Marcus Aurelius

FOR LONG STRETCHES of the Meditations Marcus keeps very close to Stoic orthodoxy, even making a nod to Chrysippus and the founding fathers by agreeing that the world will be consumed by fire.1 Yet it is the aphoristic Marcus, dispensing saws, adages and apothegms that can be appreciated by people without any knowledge of or interest in Stoicism, that has ensured his popularity down the ages. Some of these maxims are both pithy and striking. ‘All you have to remember is three things: when it comes to matter, you’re just a tiny part of it; when it comes to time, your share is a tiny and fleeting moment; and when it comes to Fate, your role in it is tiny.’² ‘It is crazy to want what is impossible, and impossible for the wicked not to do so.’³ ‘Does the sun try to do the rain’s work? Or Asclepius Demeter’s? And what about each of the stars – so different yet working in common?’⁴ ‘Ambition means linking your well-being to what other people say or do; self-indulgence means linking it to the things that happen to you alone; but sanity means linking it to your own actions.’⁵ ‘Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People with rabies are terrified of water. And a child’s idea of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you? Do you think falsehood is less powerful than bile or a rabid dog?’⁶ ‘Never assume something’s impossible because you find it hard. You should recognise that, if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.’⁷ ‘This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you chose tomorrow.’⁸ ‘Never let go of philosophy, no matter what happens. And don’t waste time bandying words with philistines and crackpots.’⁹ ‘Stupidity is expecting figs in winter, or children in old age.’10 ‘The student should be a boxer, not a fencer; the fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again; but the boxer’s weapon is part of him – all he has to do is clench his fist.’¹¹ ‘Practise even what seems impossible. The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.’¹² It is this kind of epigrammatic richness that has always made Marcus Aurelius a favourite with devotees of ‘self-help’ and why, except for the purist, his reflections are usually preferred to the more enigmatic and esoteric ones of Epictetus.

Yet the essential Marcus lies neither in his role as a purveyor of Stoic orthodoxy nor as a dispenser of popular axioms and folk-remedies, but in those areas where his thought is at its most idiosyncratic: in the discussion of religion; in his treatment of evil; and in his reflections on death. His attitude to religion and the gods is problematical not just because he exhibits the usual Stoic confusion between theism and pantheism, but because of his official (and apparently sincere) devotion to the traditional polytheistic religion of the Olympians, the state religion to which he was committed as chief priest or pontifex maximus. Until the coming of the Roman empire, the post had usually been held by a member of one of the prominent families; Julius Caesar, for instance, was appointed in 63 BC and kept the office until his death. In republican times it was not a full-time job, and the holder could also hold a secular magistracy or serve in the military.¹³ From the time of Augustus it became customary for the emperor to be pontifex maximus; he would usually have a vice-master to carry out his duties when he was absent from Rome.¹⁴ The prestige of the post came from the administration of the divine law (ius divinum), making the chief priest the principal conduit to the gods. Among his functions were consecrating temples and altars, carrying out expiatory ceremonies to ward off or palliate pestilence, plague, famine, flood, lightning strikes, and so on; the regulation of the calendar; the administration of the law relating to burials; superintending marriages; administering the law relating to adoptions and wills; and custodianship of state archives and official records and minutes of decisions taken by the magistracies.¹⁵ Marcus inherited this mantle as senior partner in the empire in 161, but a secret unbeliever would presumably have used the opportunity to slough off this part of the emperor’s job onto Lucius Verus; quite the reverse happened, for Marcus employed as his pontifex minor a certain M. Livius, whose task was to oversee all cults in Rome, both indigenous ones and foreign imports, whether Greek or Asian. It seems clear that Marcus wanted Verus as far away from the state religion as possible.16

Most educated Romans and most emperors did not really believe in the Olympian gods (or, indeed, any gods). It was almost a badge of honour for the senatorial class to be sceptics, as though this was a mark of their status, and belief in the gods something for the mob at the arena and the Circus.¹⁷ Cicero was a convinced atheist, but thought religion and belief in the Olympians played a vital part in promoting social stability. Long before William James, the Romans had invented the pragmatic argument for religion. But Marcus Aurelius presents a conundrum, for there are clear signs in him of a belief in traditional religion. Naturally a sophisticated reading of the use of Olympian polytheism by successive emperors can easily construe it as an allegory for deism or pantheism,¹⁸ but this is difficult to do in Marcus’s case, not only because he mentions the deities of Greek and Roman mythology so often – Clotho, the Muses, Zeus, Asclepius, not to mention a fertility goddess¹⁹ – but because his coinage foregrounds the traditional deities like Minerva, Mars and Jupiter instead of emphasising the glorious and legendary early figures of Roman history, as Antoninus Pius did on his coins.²⁰ The other well-known aspect of Marcus’s traditional worship was his fondness for sacrifice, an attribute shared with a later ‘intellectual’ emperor, Julian the Apostate. This propensity was burlesqued in a ditty of the times: ‘the white cattle to Marcus, greeting. If you conquer on the frontier, there is an end of us’.²¹ At the very least there is a tension between Marcus Aurelius’s cult practice as high priest and his philosophical beliefs as a Stoic. Critics have read this in different ways. One describes him as ‘a Stoic philosopher of the superstitious rather than the rational type’.²² Renan thought him a great intellect who could not quite surmount and abjure the supernatural.²³ Perhaps the most convincing explanation for Marcus’s apparent eccentricity in the matter of the Olympians is that he was using the state religion to promote very heavily the notion of the divine right of emperors – an idea he had taken over from Antoninus Pius.²⁴

