Within decades of Cicero’s death, the exercise of power in Rome was being fundamentally reshaped. The struggle for power between the heir and aides of the murdered Julius Caesar, first against the forces of his assassins and then among themselves, led ultimately to the consolidation of military power in the hands of Octavian (the adopted son of Julius Caesar), who soon began to call himself ‘Imperator Caesar divi filius’ (‘General Caesar, son of the god’).1 That combination of military power and religious–personal authority connected to Julius Caesar allowed the younger Caesar to accrue new forms of political power, for example, summoning the Senate without any official authority to do so in 32 BCE, and then getting each of the municipalities in Italy to demand that he lead them in a last wave of battle against his erstwhile ally now allied with the queen of Egypt.²

Octavian did not abolish the republican magistracies. On the contrary, he presented himself as the restorer and defender of the republican constitution. But he demanded and received from the Senate new combinations of roles and powers for himself. He was in 27 BCE elected to a consulship in which he would serve continuously for several years (violating the republican requirement of yearly election), after which in 23 BCE he was accorded the powers of a tribune to preside over the Senate and veto the actions of any magistrate; he accrued other powers, positions and titles as well. The result of this unprecedented assemblage of powers in a single set of hands was recognized as something new with the titles of princeps senatus and princeps civitatis. Although the Senate granted those titles and itself continued to exist throughout the imperial period, as did the idea that the people were the ultimate source of imperial legal authority, the independence of the Senate’s deliberations and the meaningfulness of the people’s role would become so compromised as to become largely hollow.

The titles of princeps senatus and princeps civitatis suggested that Octavian was simply the first among equals. But the title of Caesar Augustus that had been conferred on him by the Senate in 27 BCE, ironically in gratitude for his having given up his powers with the end of the war (only to have new powers conferred upon him), confirmed what events had already made true: that he was now an unequal, with no true peers among his fellow citizens.³ Any remaining attempt to cling to a fiction of continued equality would eventually be abandoned when the Senate inaugurated the reign of Vespasian in 69 CE with what is called the lex de imperio Vespasiani, empowering the new emperor to act according to his discretion to do what he judged best, irrespective of the existing laws. This would break openly with the republican commitment to the principle of aequa libertas, or equality with respect to the laws.⁴ Still, the title of princeps gives its name to the whole period that historians call the ‘principate’, or the first phase of rule by emperors in Rome (27 BCE–284 CE). After that time begins the ‘dominate’, so called from the formal imperial title of dominus – master or lord – adopted in the reign of Diocletian.

As the varied titles adopted by Augustus and his successors suggest, there is no single word or concept that alone captures the emergence of new ideas of what may be called ‘sovereignty’ in imperial Rome. (‘Imperial Rome’ means in this chapter the Rome ruled by the emperors, as opposed to the territorial empire possessed by the Roman people, which had begun to be acquired centuries earlier under the republic as shown in the previous chapter.) Perhaps the closest is the word imperium, with the root sense of giving orders and being able to enforce obedience to them, describing powers that had been ascribed to a range of magistrates in the course of the republic. Imperium was accorded in an augmented form to Augustus in 23 BCE when (and despite the fact that) he formally resigned the consulship, and it would be granted to each successive emperor by a vote of the Senate. Yet the specific power of imperium (originally in the provinces, then for Augustus from within the city of Rome and over the whole of Italy, which was treated as a province) was only one of the powers that the emperors would enjoy. The proliferation of new titles for the emperors suggests that Romans struggled to articulate the sense in which the continuing roles of the people and the Senate were altered by confrontation with these individual rulers who, if they were made by the people in theory, ruled over them in unaccountable ways in practice. This chapter discusses ‘sovereignty’ not as the translation of any one particular Latin word, but rather as the emperors’ evolving set of powers, which combined, augmented or superseded the highest powers of the republican magistracies. To an even greater extent, it explores ‘sovereignty’ in terms of the control of one’s self, an interest that preoccupied many of the writers of this period – whether because they felt their ability to shape political events ebbing away, or because without such internal control even the powers of the emperor were of little value. To consider these dual themes of outer and inner sovereignty, we will examine aspects of the lives and writings of Tacitus, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Plutarch.

