Inside the Final Years of Marcus Aurelius

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, Mark's really spent most of his life thinking about death. And I don't just mean in some abstract philosophical way. I mean, he lived with it. His father died when he was young. Several of his children died when he was young. His brother, his co-emperor, Lucius Verus, died. His wife died. He lived through plague. He lived through war. He lived through an amount of death that most of us can't even imagine. I was just in Rome and you could see Hadrian's tomb, right? He sees where he's going to be put when his time is through.

0:59Ryan Holiday: Hadrian is buried there. It's an enormous mausoleum. Antoninus is buried there too. And so death is not this abstraction for Marcus. It's where he's going next. And that's actually what I'm going to talk about in today's episode with today's guest, Professor William O. Stevens is a professor. He's actually a professor emeritus of philosophy at Crichton University. And he's the author of this great new biography, Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher King. I've been raving about it. I've had him on. We've done a number of short episodes. We dived into a handful of topics with him. And in this episode, we talked about not the beginning, not the middle of Marcus's life, but the end.

1:43Ryan Holiday: We talked about some of his health problems. We talk about the Antonine Plague and then the possibility that meditations, or as William prefers to call them, the memoranda, were written in those final years of Marcus's life. Maybe even the last entry is the last thing that he ever wrote. And so today's conversation is a conversation about death, but ultimately about life as well, about endurance, about perseverance, about a man who had every reason to not keep going, but did anyway and tried to be good in the brief amount of time he was here. You can watch the full interview of this on the Daily Stoic Podcast YouTube channel, which I will link to this in today's show notes.

2:23Ryan Holiday: It's a great interview. And he was just a delight to talk to. And I think you're going to find him delightful to listen to and watch. Tell me about Marcus Aurelius at the end. So it does seem like, you know, his health was, it was precarious throughout really all of his life. He had digestive issues. he had respiratory issues. Galen was treating him with this weird compound known as theriac that had morphine in it. One scholar thinks that Marcus became addicted to this and he had difficulty sleeping. And so, you know, viper flesh and all sorts of weird ingredients would be mixed in with this morphine to produce this Theriac with dozens or even hundreds of ingredients, bizarre stuff.

3:17And Galen would dose this to Marcus to help him sleep. But, you know, then he would dose off during the day sometimes. So he had trouble getting the sweet spot with his physician's treatments. And of course, you know, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million died over the course of the Antonine Plague. And Marcus might have died from that himself. It seems that that's likely to be what caused Faustina's death. It seems even more likely that that's what caused the death of Lucius Verus at a young age. Yeah. And maybe it was just a matter of time before it caught up with Marcus.

4:03Ryan Holiday: Especially because he doesn't live in quarantine or isolation as he perhaps could have. He seems to have not run away from the plague. Right. And the very notion of quarantining was not an accepted widespread practice anyway. So people were ascribing this to a failure of the pax to orm, the peace with the gods. The gods are angry. They're afflicting us with plague. We need to introduce foreign practices, religious practices to try to appease the gods again. Oh, yeah, let's persecute these Christians. They're not towing the line. They're not making the practices of Roman religion. So they're the ones who are angering the gods.

4:43The Christians are atheists because they don't believe in the Roman pantheon, right? Right. Which is always very welcoming and so forth. So and I think, you know, scholars agree that it's likely that Marcus started writing his notes, his journal, the last few years of his life when he was campaigning along the Danube. Right. We have textual evidence that that he's on the River Grand in book two. Right. And so I think, you know, this is Marcus's it can be seen as a kind of swan song. Right. He doesn't know how much longer he's going to live, given the health challenges that he's had, the difficulties that he's had.