He founded an oracle that charged extortionate sums for making ‘true predictions’ and made a fortune from it. He even hooked up a primitive form of autophone, with long tubes and wind pipes interconnecting, so that the ‘god’ would appear to answer people’s questions.²⁸ He made another pile of money by pretending that he had a febrifuge that could protect people against all known diseases. His favourite scam was getting people to ask the gods questions in papers sealed with wax. The papers would be returned with the seals apparently unbroken and convincing answers relayed to the petitioners, but in fact Alexander had perfected an ingenious method for burning through the wax, reading the letters and then resealing them.29 He was a master of the usual bogus ‘cold reading’ responses, and one of his favourite dodges was to recommend sham ‘remedies’ and prescriptions, naturally charging a fee for each ‘consultation’. While indulged by the Stoics, Alexander was detested by both the Epicureans and the Christians, who saw right through him; he returned their hatred manyfold and indulged in vicious propaganda warfare against both groups.³⁰ He was yet another in the long line of homosexualists who denounce ‘the vice’ while practising it themselves. How he escaped exposure as a charlatan is a nice question, but local magistrates hesitated to prosecute leaders of sects, partly because the entire sect then demanded to be lodged and fed at public expense because it was denied the ‘sustenance’ of its leaders.³¹ In Alexander’s case there was the additional factor that he had powerful friends like Rutilianus. He successfully petitioned Marcus to have his native city renamed Ionopolis and even gained from the emperor the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to mint his own coinage.³² Moreover, later on military campaign Marcus took his advice, with embarrassing results (see here). Marcus’s partiality for such an obvious impostor is one of the things that have led some of his modern critics to doubt the calibre of his mind.

It is tempting to see Marcus’s different oscillations – between pantheism, the official doctrine of the Stoics and the Olympian polytheism he had the civic duty to propagate, and between superstition and scepticism – as the product of a self-induced confusion. Yet it is clear that at least some of these confusions and self-contradictions were already there in the work of Epictetus, who was also capable of moving, without prior notice, between three entirely different notions of God: the polytheistic Olympian creed, God as logos or Nature and God as the ‘god within’ – not so much a case of ‘double-talk’, but more like triple-talk. Some apologists for Epictetus claim that his references to ‘Zeus’ are simply his demotic way of addressing a crowd and that ‘Zeus’ always means logos or universal reason. Yet some of his statements are simply impossible to interpret that way and pay more than just lip-service to polytheism: ‘Let your desires and your aversions become attached to Zeus, and to the other gods, give them to them, let them govern them, and let this desire and this aversion be ranged in accordance with them.’³³ As against a deistic stance, Epictetus often pictures God as an Olympic coach, one it would make sense to pray to.34 Some of his remarks would fit very well in a ‘God made me’ Christian catechism. ‘This body made of mud: how could God have created it free of impediments? He therefore submitted it to the revolution of the universe, as he did with my possessions, my furniture, my house, my children, and my wife. Why, then, should I fight against God? Why should I wish for things that ought not to be wished for?’³⁵ Epictetus further argues that we should not blame God for taking anything away from us, as he gave us everything in the first place; by the same token, we should not pray to the gods for favours, but sing songs of praise for the benefits they have already given us.³⁶ And he recommends that the good, moral man should depart this life with the following words on his lips for the Maker: ‘I leave full of gratefulness to you, for you have judged me worthy of celebrating the festival with you, of contemplating your works, and of following together with you the way in which you govern the world.’³⁷

Yet Epictetus consistently muddies the waters. Not only is he confused as between ‘the gods’ of official religion and God as reason or logos, but, having categorically stated that God is transcendent, ‘out there’, he then changes tack and speaks of an immanent deity, the ‘god within’. ‘You are carrying God around, you poor thing, and you don’t know it. Do you think I am talking about an external God made of gold or silver? You are carrying him around inside yourself, and you fail to realise that you defile him with unclean thoughts and foul actions.’³⁸ As if the contrast between an immanent and transcendent God did not make the picture cloudy enough, Epictetus also gives us occasional measures of full-throated pantheism: ‘What else am I, a lame old man, capable of except singing hymns to God? If I were a nightingale, I would do the nightingale’s thing and if I were a swan, a swan’s. Well, I am a rational creature; so I must sing hymns to God. This is my task: I do it and I will not abandon this position as long as it is granted to me, and I urge you to sing this same song.’³⁹ To this already turgid brew Epictetus adds further ingredients, turning the soup into a dark, turbid pool. He links the argument about how we should conceive and interpet God (literally, symbolically, allegorically or pantheistically) with the quite separate Stoic confusions about an individual and a general Providence, and whether said Providence is something especially designed for the sage, from which lesser beings are excluded, but may also benefit indirectly.40 With his lack of interest in cosmology, Epictetus failed to spot the contradiction between gods or God being uninterested in ‘unimportant’ men and the fact that Providence or Destiny has designed them as such since the beginning of the world; sadly, Marcus also fell into the selfsame trap.⁴¹