While the Romans were well aware of models of kingship in the world around them and in Greek history and theory, they could not simply adopt these models wholesale. Instead they had to evolve ways of thinking about the ideals and realities that the new sovereigns embodied, and about the ethical and political predicaments of those subject to them. The idea of Sovereignty marks the point at which the powers that still in Roman law theoretically emanated from the people were put, in practice, largely beyond the reach of their control. As with the idea of the Republic, this notion is radical for us today largely in its uncomfortable closeness to predicaments of our own. Whether such powers can somehow be guided without popular control and accountability, and how ordinary people should live under the powers that now dominate their lives, are questions that speak to the experiences of many today.

At the same time that these new sovereign figures were asserting themselves at the heart of Rome, the regime’s borders and the place of subject peoples within them were also undergoing transformation. We have been tracing the role of city walls and laws throughout this book, observing in Chapter 6 certain Stoic and Epicurean visions of a world not divided by the walls or laws of distinct cities. Those visions of the kosmos as demarcating the reach of natural fellowship took a new turn as Rome expanded. Now it became possible to see Rome itself as tantamount to a single cosmopolitan community. So a Greek orator would proclaim before Antoninus Pius in 155 CE, declaring that Rome had made of the whole world a single polis (Aelius Aristides, Or. 26.36). Instead of a vision of no walls, he likened the armies guarding Rome’s borders to the walls of a single giant city (however fancifully, given the shifting and contested frontiers of the time) (Or. 26.80–81).⁵ A few decades later, in 212 CE, the idea of a single set of laws for the whole empire would also be taken to a new level, when the emperor Caracalla promulgated the Constitutio Antoniniana, making all the free inhabitants of the empire into full citizens (and so conveniently subject to his increasingly punishing taxation demands).

In the course of these transformations, historians and philosophers debated the value and values of the emerging forms of sovereign rule, and the role that citizens should play under them. Deprived of the possibility of real political self-rule, many of the philosophers living under the empire were inclined instead to cultivate a form of self-rule, of personal sovereignty, to maintain a kind of immunity to the public depredations. Republican political ideals and Stoic philosophical ideals (as well as other schools of philosophical thought) were mined to provide critiques of sovereignty in addition to new conceptions of, or alternatives to, it.

A Republican Critique of Sovereignty

Despite the efforts of the early principate’s rulers to conserve the appearance of republican forms, many observers saw this as a figleaf for a fundamental abandonment of republican values. No one was more excoriating in this analysis than the historian Tacitus (P. Cornelius Tacitus, c. 55–118 CE). In his writings, he looked back to the history of Rome from the death of Augustus in 14 CE, all the way to 96 CE, when Domitian was assassinated.6 And in other writings, especially in his Dialogus de Oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory), written in a much more Ciceronian style of Latin than his other works, he reflected bitterly on the distance between republican mores and the attitudes possible under the new dispensation.⁷ Just as we found political ideas embedded in the Histories of Polybius, so emphatically do we find them in Tacitus (and so would other readers, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, when those jaundiced by the hubris and folly of early modern rulers found confirmation for the bleakness of their political outlook in his work).

Looking back to the years before his birth and those of his early childhood in the timespan he chronicled, Tacitus had first-hand experience of a wide range of imperial rulers. He held office under the emperor Domitian, whom he viewed as a tyrant, and then served as consul in 97 CE under Nerva, the first of the ‘Five Good Emperors’ of the Nervan–Antonine dynasty. (Ruling moderately, the reign of these men – each of whom adopted as his son a senator to become his successor – would be celebrated by the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon – author of the seminal History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – as ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.8) Yet, while he was acutely sensitive to the difference between good and bad emperors, Tacitus came to imply that the principate as an institution inherently tended to the destruction of liberty.

In the Annals, he dramatizes how senators who were proud of their republican heritage were brought under the thumb of the vicious emperors, as when Tiberius ascended to power after the death of Augustus Caesar in 14 CE: ‘at Rome people plunged into slavery – consuls, senators, knights’ (Annals 1.7).⁹ The image of these men, who had nominally been elected to lead the republic, being effectively enslaved by a tyrannical emperor, marks a trenchant political condemnation. It forms a counterpoint to the Stoic theses we have considered, according to which no wise man is actually a slave, even if he is cast into chains as what the world calls a slave. The Roman Stoic philosophers extolled the freedom of every wise man, even if he were legally a slave. Tacitus, in contrast, condemned as slaves to imperial tyranny even those men whom the world counted as pre-eminently free.

