just Marcus and Epictetus. No Stoics post-Seneca mentioned his name. Yeah. Yeah, like no one mentions his name. And, you know, so that puzzles people. It may be because there's this odd convention that classicists often mention that authors writing in Greek in the Roman world don't tend to cite or mention authors that write in Latin. Although I believe Marcus does once or twice. Marcus had definitely read Seneca because Fronto, we have this correspondence between Marcus and Fronto, and Fronto's Marcus is Latin. rhetoric tutor. And Fronto mentions Seneca several times in a really sniffy way.

55:01He's incredible. And at one point, he's really insulting about Seneca. He says something that only a rhetorician could say. It's what the kids today would call a sick burn, right? He says something Marcus would never have said. So we only see... What's the burn? We don't see what Marcus says. We only see Fronto's comment, which is, he says, looking for valuable sayings in the writings of Seneca would be like grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer looking for silver coins, a handful of silver coins in the filth, right? So very vivid. You're like, wow, how long did you spend thinking that? You see why he's a rhetoric teacher.

55:39Yeah, that's a memorable insult, right? And I get what you're saying. We as readers of Seneca might think, no way. Seneca's writings are amazing. you know, the letters to Lasilius. But I suspect that they're reading something else. Now, you know, they may be reading speeches by Seneca. And we have things like, you know, other odd writing. We have Seneca's plays, which seem very different, you know, from his letters. His natural history is not great. But he also writes that thing called the pumpkinification of Claudius, which is a weird satire, which also seems very un-stoic. and kind of doesn't reflect well on Seneca because he started off sucking up to Claudius and then after he dies, he ridicules him.

56:28But we also have on clemency, which is this speech or letter that he writes praising Nero, portraying him as a philosopher king, saying his hands are untainted by blood, but also trying to encourage him towards clemency. And I suspect that he's reading stuff like that. So they go, well, there's good bits in this. But then the gist of the whole thing is heaping praise on Nero and saying he's got this potential to be a philosopher and saying that he's guiltless of any, after he's clearly just had his little brother assassinated and just not long after that has his mother clubbed to death. So I think these guys, I mean, Marcus mentions Nero in passing Epictetus clearly can't stand Nero he describes him as a kind of wild animal like they, I suspect Marcus had mixed feelings about Seneca because it sounds like Fronto thinks Marcus likes Seneca and he's arguing with him about it because he doesn't like him but I think Epictetus would have said look Seneca compromised too much he's a guy because Epictetus draws a kind of hard line.

57:49He's like, never flatter tyrants. Never compromise on your principles on anything. And if you asked him, what do you think of Seneca? I think we can get, especially if he read on clemency, that's a good thought experiment. What would Epictetus have thought of on clemency? He would have ripped it up. He would have thought, this guy's playing with the devil. like you know he's kind of getting into bed with a sociopath like and this is the opposite of what stoicism should be teaching there's also someone that Seneca never mentions he never mentions Masonius Rufus although he's a bit younger than him but he was the most famous stoic teacher of the period and Seneca doesn't acknowledge him I think they were probably saw themselves as although they were fellow stoics and so they're cousins in a sense, I think they would have been aligned with different factions politically and philosophically within Stoicism.

58:50Certainly the Stoic opposition, like with Musonius Rufus mentored and it was led by Thrasia, like I think would have seen Seneca as a political opponent. Yeah. And then in Cassius Dio, there's this curious remark where he claims that Thrasia, the head of the stoic opposition, said of the people who collaborated with Nero, let their names never be mentioned again, except to explain that although they compromised and collaborated with Nero, they ended up being executed anyway, the same as the people that opposed him. So you didn't even save your own skin by sucking up to Nero. Now, we don't know for sure, But I think anyone reading that and thinking about it, the first name that comes to mind has to be Seneca.

59:46Like, Seneca would clearly have been the most obvious example. He was Nero's right-hand man. So I guess what I'm suggesting is that one of the leading Stoics from a previous generation was famed for having condemned Seneca to a damnatio memoriae, like to say, let's strike his name out from history and just not mention it again, which is something the Romans were known for doing to people that they criticised. And that might explain why Epictetus and Marcus don't mention Seneca. Because certainly you'd think Epictetus could easily use Seneca as an example to illustrate a lot of the things he's saying to his students about not compromising with tyrants and how it's a slippery slope and you can't serve two masters.

1:00:35And, you know, all of this stuff kind of, you could almost put in brackets after it, you know, see Seneca for a counter example. There is this, politics is serving many masters by definition, right? You have multiple constituencies. And so there is something, I think, a little bit in Epictetus, as much as I like him, that's closer to the sort of origin of Stoicism, the sort of cynic tradition. And the, I mean, look, he doesn't, the first chance he gets, he leaves Rome and he lives out far away, right? And we can't fault a person who is enslaved and exiled and experiences the worst of the system for not believing in the system and participating in it.