In general Marcus incorporates all Epictetus’s confusions about God and adds further elements of his own. His treatment of the divine faculty within us, or daimon, is particularly obscure. Why does he tack between a number of different terms, all of which seem to mean the same: self, intellect (nous), guiding principle (hegemonikon) and inner daimon ? Is the daimon merely a synonym for reason? Is it simply the godlike portion within each person (the god within) or should it be understood more like the Christian idea of a guardian angel? In other words, should it be conceived as an immanent or transcendent entity? Sometimes he seems to imply that the correct meaning must be something like ‘guardian angel’, for otherwise what would be the point of sacrifices, oaths and prayers?⁴² Part of the problem is that Marcus has added an extra layer to the basic Stoic mind/body dualism, by introducing a third element and producing a troika of body, pneuma and intelligence or even, as we have seen (see here), by replacing a Stoic trio with a quincunx, but without saying what the basis of his reasoning is. Another difficulty is the semantic point of not knowing when we are comparing like with like, for Marcus identifies the ‘command post’ of the self with reason (nous), whereas orthodox Stoicism located it in the soul (psyche). Let us leave on one side the awkward ‘sore thumb’ of a self that is supposedly one, yet divided. Even if we could clear away all the thorny linguistic issues, there is no getting round the fact that, in discussing daimon (as well as in discussing God in general, though we cannot be sure that they are synonymous terms), Marcus confusingly oscillates between an immanent meaning⁴³ and a transcendent one.⁴⁴

In discussing God, Marcus moves some way from the position of his supposed teacher, Epictetus, and this may be, as has been suggested, simply a difference in their life-experience, their temperament and, most obviously, their social status.⁴⁵ Certainly, in contrast to Epictetus, Marcus rarely refers to God in the singular, preferring to talk of Nature or the Whole, which clearly allows us to see the gap between Epictetus the theist and Marcus the pantheist.⁴⁶ On the other hand, strict pantheism would imply that the divine order would be concerned only with the design and running of the cosmos, not with individual humans or even humanity at all, so that sacrifices, prayers and oaths would make no sense. Marcus never decides categorically between the idea of gods that we can appeal to and the pantheistic notion of an impersonal deity woven into the very fabric of the universe, and oscillates wildly between the two mutually exclusive conceptions.47 To complicate matters still further, Marcus is adamant that the gods help us via our dreams and through oracles and omens and aid us to get the things we need.⁴⁸ We may differentiate Marcus from Epictetus by saying that the emperor tacks mainly between ‘the gods’ as the proper name for reason or Nature and a superstitious regard for the Olympians, while Epictetus almost always refers simply to ‘God’. On the other hand, Epictetus’s deity is largely theistic and personalist, whereas Marcus’s is largely abstract and pantheistic.⁴⁹ Epictetus’s God also seems more limited in power than Marcus’s.⁵⁰ We are told that God is more powerful than any individual human, but not necessarily superior in virtue or happiness, though what any of this could mean if we conceive God pantheistically is a moot question.⁵¹ For Marcus, but not for Epictetus, there is a further problem, aside from the riddles concerning polytheism, monotheism, deism and pantheism and the immanent/transcendent issue. Given his Gnostic distaste for the body and the physical world, how could he logically accept the Stoic argument for God’s existence from design? Marcus’s tendency towards nihilism is frequently in conflict with his official belief that everything in the world is the product of divine reason. On the one hand, he tells us that without the existence of God and Providence, life would be meaningless; on the other, he often tells us that it is meaningless.

Marcus Aurelius is a notably inconsistent thinker, and the coils he wraps himself in when discussing God raise the inconsistency to new heights. On the one hand, he is concerned to defend belief in the Olympians and rounds on sceptics who will not even pronounce the name of Zeus; if we are not prepared to say his name, we should not be praying in the first place.⁵² And he is concerned to stress the immortality of the gods, by which he must mean the Olympians, for by definition a pantheistic God could never die.⁵³ On the other hand, he never attached himself to a named god in the way Galen and Aelius Aristides did with Asclepius, or Apuleius did with Isis. In Book Twelve of the Meditations he even manages to insinuate a transcendent God, only to contradict it with an immanent ‘god within’ a few paragraphs later.54 It may be, as has been suggested, that Marcus was as uneasy talking about God and religion as he was about sex.⁵⁵ Tied down and circumscribed by, on the one hand, the traditional Roman religion of which he was high priest and, on the other, Stoicism with its insistence on the ‘god within’, Marcus only occasionally allowed himself to cut loose with the full-blooded pantheism that probably represents his true attitude. When he does so, he is at once at his most original and his most modern; there is nothing like it elsewhere in the Stoic literature. Some critics have compared his treatment of the daimon to passages in Shakespeare and Tennyson.⁵⁶ Most strikingly mystical is the address to his soul at the beginning of Book Ten of the Meditations, which has been compared to a Hebrew psalm and to Thomas à Kempis. The nearest equivalent of the enthusiastic passages in which Marcus rhapsodises about the divine universe must be sought in the Nature poetry of the early nineteenth-century English Romantic poets: Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ have been cited in this regard.⁵⁷