He implies a further critique – not merely of bad sovereigns but of sovereigns altogether – in his Dialogus De Oratoribus, written after 101 CE, with a dramatic date of 74 CE. This dialogue explores the decision of a Roman writer to renounce oratory and law in favour of dramatic poetry. This was one model of coping with the pressures of the principate, but one that Tacitus himself adopted only in fits and starts (he withdrew from active political life at various points but then took on certain roles over the years, while at the same time constructing another form of identity and autonomy relevant to his political and social standing, by writing his histories and other works).10 Among those gathered are men who are senators and have held high elected offices: they have lived the full extent of political life that the principate allows. And yet, even when one of them celebrates his enjoyment of his oratorical powers in political life, he views the favour of the emperor as among the highest successes that he used them to win (7.1, 8.1–3).

Another participant looks back to the greater effectiveness of rhetoric under the republic, which, although torn by disagreement and civil strife, was genuinely governed by the convictions imparted to the people by its orators. He plays with the idea that in genuinely well-governed states there is no need for orators; orators reigned in Athens and Rhodes, not in Sparta or Crete (40.3). If a single wise monarch makes all the decisions, oratory would indeed be useless (41.4). The question is left open as to whether the princeps of the day qualifies as a single wisest monarch. If not, the picture of rhetoric under the principate as a matter of flattery and attention-seeking looks dark indeed. And, even if he does, is not liberty lost along with oratory, in the name of good government? That question Tacitus leaves provocatively unresolved.¹¹

A Stoic Idealization of Sovereignty

While Tacitus would ruminate on the possible loss of liberty even under a good emperor, a Roman thinker of the previous generation had pinned political hope on being able to cultivate a sovereign to rule well rather than badly. This was done in a philosophical rather than an historical vein by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, tutor and then political adviser to Nero (who reigned 54–68 CE). A Stoic in philosophical adherence who was also a playwright and man of letters, Seneca never wrote a De Re Publica along the lines of the Politeia works composed by the Stoic founders Zeno and Chrysippus (and previously by Plato). Instead of delineating the constitution or laws of an ideal commonwealth, he tellingly composed an account of the idealized prince – a sign that the welfare of the polity had already become overwhelmingly dependent on the virtues or vices of a single man.

In the case of Nero, after the hopeful moment of his accession at age sixteen that Seneca heralded with his treatise, the vices would predominate. Among other enormities, Nero would eventually enjoy having Christians burned at the stake and using the light to illuminate his garden, and he would ultimately become so suspicious of Seneca’s political intentions that he would order him to commit suicide. But when Seneca wrote De Clementia (On Mercy) in 54, all that was in the future, and Seneca’s hopes lay in his effort to shape Nero’s reign for the good. He advises the prince that ‘your commonwealth [rei publicae] is your body and you are its mind’ (1.5).¹² As the animating mind of the commonwealth, the prince must model himself on the gods: ‘because the gods … are the best example for the prince … he should wish to be such to the citizens, as he would wish the gods to be to him’ (1.7). The prince here is given the most exalted possible standard of conduct: the good order of the commonwealth and even of the cosmos depends on his rectitude and virtue.

Of course, the idea of a good king or monarch was not new, and there were plenty of diverse intellectual resources in Greek and Roman thought and in the neighbouring societies with which they engaged on which Seneca could draw, even while maintaining his principal philosophical identity as a Stoic. The ideal of monarchy had never been absent from Greek political thought. We met it at various points in earlier chapters, including as one of the three basic kinds of constitution in Herodotus (Chapter 2); in the strands of Macedonian, Persian and other regime practices that Alexander the Great melded into the image of himself as a new kind of ruler; and in the Hellenistic ideals of the king as a living law that arose in the successor kingdoms in Alexander’s wake (both, Chapter 6).

There were other important developments of a monarchical ideal too. Perhaps most important was that by Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato and friend of Socrates, who led almost as adventurous a life as Polybius. He wrote an encomium of the education of the earlier monarch Cyrus the Great of Persia, who had reigned in the 6th century BCE. That work articulated an ideal of kingship in the very heyday of classical Greek political theory that would be available for those reviving and inventing new practices of monarchical rule or sway to appropriate. Xenophon also wrote an epistle to Nicocles, the prince of Cyprus, on how to rule his subjects.