5:22And so one idea that I've been kicking around is, I mean, we don't have evidence that Marcus intended anyone else to read these notes, but we do have them. So why did they survive? How did they survive? and if it's the case that he was only writing the notes for himself to read before he died he could have destroyed the notes or he could have instructed that those who survived him destroyed the notes and we have no evidence that he did that right that suggests to me that marcus was okay with the idea of other people reading these notes after he was dead and then they were copied and they were copied and they were copied over and over and over again and they survived to be handed down to us and so i i really think that you know marcus expresses at times a real world weariness in the memoranda he said enough with this monkey life right i've

6:26Ryan Holiday: lived long enough there there's some dark moments the last passage does also kind of we talked about this, but it does feel like a man wrapping things up, coming face to face with the end. You know, he's got his affairs in order. He's made Commodus co-emperor. They've celebrated triumphs together, you know, after some successful battles along the Danube. And, you know, he, 59, he makes it almost to age, like a month short of 59, right? And so he's not dying as a young man by the standards of antiquity. Sure. But with the plague and his health problems, yeah, that was it. And his wife has already died, right?

7:10I mean, all those kids died. His wife is gone. Lucius Verus is gone. Avidius Cassius betrays him, tries to usurp the throne. And then there's his son, Commodus, right? I mean, he must have just cherished the guy, right? Yeah. He just doesn't. But that and a few daughters, a couple of daughters, that's all he's got.

7:32Ryan Holiday: That's all he's got left. Yeah, death has followed him his whole life. He's never been far from it. And then, yeah, you put in the plague, too. I mean, he must have seen just—I think Donald Robertson writes about this very vividly in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Like, Rome would have smelled of burning bodies. Well, and he talks about a hand severed from the body, hand severed from the arm, right? From war as well, yes. He saw that. Surely he saw that on the battlefield. He saw limbs hacked off. Right. There's nothing tidy about a battlefield after the battle is won. The carrion, the odor.

8:12Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And the lack of sanitation. It's astounding that the Romans, who were such fabulous engineers, building the aqueducts, the roads and the sewers, they had a sewer system. It wasn't designed for human waste at all. It was designed to handle the flooding of the Tiber and floodwaters. And ordinary Romans had no access to the clean water of fountains. These were ornamental for only the wealthiest people who paid their water tax. So clean water wasn't something that average Romans had. So, yeah, things took a bad turn when Marcus died. You get the sense, yeah, that death was a kind of a relief for him, that he wasn't, you know, sometimes you talk to someone who's in their 90s or whatever, and you're like, you know, you're fond of them, so you want them to live forever.

9:07Ryan Holiday: And they're just like, I'm ready. I don't need that. You know, and sometimes that can shock you when you talk to like grandparents and they're just, they don't cling to life the way that we do. and I think you can pick that up in Marcus both philosophically but I suspect part of it is just practically he's just all his friends are gone all his loved ones are gone life has really kicked the shit out of him and I mean he's still standing he's still standing but but you know he's uh you know he's uh he's you said world weariness I think that's a good good capsulation of how he probably felt. Yeah, he was never hailing Hardy.

9:46Yeah, he was never hailing Hardy. So yeah, he still got and friends. And then and let's quickly analyze that concept. What is it to have friends as a Roman emperor?

9:56Ryan Holiday: Yeah, sure. It was lonely. It was a lonely life. Yeah. Yeah. Like, hey, hey, hey, you know, General so and so come sit next to me again. Again, kind of like the gladiator scene, right? Yeah. Let's sit next. Let's talk as men, you know, pretend that I'm not the emperor. Pretend that you're not my general, that you'll do whatever I command you to do because that's your job. Right. And you can't say no to me. Let's just take off those hats and crack open a beer and pretend that we're just shooting the breeze and we can be candid with each other. Marcus, there's no such person in Marcus's life. You can't have a friend when you're emperor.

10:34Everyone is your son.

10:35Ryan Holiday: Because you're going to kill your entire family. His brother is gone. You know, all but one of his sons have died. Who's going to be there to be candid with him and say, this is what you're doing wrong, Marcus. This was a bad decision. You know, are you really sure about communists? Let's rethink this. Who's going to be in a position who is the emperor? Well, you know, now that you bring this up, I'm thinking of a scene in Meditations where he talks about how it doesn't matter how good a life he's lived. I mean, he says, you know, you, but he means himself. you know he's like there's gonna be people crowded around your deathbed like excited that you're dying you know like like indeed and that that must have been at some level his sense of it that like all these people are you know you have the people in Commodus's camp and they're right now this is their moment you have the enemies that he's made you know just nobody is um you got no friends And probably by this point, Fronto is dead and Rusticus is dead and all of his teachers are dead.