The nature of evil is another subject where Marcus evinces an independent turn of mind. The path to his thinking is winding and devious, so that we must first consider his notion of goodness. We begin with the familiar Stoic notion that the only good is moral good (and hence the only evil moral evil), and that neither pleasure nor pain is an evil.⁵⁸ For Marcus, the true philosopher concentrates on the positive quality of goodness, not its negative opposite. Doing good not only benefits others, but also benefits the benefactor.⁵⁹ This is in accordance with the Stoic doctrine that doing good to others is the same as doing good to ourselves – though critics allege that this fatally blurs the distinction between selfishness and altruism, thus giving fortune’s hostages to those who claim that altruism is anyway merely a disguised form of selfishness. There is also the ‘holistic’ argument that by doing good to a part we are thereby doing good to the whole. Love is the logical corollary of the union of all things on the Earth, so that the closer you get to wisdom and God, the more you should love your neighbour.⁶⁰ Marcus distinguishes three types of benefactor: the Stoic who is conscious that he does good for the sake of another; the non-Stoic who considers his beneficiary to be in his debt – the ultimate sin for the Stoic; and the so-called benefactor who is unaware of what he has done.61 For Marcus, altruism is merely the perception that our own self-interest lies in doing good to others. We owe a duty to our family, for example, no matter how atrociously our parents or siblings behave. The beginnings of morality are in our family relations, but this should be extended outwards to our neighbours, to fellow-Romans and ultimately to the entire world. Marcus thought that personal goodness was palpable, that you could sense it and almost smell it in the virtuous.⁶² Goodness, not anger or power, is real strength. The man who concentrates on goodness is a kind of priest of the cosmos, a servant of the gods, using the element within himself that transcends pain, pleasure, passion and evil, devoted to justice and welcoming in his heart whatever happens as the best thing that could happen. In so doing we are manifesting the strength of reason and the power of the god within us.⁶³

Marcus stressed that we should even be benevolent to the unjust and to liars, because such people retain their rational nature and therefore unconsciously desire good.⁶⁴ Here he followed closely in the footsteps of Epictetus, who taught gentleness and tolerance even to those who think and act erroneously; if you can’t get such people to reform or change their minds, simply reflect that that was why benevolence was given to you, and that the gods are merciful to the hard-hearted and refractory.⁶⁵ You cannot go too far wrong if you always direct your actions towards some goal that serves humanity, which means that altriusm is a core value. Another is seriousness, single-mindedness and the ability to focus. Marcus exhorts us to stop being puppets pulled by the strings of selfish desires and to stop spinning around like a top.⁶⁶ No wise man can be a dilettante, he argues. Believing strongly in professional expertise and a strict division of labour, he considered that the ultimate horror was the man who flitted from thing to thing, one year being an athlete, the next a gladiator, the next an orator and finally a so-called philosopher.⁶⁷ To act morally brings joy, which is a key motif in Marcus’s writings, and denotes the emotion we feel when we are truly fulfilling the function for which we were put on the Earth, and when we consent to the reality of Providence, pantheism and the ‘city of the world’.⁶⁸ Here we see that virtue is truly its own reward, for joy is not the end of moral action, as the Epicureans thought. The sage does not choose virtue because it causes pleasure, but it is a fact that, if chosen, virtue does cause pleasure. It is a curiosity that under Stoicism the individual is exhorted to sacrifice himself for the good of the cosmos, just as the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century were urged by Marx to sacrifice themselves for the good of future generations. The liberal theory of self-assigned self-interest would say that both of these propositions are nonsense.

Yet because Marcus’s thought is more complex and nuanced than Epictetus’s, we find many more possible definitions and musings about evil in the Meditations. One idea is that God permits evil in order to allow us to appreciate beauty: many ugly and ungraceful entities are placed in the universe by Providence to enhance our aesthetic sense; the catch is that only the sage can appreciate this beauty.78 So dirt, mud, poison, earthquakes and storms come from the same source as roses, seascapes and the wonders of spring. Marcus is pulled in several different directions by the fissiparous elements in his thought, especially the conflict between Stoic orthodoxy and his Gnostic attitude to matter and the physical world. Strictly speaking, notions of good and evil should arise only in the use of reason by a sentient human, but Marcus was clearly unhappy with this attitude to matter. He uses two techniques to try to reconcile his thoughts. One is that beauty and morality – and hence evil – inhabit separate spheres, which are separated by a hierarchy of perspectives. Objects in the external world are both beautiful and worthless; beautiful because they exist, and worthless because they cannot access the realm of freedom and morality. Beautiful things are impermanent and vanish into the flux: ‘Who would attach any value to any of the things which simply flow past us?’⁷⁹ Another is that beauty is a kind of halfway house between the ‘illusion’ of evil and the reality of virtue. ‘The lion’s jaws, the poisonous substances, and every harmful thing – from thorns to mud – are by-products of the beautiful.’⁸⁰