Yet Seneca’s development of these ideas in a Roman context, composing a work of the kind that would become known as a ‘mirror for princes’ (understood as a highly refracting mirror designed to make the prince see himself in a certain light), is still striking. The commonwealth, however autonomous it might have been under the republic, is now incapable of thinking or self-direction without its prince. That imposes on him a noblesse oblige. But it does so at the cost of divesting the citizens – even the high-status senators like Seneca himself – of meaningful political authority.

Political Ethics under Sovereign Rule

That approach is reflected in the tensions that Seneca himself experienced in living under a sovereign. The son of a prominent Roman citizen from Spain, Seneca was, like many sons of wealthy and ambitious provincial men, educated in rhetoric and philosophy in Rome. He made his reputation as an orator, served in high elected offices and joined the Senate, all as Cicero had done. Yet his life was threatened, and he was banished, because of the emperor Claudius’ jealous suspicion of him; and, while he then returned to favour as tutor and adviser to Nero (the son of Claudius’ wife Agrippina, who was adopted by her husband), he would eventually be suspected of conspiracy, and committed suicide upon Nero’s orders in 65 CE. Such subjection to the arbitrary power of one man, without even the chance to battle for republican equality as Cicero had sought to do, marks a distinct break between a political life under the republic and one under the principate.

Seneca never gave up on the idea that the patria is to be counted among the primary goods for human beings (Ep. 66.36, 66.37), and that it is in his own patria that a citizen should wish ideally to display his virtue (Ep. 85.40). But one could only serve the patria to the extent that it – or, rather, its new sovereign prince – would allow a political culture to exist in which it could be served. And in Seneca’s day, that culture was deeply flawed. This was the reasoning by which he reconciled his sometime aversion to public life with his allegiance to a Stoic school whose founder had said that the wise man ‘will go into public life, unless something impedes’.

Seneca goes so far as to argue that the effective implication of that injunction by Zeno is identical to the seemingly opposite Epicurean doctrine that the wise man ‘will not go into public life, unless something interferes’ (both as reported by Seneca in De Otio (On the Private Life) 3.2).13 The more seemingly positive Stoic doctrine merges with the quietist Epicurean one when it is recognized that ‘if the public realm is too corrupt to be helped, if it has been taken over by the wicked, the wise man will not struggle pointlessly nor squander himself to no avail’ (all the more so, he adds, if the wise man also lacks sufficient health, authority or strength) (De Otio 3.3). The path of the wise man in a corrupt public realm is one of leisured withdrawal (otium), not active engagement (negotium).¹⁴

And yet Seneca does not leave it at that. For the withdrawal to otium in respect of the affairs of the commonwealth leaves the wise man open to serve what he calls a greater commonwealth. This is the use to which he now puts the Stoic idea of being a cosmopolitan citizen. For Seneca, this community of cosmopolitan citizens is not (as for the early Stoics) the perfected province of the wise. Nor is it, as for the orator Aelius Aristides quoted above, coterminous with Rome. It is rather a fellowship of all potentially rational beings. Here is his expression of the implications of this idea in De Otio (4.1–2):

We must grasp that there are two public realms, two commonwealths [duas res publicas]. One is great and truly common to all, where gods as well as men are included, where we look not to this corner or that, but measure its bounds by the path of the sun. The other is that in which we are enrolled by an accident of birth – I mean Athens or Carthage or some other city that belongs not to all men but only to a limited number. Some devote themselves at the same time to both commonwealths, the greater and the lesser, some only to the one or the other. We can serve this greater commonwealth even in retirement – indeed better, I suspect, in retirement – by inquiring what virtue is …

Here we find a continuation of the idea of the res publica as the organizing conception for political life into the imperial period – together with its doubling into two: the res publica of any actual and particular political unit, versus the res publica of gods and men, coextensive with the cosmos. Both commonwealths may be served, but in different ways: the traditionally politically bounded one (‘lesser’ in size) with active political service, the ‘greater’ one in size by philosophizing in leisure or retirement (otium), withdrawing from worldly affairs (negotium) in order the better to serve one’s larger commonwealth through philosophical contemplation. It is in this sense of philosophical service that Seneca enjoins that one should consider oneself ‘a citizen and soldier of the cosmos’ (Ep. 120.12).15