1:01:20But Seneca, I go back and forth. Sometimes I'm very sympathetic. Sometimes I'm utterly disgusted. and i think in that way he's actually someone we have to talk about because he so embodies the contradictions the temptations the imperfect uh nature of reality that we all struggle with you know but but there's something about epictetus it's very pure that says don't get your hands dirty step away from it virtue is the the only thing that matters and that's great as far as it works for the individual but i think many other stoic thinkers and and and and philosophers before and since go hey you know when you uh withdraw it doesn't it doesn't change anything all it does is seed that role or place to someone else who's almost certainly less philosophical less virtuous less principled like your i think pericles said something like your disengagement is only uh uh uh possible by the increased engagement from someone else yeah and that that part i think many of the later roman stoics struggle with this idea of like here's what's philosophical here's what's virtuous here's what's pure and then um here's the real world with its imperfect problems and solutions and and the decision to be the pen and ink philosopher on this side and the philosopher-politician participant on this side, as Marcus tries to be and Seneca tries to be, it's just fraught with morally vexing decisions.

1:03:00Yeah, we're never going to resolve it because it's always been a tension that runs famously, in a way, runs through the history of philosophy. And it reminds me, in the Eastern tradition, in Buddhism, you have these two major schools of Buddhism called the Hinayana and the Mahayana. And the earliest form of Buddhism has this monastic ideal that involves retreating completely from the world, a bit like a cynic philosopher. Or an Epicurean. Yeah. And then over time, people thought, well, that seems like there's something wrong with this. You know, surely the ideal should be to benefit the rest of mankind as well.

1:03:35And so reconciling the benefits of withdrawing from society with the kind of meaninglessness of that in a way, unless you're contributing to the greater good or the common welfare of mankind, has always been... I think the stories are kind of aware of that, though. Like, you even get this tension to some extent in Epictetus. It can be explained in a way... By the way, let me just digress for a moment and say that what we're describing, these different factions, we have a source that says there were three schools of Stoicism by the Roman period. And they were represented by followers of the last three scholarks of Stoicism.

1:04:17And we don't know what the difference was between them. And what are those names for people? One of them is Diogenes of Babylon, I think. One's Antipater of Tarsus, another one's Panatius of Rhodes. And so I think the followers of Panatius are the Middle Stoics who follow Posidonius as well, and they incorporate bits of Aristotle and Plato. Seneca and Cicero look like they're probably more aligned with that. And interestingly, the other ones are both right in Latin, right? So maybe the language has something to do with it as well. this is the more kind of modernized in a way, like, you know, version, more kind of Latinized version of Stoicism.

1:05:05And then there must be, one of the others must be more old school by comparison. Seneca gives us a list of his favorite philosophers at one point, and he lists Socrates and the founders of Stoicism. And he also lists Plato, but he doesn't list Diogenes the Cynic, interestingly. Whereas definitely if you asked Epictetus, who are your top three favorite philosophers? He would say Socrates, and maybe he'd say Xeno and Chrysippus. He'd definitely say Diogenes the Cynic. So I think there's this more urbane version of Stoicism, where they are more into Plato and Aristotle, and Roman senators are quite into it.

1:05:43And then there's this more hardcore, old-school version. It's like fundamentalist Stoicism. Yeah, fundamental Stoicism. And Epictetus is clearly... Now, the weird thing is that Marcus Aurelius ends up being into the more hardcore, fundamentalist, cynic-oriented version of Stoicism. But yeah, definitely, that's something that I think they struggled with. So in Epictetus, I think this is something that people ask me a lot about, so maybe it's worth mentioning. He seems to be aware that we have to... There's a passage where he talks about... He talks about bulls quite a lot, interestingly. and he says how does the bull know that it can kill a lion I didn't know that bulls could kill lions actually but apparently they can't, they toss them on their horns yeah I guess a water buffalo or something would have some adaptations for fighting off a lion they can fight off lions if they're strong enough they throw them up in the air on their horns and mess them up pretty badly so Epictetus apparently knows this and he says how is it possible that some bulls know again the calves like the heifers can't defend themselves against lies but the strongest bull in the herd can fight off lies how does it know that and i think he's implying that it comes from trial and error and the only way it can know is through testing itself and experience like and the analogy i think that the stoics and other philosophers always have at the back of their mind is wrestling and pancration So he'd say, how do you know which sparring partner to pick?

1:07:23If it's someone that's much younger and weaker and less experienced than you, you're not going to learn anything. But if it's someone that's much bigger and stronger and more skilled than you, you're just going to get humiliated. And, you know, you're probably not going to learn anything. He's going to beat you within a second, you know, and it's going to be kind of demoralizing. So really, you want to find somebody who's slightly better than you. Yeah. You know, and that you kind of stand a chance of potentially beating. You can learn something. You've got to kind of pick your battles, as it were.