Although Marcus sometimes pays lip-service to the Stoic view that good and evil arise only from the use of reason and from misperceptions and ‘false representations’, a strong element in his thinking, in flat contradiction to this (and here we can see the Gnostic element in his thinking), is that evil is a ‘partial’ phenomenon, something that exists in Nature, but not in the realm of reason. Evil is a secondary phenomenon that can sometimes be a spin-off from the primary quality of good; good is in the realm of nature, but evil is in the domain of physics. In terms of cosmology, evil is unimportant: ‘The existence of evil does not harm the world. And an individual act of evil does not harm the victim. Only one person is harmed by it – and he can stop being harmed as soon as he decides to.’⁸¹ Evil exists in the realm of ‘indifferents’ – a trivial realm of which the gods take no notice, for they are concerned only with great issues and not minor ones. Cicero expressed this as follows: ‘If drought or hail do harm to a landowner, that is no business of Jupiter’s.’82 An allied view is that because God does not operate in the world of matter, if we look only at the world of matter we will see reality askew. The truth about the universe is holistic, and it is only with a tunnel-vision one-dimensional view of matter – seeing the part, but not the whole – that we come to think of evil as a universal principle and something to be taken seriously. What we experience is only an infinitesimal part of the universe, so how could we possibly grasp the entire workings of Destiny?⁸³ Yet it cannot be stated too often that this emphasis on cosmology, with evil in an unimportant role in the external world, is frequently rebutted by Marcus himself elsewhere in the Meditations. ‘You take things you can’t control and define them as “good” or “bad”. And so of course when the “bad” things happen or the “good” ones don’t, you blame the gods and feel hatred for the people responsible – or those you decide to make responsible. Much of our bad behaviour stems from trying to apply those criteria. If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.’⁸⁴ It is the latter view that has been most influential in the history of philosophy. The seventeenth-century rationalist Spinoza famously announced that it was pointless to seek explanations for good and evil in Nature, since the category of the physical universe was purely natural, whereas the category of good and evil was ethical – something quite different.

It is easy, and perhaps even facile, to point up the numerous contradictions in Marcus’s thought, most of them caused by the Nessus’s shirt of Stoicism that he chose to wear. Far more interesting from the standpoint of ethical theory are the many instances where his thinking seems a forerunner or adumbration of the theories of the early Church Fathers and, beyond them, the medieval schoolmen. The three most salient issues are: evil as a prerequisite for freedom; evil as a manifestation of God’s ulterior purpose, which we cannot discern; and evil as pure negativity, the mere absence of good. The alleged connection between freedom and evil pervades both Epictetus and Marcus’s work, but was perhaps summed up most succinctly by a later thinker, John Stuart Mill. The evil in the universe is caused by man’s wickedness. Man is free, which means free to do evil as well as good. Even an omnipotent being could not make man free and yet not free to do evil. Evil is thus an inevitable concomitant of man’s freedom.85 Marcus takes over Epictetus’s frequent observations on freedom, which contrast it with cowardice, liken it to manumission from slavery and to being an athlete in an open, unfixed contest (and with God as a kind of Olympic coach).⁸⁶ Epictetus adds the further point that freedom must be considered holistically: you should bathe as someone who keeps his word and eat as a man of integrity.⁸⁷ Concentration on freedom also leads Marcus to a holistic, Platonic and inegalitarian conception of justice.⁸⁸ The basic point is clear: without the ability to commit evil, man is not free, but a mere automaton. Yet this does not explain why God did not create humans with freedom, yet unable to commit evil, just as they are created with reason, but unable to fly. To make it definitional of humans that they should be capable of evil begs every conceivable question. And no amount of talk about divine justice or cosmic perfection in the long term could ever annul the suffering in this world. As Dostoevsky pointed out in The Brothers Karamazov, in the case of a brutal army officer who had a child torn apart by dogs, what conceivable cosmic outcome could ever undo such appalling evil?⁸⁹

The second proto-Christian argument that Marcus uses is that evil must have a purpose that we, as mere humans, cannot discern. To use one of his favourite sayings: ‘If I and my two children cannot move the gods, the gods must have their reasons.’⁹⁰ For Marcus, there is no point in railing and querying why unpleasant things exist, even the minor annoyances like bitter cucumber or brambles in the path: ‘Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.’⁹¹ You can be sure, he says, that the gods ‘would have arranged things differently if that had been appropriate. If it were the right thing to do, they could have done it, and if it were natural, Nature would have done it.’⁹² But all such talk requires a leap of faith, a belief in the beneficent workings of Providence, which cannot be based on reason alone. Reason is supposed to work forward from the unknown to the known, not from the known to the unknown. As with all quasi-theological systems, Stoicism constantly assumes that which has to be proved. Marcus’s thought is teleological, it looks forward to an ultim ate and eventual explanation of evil that is not within the power of humans to elucidate. Despite his many exhortations to live in the present, Marcus often projects forward to a mystical future, an ‘end of times’ scenario where evil will be harmonised with good under divine direction. This links with another of his mystical tropes: that the philosopher can cut himself off temporarily from the whole, but in the end return to it.93 Both ideas strongly point forward to the theology of Origen, greatest of the Church Fathers, who in his doctrine of apocatastasis (later condemned as a heresy) hypothesised that at the end of time Satan and all the demons would be reconciled with the Almighty.