Chances to serve the lesser commonwealth – the actual Roman polity – were by contrast limited by the corruption of values and opportunities experienced within it. Despite the natural inclination to sociability that he as a Stoic recognizes, Seneca takes a bleak view of the crowded Roman forum and circus in which public life was variously lived: ‘Life is the same here as in a school of gladiators – living together means fighting together’ (De Ira (On Anger) 2.8).16 In corrupt social conditions, the cruel, merciless social and political struggle for advancement, even for existence, makes it hard for anyone to live virtuously: ‘our public madness makes this a difficult task; we drive each other into vice’ (Ep. 41.9).¹⁷ Public life is a source of conflict, corruption and temptation. It is better to watch elections in tranquillity than to participate in them (Ep. 118.3). Cicero and his brother Quintus had corresponded feverishly about how to win elections; Seneca notes how different he is from Cicero in preferring to keep away from them (Ep. 118.2).

Seneca’s disillusioned stance was far from a universal view in a society where many people enthusiastically engaged in campaigns for local office, such as in Pompeii, where painted electoral ‘posters’ survive with dozens of voices, including women’s, advocating their favourite candidates.¹⁸ (The English word ‘candidate’ comes from the bleached white toga candida that those standing for public office wore.¹⁹) But to Seneca, from a stance of philosophical reflection (and despite his own history of being elected to high offices), striving for public honour is likely to lead to disappointment or even self-endangerment. ‘[P]ublic office’ is, like money and the body, one of ‘those things over which chance exercises power’, and therefore ‘servile’ (Ep. 66.23). It is not befitting of anyone whose ethical goal, as should be the ethical goal of everyone, is to be free. Freedom is no longer best embodied in political participation, though it is an idea originally modelled in political terms: now it resides in the conduct of the self.20

Ethics as One’s Own Sovereign

If moral or ethical freedom is the most important value, and it can be attained only by the wise and virtuous man (the Stoic sage), how should one live to approach this goal? All of the Roman Stoic authors had much practical advice to give on this front. Indeed, to the extent that one withdrew from the public realm, the private realm of self-fashioning, of ruling one’s own body and desires in place of attempting to rule over others, became a favoured domain for ethical practice. If one could not escape a wayward sovereign in the public realm, one could make oneself one’s own sovereign in personal behaviour.²¹

For Seneca, the fundamental practice is a nightly self-examination of the good and bad deeds that he has performed, and the inclinations he has experienced, in the course of the day (De Clementia 3.36): he recommends a similar practice to the prince. The aim of such exercises is to maintain the rule of reason in one’s soul, extirpating the everyday emotions, as they are not saturated by rational determination. By doing this, one can free oneself from fear of even the most terrible harm that one might ever face (such as being tortured on a rack, a common Roman punishment), and therefore face good and bad fortune with the same equanimity. Seneca asks himself in a letter: ‘are reclining at a dinner party and being tortured equal?’, meaning, will a wise man consider these two possible fates with equal equanimity? He replies with an emphatic yes (Ep. 71.21).

Fundamental threats to self-rule came from the unregulated, irrational passions that go by the name of emotion in ordinary parlance (for Stoics, there were more rational responses that should replace them). For Seneca, one of the most important challenges was anger (an emotion in which as an aristocratic Roman he was perhaps freer to indulge from childhood than were those more servile to their patrons and betters). Dedicating a whole essay to this one emotion (De Ira), here, as in his other essays and letters, Seneca wrote, in part, to offer therapy to himself and his fellows. Not uniquely (Cicero had discussed the emotions in a similar way in the Tusculan Disputations), but characteristically, Seneca prescribes practical steps about ‘how not to fall into anger … on how to free ourselves from anger, and … on how the angry should be restrained, pacified and brought back to sanity’ (3.5).22

Seneca personifies anger as an enemy in war, which must be stopped at the ‘city gates’ of the mind rather than allowed to conquer and usurp the role of reason (1.8). Here the city walls have become internalized: the city for which we have responsibility is first of all our own mind (borrowing a Platonic image from the Republic). Developing in Stoic vein what was originally a Platonic challenge to the validity of the frequent anger that had animated Athenians’ social and political struggles for respect, and now informed Roman ones, Seneca insists again and again that anger is both useless and counter-productive, ‘even in battle or in war. With its wish to bring others into danger, it lowers its own guard. The surest courage is to look around long and hard, to govern oneself, to move slowly and deliberately forward’ (1.11).