11:42Ryan Holiday: Absolutely. They're all gone. They're all gone. And what does he have to look forward to? More years of warfare. Yeah. More battles, more treaties that are going to get broken. Right. Maybe there'll be another coup. Who's going to be the next Davidius Cassius to try to take over the throne? Right. So, I mean, yeah, he was very tired. The plague, dealing with the plague exhausted him. Dealing with year after year of warfare and conflict and uprising, that sort of thing. I mean, believe me, the Christians were the least of his problems. And they weren't even a problem. They'd go for years at a time before there would be a little, you know, outburst of violence against the persecution of the Christians.

12:31Right. in some remote province, right? He's dealing with all this displacement of tribes coming into the empire, and he's trying to keep it safe. Where's the peace? He's not going to find peace out in the world. The only peace that he can muster is what he gets from reading his Epictetus and rehearsing the arguments for stoic truths.

12:55Ryan Holiday: Well, it's not the happiest ending to that story, I guess. that is a little bit of the tragedy of Marcus Aurelius is that he seems to have made the best of a bad situation as opposed to have lived a wonderful and fulfilling life. But again, I guess we have to look at it in, if you run down the list of the things that happened to this guy, starting with, as we started this episode, his father dying when he was a young boy, It was probably about the happiest ending that you could have made from that set of story plot points. Sure. And we can certainly, I mean, for an upbeat, we can absolutely celebrate the survival of his notes.

13:44Imagine the story that historians would tell about Marcus if the meditations or the memorandum had not survived. and all we had was the equestrian statue, the military leader, you know, the emperor with the terrible rumors about, you know, whether he's even Commodus' father and Faustina and Nividus Cassius and Lucius Verus the playboy and all this other stuff, right? Right. And if all we had was the Historia Augusta and we didn't have the meditations, man, imagine our picture of Marcus. It would be so different. And so thank goodness, you know, thank Jupiter, right, that his notes did survive and that they are so useful to us.

14:32I mean, isn't this crazy? He wrote this for himself. And yet here we are peeking over his shoulder and we're drawing lessons that help us every day. No, that's true. For anyone, any walk of life, rich, poor, male, female, right? Right.

14:51Ryan Holiday: Well, look, I would add to that, and I thought this is what you're going to say. I think we should celebrate his survival period, like that this guy got out of bed every morning after the third funeral for one of his beloved children, let alone the ninth, that he did it after, you know, the rumors about his wife, the betrayal of his general, the plague, the famines, the floods, the wars. Like this guy, if there was ever a justification for throwing in the towel or giving up to say nothing of more extreme options, that the sheer fortitude and commitment and ultimately, I mean, at some level, he must have found pleasure in getting up every day.

15:37Ryan Holiday: Like there was some reason that he carried on. And that is an incredibly powerful thing. Despite the physical aches and pains, right? Didn't even get into that. Despite the physical ailments. Exactly. He chose not to take the route of Tiberias, retreating to the Isle of Capri, right? Just checking out. I'm going to my beautiful little island and the empire can just take care of itself, right? Right. Right. And so there he's lying in his army cot and he's like, he wants to stay in bed. And he says explicitly, no. Gotta get up. Look at the bees. Look at the ants. They're going about putting things in order in the natural world.

16:15That's my job as a human being, too. I'm going to do my job and I'm going to do it the best I can. That's what I'm called upon to do. I'm not going to check out. I'm not going to cop out. I'm going to stop postponing becoming a good a good man. It's urgent. You got to do it now. You only have the now. You don't have the future. You don't have the past. All you have is now. You got to make the best of it. every single day. And yeah, that is inspiring. We know what that's like to lie in bed and want to stay under the covers, right?

16:50Ryan Holiday: You got to get up. You got to do your job. There's stuff to do. Well, we did it. We managed to find an upbeat, a positive way to end this. And I really appreciate the time. And I thought the book is fantastic. Anyone who wants to learn more about Marcus should absolutely read it. And thank you very much. It was awesome. Thank you, Ryan. My pleasure. I really appreciate it.