Despite Marcus’s occasional forays into evil in Nature, he usually shared the general Stoic view that evil is a human aberration, for which God is not responsible. Yet if we concentrate on evil in Nature, all the talk about freedom and human reason becomes irrelevant and we have to face the ultimate question, first posed by Epicurus, but echoed by every theologian since. ‘Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence evil?’⁹⁴ Or as Man Friday said when Robinson Crusoe told him about the Christian God and Satan: ‘Why God him not kill debil?’ All the Stoic talk about moral evil does nothing to answer the questions posed by natural evil. William Blake wondered if he who made the lamb made the tiger. Or, as William James memorably put it:

Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholic feels is literally the right reaction on the situation. It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical recourse.⁹⁵

There are, of course, those eccentrics who claim to see nothing evil in sharks, crocodiles, black mambas or king cobras, and who berate Sir Thomas Malory for having Sir Percival take the side of a lion fighting a serpent because it was a more ‘natural’ animal.96 They seek comfort in the words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear or an elephant ugly.’⁹⁷ Here, of course, Browne had loaded the dice, for most people simply would not call a bear or elephant ugly, but the general point is clear: humans construct a hierarchy of desirability in the wild beasts, and bottom of the heap are the animals dangerous to man.

Even if we were to allow the extreme critics their day and exclude snakes, crocodiles, sharks et hoc genus omne from the category of evil, how – on a theory of divine benevolence – do we explain earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, 100-foot oceanic waves, to say nothing of the plethora of diseases, both the specifically human ones and those spread by mosquitoes, locusts, rats, and so on? The Stoics always provided the most facile and unconvincing answers to such questions. The existence of rats teaches us not to leave garbage around; the existence of mosquitoes teaches us to bear loss of sleep with courage; winds cause typhoons and hurricanes, but if there was no wind, nothing would sweep the ‘miasmata’ away; a few shipwrecks are the price we pay for not being exterminated by disease.⁹⁸ The nineteenth-century Romantics and proponents of the modern, pessimistic version of ‘stoicism’ have no problem with this for, to use Nietzsche’s words, God is dead and the universe is meaningless. To use the formulation of Alfred de Vigny:

Toil vigorously at the long and heavy task

In the path where chance chose to call you.

Then, done, suffer, as I do and die without a word.⁹⁹

This ‘solution’ is not available to Marcus, as Nature and Providence are supposed to guarantee our happiness. Stoicism shared with all other ancient philosophies the idea that life must have some purpose, and this explains the ubiquity of logos in the Meditations; it was only after the Romantic movement that people could conceive of unhappy endings and conclude that everything was meaningless – ‘merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’, as A.N. Whitehead put it.¹⁰⁰

Marcus also on several occasions suggests that evil is unreal and is a mere absence of good, anticipating the Christian notion of privatio boni, suggested by St Augustine and later taken up by Thomas Aquinas.101 This is Panglossian philosophy at its worst and seems a mere semantic parlour-game. Any set of antonyms – war and peace, lust and chastity, beauty and ugliness – can be juxtaposed, with one assigned the primary place as a ‘real’, positive feature and the other being classified as ‘unreal’ or negative. One might just as well say that ‘good’ is a secondary quality, being the mere absence of evil. As has been remarked, the sick man usually does not suffer from an absence of something but its presence, in the form of a deadly virus.¹⁰² The psychologist C.G. Jung once scathingly remarked that on the privato boni principle, Auschwitz and the other death-camps would have to be characterised as a mere absence of good. In any case, an entire school of modern philosophy, associated with Martin Heidegger, has asserted that ‘nothingness’ (le néant in the writings of J.-P. Sartre) is not a mere absence, but a positive force.¹⁰³ The idea that unpleasant or evil things are somehow ‘accidental’ or ‘secondary’ manifestations of some overarching principle of Goodness is of course a very convenient doctrine, nonsensical, but highly influential. Modern critics claim that attempts to explain evil either fall into the error of Providentialism, denying the reality of evil, or opt for the Christian tactic of trying to differentiate good and evil too sharply, decanting all evil into notions like Satan and Hell.¹⁰⁴ That kind of dualism, sometimes hinted at by Seneca, would be impossible for Marcus Aurelius, wedded as he is to holistic notions. Yet for all the failings and inadequacies of his conception of evil, he must be credited with at least intermittently trying to deal seriously with the notion; by contrast, the effusions of Epictetus on the subject are pat, formulaic and totally unconvincing.