Seneca was well aware of the castigation that would be launched against such a stance – it would be disparaged as unworldly and unnatural, even inhuman and vicious. To counter objections that anger is natural, admirable and befitting of ruling men, Seneca tells stories of the cruelty and self-destructive folly caused by the anger of kings. He recalls Alexander the Great’s murder of a friend for showing too little flattery (De Ira 3.17). Closer to home, he recalls the action of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, who during his brief reign (37–41 CE) had torn down a villa in revenge for the fact that his mother had once been held there under house arrest. That angry act of destruction was self-defeating: it resulted only in drawing people’s attention to the destruction and therefore to what had occasioned it: his mother’s shame (3.22). According to Seneca all anger, like all conduct driven by passions rather than governed by reason, is self-defeating in an even more fundamental sense. By allowing oneself to be moved by passions, one fails to achieve the rational self-control that constitutes virtue. One allows oneself to be a slave rather than attaining the status of someone truly free.23

This Stoic stance was all the more compelling when voiced by someone who had been a slave himself. The Stoic Epictetus (c. 55–135 CE) has already been mentioned. He was born a slave in what is now Turkey, bought by a freedman who was a secretary to Nero – so he, like Seneca, found himself at Nero’s court in Rome. Having been freed by his master, he eventually established his own school in the Greek city of Nicopolis. His sayings were compiled in a book of Dissertationes (Discourses), along with a handbook to his philosophy (the Enchiridion), by his student Arrian.

Epictetus’ emphasis on theory for the sake of practice was a departure, even something of an inversion, of the early Stoic insistence that ethics flowed out of physics. He stresses ataraxia (tranquillity) as the interpretation of the end of happiness, actively competing on the same turf as the Epicureans and Sceptics. But he still invokes the Stoic understanding of the cosmic order in explaining how one might best achieve tranquillity: by philosophizing in order to realize that freedom comes from wishing only what Zeus wills. Living in accordance with this norm-saturated nature will bring virtue and freedom.

If Seneca, contending with quarrelsome and ambitious courtiers, was especially preoccupied with the dangers posed by the emotion of anger, Epictetus was especially attuned – perhaps given the losses he had suffered in slavery – to the dangers posed by the emotion of grief. As reported in the Discourses, he chastised students who joined his school just to ‘acquire a bookish disposition’; the worthwhile reason to study Stoicism is rather ‘to work on eliminating from one’s life grief and lamentation, the “Woe is me!” and “Alas, alack!” along with misfortune and bad luck’ – so that one will not lament like Priam or Oedipus or any king in tragedy (‘for tragedies are nothing but the sufferings of people who are impressed by externals, performed in the right sort of meter’).24 He insists that each person has the capacity to make a moral choice in what he believes and desires that is free of ‘hindrance, compulsion and impediment’. Even if threatened with death, one is not compelled to do what the threatener demands: ‘It’s not because you are threatened, but it’s because you believe that it is better to do this or that rather than to die.’ It is ‘your opinion that compelled you’, just as all action is determined by what we think. This is why emotions are at bottom only false beliefs.²⁵

One of Epictetus’ readers would become an emperor. Although not exclusively doctrinaire in his Stoicism, with a mix of philosophical inclinations including a strong current of Platonism, Marcus Aurelius likewise concerned himself with the practice of self-rule – even while he came to rule as emperor in Rome.²⁶ Marcus Aurelius is classed as the last of the ‘Five Good Emperors’ mentioned earlier (reigning first jointly, and then alone, in the course of the period 161–80 CE, during which he won important military campaigns and also lived an admirable domestic familial life). Writing in Greek, he composed a set of Meditations while at war that reveal the voice of an emperor beset with cares. Seneca had prescribed nightly self-examination; Marcus Aurelius begins Book 2 with the injunction to ‘Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men’ – but all of them act so only out of ignorance, and none of them can harm you, nor should you be angry with them (2.1).²⁷ (He seems not to have been one of life’s natural early risers. Book 5 begins, ‘At dawn of day, when you dislike being called …’ (5.1)²⁸)