1:07:57He says if there's too much smoke in your house, you should get out. But if there's a little bit of smoke, maybe you could put up with it. And I think this is a similar kind of analogy. So I think what Epictetus might say is you need to pick your career in a similar way. If you think that you have the integrity, the wisdom, the composure to get into politics and keep your cool, then maybe the gods have put you in that position. Maybe you are the right guy for the job. But most of you guys, his students, aren't up to this. You're novices when it comes to stoicism. and some of you might be better off retreating from society for a while in order to cultivate your virtue.

1:08:48So choosing a career is like choosing a sparring partner. Because it's going to challenge you and tempt you and put you in vexing moral positions and it has the potential to bring out the best in you but also the worst in you. And you meet guys like that in different careers. You meet people that seem to be able to maintain their composure and their integrity even in a business where there's a lot of corruption or a lot of temptation. And then you meet other people who wouldn't last five minutes, who are smart, who are educated and competent, but are easily overwhelmed by the stress. They want approval too badly or their moral compass isn't clear enough.

1:09:30Yeah. So I think Epictetus is saying, look, I can't tell you. Other people can't tell you. You know, you need to become a good student of your own psyche. You need to learn to know yourself like the bulls in the herd and figure out, you know, are you just like a little calf that's going to get eaten alive by the lions? You know, are you the big alpha bull in the herd that can toss the lions on its horns and isn't scared of them? Right. Are you meant for the scholar's life or the soldier's life? Are you meant to be in the arena or are you, you know, a spectator or a critic or what have you? You've got to know.

1:10:11And I think Seneca, you know, he says like he pities the person who hasn't been in the ring, who hasn't been bloodied and bruised and knocked out because they don't know what they're capable of. now we could argue that Seneca gets in the ring with more than he could handle but also I think we have to acknowledge and respect the fact that he he was so in the mix in the room where it happened that I don't know I don't know and I can't imagine many people that were tested the way that he was tested and whether you or I or they would do better in those situations I mean And the incredible, like Seneca would probably say, do you know what I prevented Nero from doing?

1:10:54Do you know how much worse he could have been? He could probably say, if what I was really after was my own power and my own enrichment, like what you think I was compensated for is a fraction of what I could. He's like, do you think if all I cared about was money or power, you think I was writing these plays or reading these books? So I think Seneca would probably see himself as having been quite heroic in all of it. Now, how much of that is what he has to tell himself to sleep at night? When you compare it to a Thrasio or an Agrippinus, some of these other Stoics who really did kind of put it all on the line, I think they stand up better.

1:11:33But Seneca was put in Shakespearean level dilemmas. and some cases I think he really did well. And in other cases, you know, we hold him up as an example of what not to do. Well, that's a good segue into a completely different perspective on the whole thing, which is what, you know, when you're writing a biography about someone like Marcus Aurelius, one of the questions that I asked myself is, what can we tell about his character by looking at the content of the meditations? Like, what's he worried about in the meditations? And then also, you know, there's another simple question, which the Romans, I think, ask themselves more than we do.

1:12:10But it's a useful question to ask, which is what don't they mention? Like he doesn't mention Seneca. The dog that doesn't bark. Yeah. Who doesn't he mention? What's missing from this? Marcus says a lot about his relationships with other people. He says a lot about justice. He says a lot about anger. Yes. He says a lot about not being alienated. So he's really concerned with interpersonal conflict, it seems to me. He has that entire section, 1118, where he lists 10 different strategies for coping with anger, right? So this is clearly something, and it's not surprising, like, given his position.

1:12:46Do you think Marcus Aurelius had an anger problem? Yeah. Like, I mean, we can't know for sure, but it certainly comes across that way. I'll tell you something that might shock you, actually, and I really don't say this lightly. Like, so as someone who has a background in therapy, I used to teach therapists. I'd stand and speak at conferences and you know for weeks on end I'd speak to rooms full of psychologists and therapists and life coaches if I said to them and I'd do this sort of thing all the time I'd get like a whiteboard and I'd say how many cognitive strategies can you guys think of for coping with anger distinct strategies not just different versions of the same thing right I think an individual I'd be impressed if they come up with like three or four I think the group collectively might come up with, if they're 20 or 30 people, they'd come up with like five or six or something.

1:13:34I don't think they would come up with 10, right? Marcus not only has a list of 10 distinct cognitive strategies, most of which are pretty viable in modern therapy, but he keeps returning to selections from that list throughout the book. So it's clearly not something he's just are copied down. He's memorized this and he's using it repeatedly. So he has, maybe this is overstating in a way, but you know, to be blunt about it, he has potentially the level of knowledge and understanding of coping with anger that I would expect from a therapist. You know, why would you know 10? Like even as a client, you'd normally learn like two or three self-help techniques and focus on the things that work.

1:14:20But normally you'd only know that many distinct techniques if actually you're teaching them to other people. He must have learned them from someone who was an expert on coping with anger. But his knowledge of this is surprisingly extensive. As a therapist, it seems surprisingly in-depth and extensive to me.

1:14:46thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show we appreciate it and i'll see you next episode

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