The third area where Marcus blazes an independent trail, in places diverging very much from orthodox Stoicism, is in his treatment of death. Some critics have accused him of a kind of thanatophilia or, at any rate, of being death-driven and death-obsessed. He is certainly at the opposite end of the scale from a thinker like Marx, whose work is characterised by a total incuriosity about corporeal existence and, especially, death.¹⁰⁵ Marcus, by contrast, has almost no interest in social and economic matters or the deep currents of socio-economic causation; the masses do not feature, and the individual is usually conceived as being at the very least a trainee sage. But death is his central concern, and the subject is referred to more than any other in the Meditations. For much of the time Marcus cleaves to the Stoic line, stressing in particular that death is simply a specific form of change; since everything else changes, why not human life?106 It is also part of Destiny, part of a pattern prepared from eternity. ‘Every event that comes your way has been linked to you by Destiny, and has been woven together with you, starting from the whole, since the beginning.’ ‘Whatever happens to you was prepared for you in advance from all eternity, and the network of causes has woven together your substance and the occurrence of this event for all time.’¹⁰⁷ Marcus also links it to his motif of the present instant. From the perspective of death, each instant has an infinite value and, besides, there is something unreal about death – for if we are dreading it, by definition we are still alive and death is absent; or, if death has come, we are no longer conscious anyway.¹⁰⁸ Some people dread death as they fear they will be robbed of a normal span of life, but, as Marcus often remarks, observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand-year existence, for after forty you would never see anything new.¹⁰⁹ ‘If it ends when it’s supposed to, it’s none the worse for that. And the person who comes to the end of the line has no cause for complaint.’ ‘Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a dollop of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid and ashes.’¹¹⁰

Besides, by departing this vale of tears we are not missing much. We are half-dead anyway, by being anchored to the body, which is in essence a corpse. ‘As if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries.’¹¹¹ And, with any luck, we will miss all the horrors of old age.¹¹² Marcus frequently reminds himself that he is, by the standards of the age, already an old man when in his late forties and fifties; he does not like the condition, but does his best to come to terms with it, sharing neither Cicero’s unbridled optimism nor Juvenal’s extreme pessimism and disgust.¹¹³ There’s no special advantage about dying old. ‘A trite but effective tactic against the fear of death: think of the list of people who had to be pried away from life. What did they gain by dying old? In the end they all sleep six feet under – Caedicianus, Fabius, Julian, Lepidus, and all the rest. They buried their contemporaries, but were buried in turn.’¹¹⁴ Moreover, what you are leaving behind on expiring is not much: most human beings are despicable so there’s no great wrench about departing and a lot of the so-called intimates and nearest and dearest want you out of the way anyhow: ‘“what a relief to be rid of that old pedant,” they will say. “Even when he said nothing, you could feel him judging you.” And that’s just the good people talking about you.’115 Marcus’s great contemporary Lucian felt very similarly. ‘They talk about being as happy as a king – but when you come to look at a king’s life, you find that, quite apart from its insecurity and the so-called fickleness of fortune, it has far more pain than pleasure in it, if only because of the fear, anxiety, hatred, intrigue, resentment and insincerity that always surrounds a throne – to say nothing of all the sorrows, accidents and diseases which kings share with the rest of humanity.’¹¹⁶ At a more philosophical level, Marcus frequently states that death is to be understood holistically, closing a process that is subordinate to the Whole; by the decay and passing away of its parts, the universe renews its youth. Once again we can see Marcus as a kind of forerunner of the Church Fathers, for an almost identical argument was used by St Augustine.¹¹⁷

Marcus evinces particular contempt for those who try to cling to life and go into denial about death. To fear death is like the child who was frightened of a mask he himself has made.¹¹⁸ We should leave life with the same happy indifference with which we take leave of a banquet if a boorish guest arrives or the drink runs out. There is nothing objectively fearful about death; it is only our representations, false perceptions and value-judgements that make it appear so. Death cannot be evil, for otherwise the gods would have not permitted it; like honour and dishonour, wealth and poverty, pain and pleasure, it is just another of the ‘indifferents’, albeit more dramatic than most.¹¹⁹ If the gods exist, the afterlife will be good. If they don’t, or if the Epicureans are right in their deistic views and the gods have no interest in humans, why would you want to live in such a world, adrift rudderless on an ocean of godless nothingness, with no Providence to steer by? Besides, if you could sit in the seat of the gods, above the clouds, you would see how insignificant human life is.¹²⁰ Of the literally dozens of variations Marcus weaves on the ‘welcome death as human life is meaningless’ theme, let us select just three. ‘Suppose that a God announced that you were going to die tomorrow “or the day after”. Unless you were a complete coward, you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was – what difference could it make? Now recognise that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.’121 ‘Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first grey hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth . . . So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Remember how you anticipated the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb? That’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.’¹²² ‘When we cease from activity, or follow a thought through to its conclusion, it’s a kind of death. And it doesn’t harm us. Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation was a kind of dying. Was it so terrible? Think about life with your grandfather, your mother, your adopted father. Realise how many other deaths and transformations and endings there have been and ask yourself: was that so terrible? Then neither will the end of your life, its ending and transformation, be terrible.’¹²³