The emperor is as suspicious of mere bookishness as was Epictetus. The goal of philosophy is to achieve genuine tranquillity: ‘put away your thirst for books, so that you may not die murmuring, but truly reconciled and grateful from your heart to the gods’ (2.3).29 And he admonishes himself and his eventual reader against the fear of death, of course a constant concern for one commanding his troops in battle. He insists that no death is untimely, for each of us dies when nature ushers us out, ‘as though the master of the stage, who engaged an actor, were to dismiss him from the stage’ (12.36).³⁰ We were born not at our own behest, but in accordance with the divine plan infusing nature; so, too, we should accept our death will be so also. Hence one should not commit suicide, but otherwise there is nothing to resist or fear in death. Here again is the echo of Socrates, and an insistence that death is not to be feared that was shared for varying reasons by the Platonists, Stoics and Epicureans alike.³¹ True tranquillity lies not in political institutions, but rather in this philosophical understanding.

By this stage, Stoics like Epictetus and Seneca had come for their own distinctive reasons to converge with the Epicurean view that one should focus primarily on one’s private life: serving the political ruler when necessary, but not expecting that political service to supply the tranquillity that only a properly constituted mind can attain. Marcus Aurelius was in the unusual position of being an emperor, with duties to his people that it behoved him to fulfil. Yet his Meditations reveal that as important to him as was ruling his empire, it was even more fundamentally important to him to succeed in ruling over himself.

Freedom and Convention

The condemnation of the fear of death as unworthy of a rational being, and of the attractiveness of servile goods like money, body and public office, was, for Seneca and his fellow Stoics, part and parcel of their prizing of freedom as an individual virtue. In a world where law precisely defined the status of slave and free man in social relations, the Roman Stoics reiterated their school’s teaching that there was a second and more fundamental scale on which these positions were to be judged: not social or legal, but ethical. Someone who is a legal slave (as Epictetus himself had been) may be ethically free – that is to say, free in the only truly meaningful sense of the word. Conversely, someone who is a legal self-master and so free man (liber) may be ethically and so, truly, a slave. The former legal slave Epictetus (his name in Greek, Epiktetos, simply means ‘acquired’, identifying him as someone who had been bought by a master) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius are equal candidates for ethical freedom. Social and legal standing neither excludes it for the one nor guarantees it for the other.

In the case of slavery, this analysis tended to be used by Roman Stoics in a politically quietist way, meaning so as not to make waves in established legal and political arrangements. For example, they accepted the continued existence of conventional legal slavery even while arguing that ‘true’ slavery was independent of the status dictated by that convention. But in the case of women, at least one Roman Stoic drew on this account of freedom and virtue to argue strongly against certain gendered social conventions of the time (as the early Stoics, indebted to Cynic anti-conventionalism, had done more ubiquitously, as we saw in Chapter 6). This was Musonius Rufus, a considerably younger contemporary of Seneca, who survived banishment by Nero, becoming the teacher of Epictetus and a revered figure in Rome (he was specially exempted from a banishment of philosophers in 71 CE), and so forming an important link in the chain of Roman Stoic thought. He is also a paradigm of the debt to Socrates in Stoic thought.

Musonius Rufus’ argument that women should practise philosophy runs along similar lines to Plato’s Republic, but universalizes the claim there that only certain women and men are capable of philosophizing, in line with the Stoic view of the naturalness and universality of human rationality. He is quoted as saying:

Women as well as men … have received from the gods the gift of reason … Likewise the female has the same senses as the male: namely, sight, hearing, smell, and the others. Also both have the same parts of the body, and one has nothing more than the other. Moreover, not men alone, but women, too, have a natural inclination towards virtue and the capacity for acquiring it … If this is true, by what reason would it ever be appropriate for men to search out and consider how they may lead good lives, which is exactly the study of philosophy, but inappropriate for women? Could it be that it is fitting for men to be good, but not for women?³²

Musonius Rufus presumes that most women will continue to play their traditional gender role in the Roman sense of managing the household (a role that in Rome at the time could involve owning land and property in their own names, and engaging in commerce and in many aspects of public life, despite needing male representatives to carry out most legal transactions). That social role, however, will best be played by women who have exercised their divinely endowed capacity of reason to achieve virtue – which, for the Roman, will be done best ‘by the woman who studies philosophy’.33 Rufus argues further that getting married is compatible with practising philosophy. The natural strength of the bond between married spouses is a keystone of the development of the natural sociability that also supports the city and eventually the reproduction of the species.³⁴

In these positions, which we might today call feminist,³⁵ we see how a Roman Stoic could practise the kind of sharp criticism of social conventions that we saw in the Republic of Zeno and of Chrysippus. But we also see the way in which he limited his attention to certain oppressive and irrational conventions while tacitly accepting others. One of Rufus’ points in favour of marriage is that it needn’t be an obstacle to philosophy insofar as the need to provide care for one’s wife and children (here still picturing the philosopher as typically male) can largely be delegated to the house slaves that he presumes will be there to serve the philosopher.³⁶ Making freedom a matter of ethical achievement does not make it inherently incompatible with subordination of others. In some contexts, Stoic ethics could lead to a radical position, as for Musonius Rufus on gender; in others, as for the same figure on slavery, it could condone acceptance of existing inequalities.

Looking Back at the Republic

A final measure of the complex stance towards politics adopted by many thinkers under the empire may be taken by returning to a century before Marcus Aurelius, to an almost exact contemporary of Tacitus with whom the main part of this chapter began. We find there, in the late 1st to 2nd centuries CE, a biographer and philosopher who looked back to the lives of the Greek and Roman statesmen of the classical period – before the principate – even while accepting monarchy as a philosophical ideal in his own time.37 This was Plutarch, a Greek from a small city on the outskirts of the empire (Chaeronea, in Boeotia).

Plutarch’s life combined many of the themes of philosophy and politics that we have been considering. He became a philosophical Platonist by studying at the Platonic Academy in Athens. He was honoured with Roman citizenship, while living the life of a local magistrate and of a priest in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi (near his home town). At the same time, he lived out the tensions common to all educated and civically active Greeks under Roman hegemony. In an essay written around 100 CE, he advises a Greek friend seeking local public office to remember that ‘you are subject as well as ruler … you must make your cloak more humble, look out from your office to the proconsul’s dais, don’t puff yourself up at or trust too much in your crown (you can see the boots over your head).’³⁸

It is to this man, Plutarch, that we owe many of the received images of the Greek and Roman legislators and politicians, which he transmitted to an eager posterity. His portrait of Sparta, for example, in his life of Lycurgus, uniquely portrays the Spartan legislator as having prohibited the writing down of his laws in an effort better to instil values through practice and memory.39 More generally, in his portraits of the political leaders of Athens and republican Rome especially, Plutarch also fashions a paradigm opposition between admirable statesmen and dangerous demagogues (while writing lives of men of both kinds). He sees demagogues as flattering and pandering the people, and statesmen as telling them what they needed to hear even when they didn’t want to hear it. In this vein, he follows in Thucydides’ view of Pericles as rule by the first man, calling him ‘aristocratic and kingly’ (Per. 14.2) once he had given up his initial experimentation with demagogic methods.

Like Pericles, many of these statesmen cultivated their virtue through exposure to philosophy, but what mattered was not whether they gained substantive knowledge (here Plutarch differed from his master Plato), but only whether philosophical training made them sufficiently moderate and self-disciplined. Philosophy in Plutarch’s hands was primarily a mainstay of democratic and especially republican virtue, and so of political freedom.⁴⁰ If the Hellenistic schools ultimately emancipated philosophy from politics, at least on some points (as in their treatment of death), Plutarch turned philosophy into the handmaiden of politics, reconciling the two classical strands that we have been considering throughout this book.

Like many of his readers today, Plutarch lived in the shadow of the ideals of political liberty – able to hold office in his Greek city, enjoying the prerogatives of Roman republican citizenship, but also knowing himself to be subject in crucial ways to rulers whose actions ordinary citizens could not fully control, and being keenly aware of Greek and Roman regimes in the past that he believed had included more complete experiences of political freedom and participation. The continuities and discontinuities of politics under imperial Rome with idealized Greek and Roman pasts included vaunted veneers alongside some real threads of similarity and influence. His struggle to take the measure of these political ideals of the past, and to reckon what they could mean in his changed political circumstances, is a predicament shared by his readers, and by readers of this book. The radical nature of late Roman sovereignty as a political idea in our own time lies in its posing the question of what self-rule really means whenever popular control seems more a promise or an illusion than a reality.