In all these formulations Marcus writes and thinks as a true Stoic. He even links death to pantheism, and toys with the idea that one might be reborn as a tree; at the very least we will fall into the Earth’s lap like a ripe olive.¹²⁴ Yet the sheer number of references to death and the constant self-examination on this theme prompt the suspicion that Marcus is protesting too much, that there is something about the notion of extinction that troubles him deeply; it is no mere hyperbole that has led one critic to speak of the emperor’s ‘metaphysical horror’.¹²⁵ Without question, death obsessed Marcus far more than it ever did Epictetus, who tended to take the idea of mortality in his stride and was unconcerned about the traditional Platonic questions about where the soul went. When Epictetus asserted that the end of life was simply the last in a series of bugbears, he sounded convincing.¹²⁶ He considered that an unwillingness to die was mere selfishness, as human immortality would clog up and overpopulate the Earth.¹²⁷ His attitude to the Grim Reaper was always humorous, even jocular, whereas Marcus was grave, po-faced and deadly serious. Where Epictetus was content to take human life and death as he found them, and to use the human condition to investigate ethical theory, Marcus, – fascinated as he was with the vastness of the universe and with cosmological issues – worried away about his relationship with the immensity of eternity. His attitude was that of Lampedusa’s Prince: ‘O fixed star, when will you find me an appointment less ephemeral, in your region of perennial certitude.’128 Where Epictetus is often a pre-echo of Spinoza, Marcus, in his attempt to make sense of cosmology and human morality, foreshadows Kant. There is the sensible world of perception, which depresses us with the numbers of stars in the heavens and the immensity of the universe; alongside this, humans may appear an insignificant speck. But there is also the intelligible world of reason, which reasserts the importance of human beings, stressing that moral laws – the Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives in Kant’s system – are just as impressive as the power, brilliance and profusion of the stars.¹²⁹

Just as the pessimistic Marcus often takes over from the Stoic apologist in his broodings on human nature, so in his thoughts on death he seems unable to derive ultimate comfort from the dogmatic certainties of Stoicism. He returns again and again to the question of meaning, particularly in relation to the lives of the great and famous. At one point there is a catalogue of Roman heroes, including Camillus, Scipio, Cato, Augustus, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius – all very different, but all alike in that they no longer walk the Earth.¹³⁰ Augustus, Vespasian, Trajan and Hadrian were all supposedly ‘great emperors in their time but are now no more’.¹³¹ Marcus lists the famous conquerors and statesmen who are now dead: Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Pompey, Julius Caesar. He always evinces particular contempt for Alexander the Great, perhaps to boost the claims of his hero Diogenes, and points out that both Alexander and his mule-driver alike were victims of mortality. At one point he jeeringly contrasts the conquerors Pompey, Caesar and Alexander with the far superior philosophers and thinkers of the Greek world – Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates and Archimedes – but then remembers the canons of mortality and concedes that all alike have vanished into the maw of oblivion.¹³² To lust after posthumous fame is mindless, because the people who do remember you die off in turn, and soon your name is known only to academic specialists and antiquarians. Besides, what is the point of trying to impress posterity; these are people we are never going to meet.¹³³ And what will their opinion be worth? The generations to come will also largely consist of fools, knaves and morons, so who would want their plaudits? No one understands death, and the only consistent wisdom is that no one gets out of here alive. ‘Always remember how many doctors have died after furrowing their brows over myriad death-beds. Or how many astrologers after pompous predictions about the death of others. Or how many philosophers, after endless treatises on extinction and immortality. Or how many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. Or how many tyrants after systematic abuse of their power over life and death, as if they were immortal.’134

Given that human life is insignificant when viewed against the background of the universe, this alone should alert us to the pointlessness of ambition, the quest for fame and the lust for glory. Although he did not use the exact words, Marcus inculcated the message conveyed by two well-known axioms: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ and ‘All this too will pass away’.¹³⁵ This takes him to the depths of pessimism, as when he describes human life as ‘The pointless bustling of processions, mere opera arias, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises, a bone flung to pet dogs, a little food in the fish-tank; the miserable servitude of ants, the scampering of mice, puppets jerked on strings.’¹³⁶ We are all standing stalks of grain, which are grown and then cut down by the harvester.¹³⁷ The generations of men are simply leaves that the wind blows to the earth. ‘Your children too are leaves, and it is mere leaves that applaud you or eulogise you, or who call down curses on you, sneering and mocking from a safe distance. Fame is simply a reputation handed down by other leaves, all destined to be blown away by the wind.’¹³⁸ Reflection on death led Marcus to a profound melancholy, which at times verged on nihilism. His more upbeat defenders claim that he is not unduly pessimistic, merely trying to get us to see how things are. Yet an obsession with how things really are, with brute contingency and mortality emphasised, does in the end lead to the pointlessness that Marcus so often describes. It is a gloomy form of materialism, eked out with some unconvincing flap-doodle about Providence, which provides no place for spirituality or creativity. The official Panglossianism of the Stoic doctrine finally unravels when Marcus ponders human mortality, showing his deep convictions triumphing over the philosophy of which he is officially an advocate.¹³⁹ If Marcus’s death-fixated pessimism were taken seriously, it is difficult to understand how a Mozart or a Shakespeare could arise. Marcus suffers as much as Marx from tunnel vision, but with both looking from different ends of the tunnel.¹⁴⁰

It is not surprising, then, that Marcus finds the Stoic doctrine on suicide a comfortable crutch. It will be recalled that the Stoics in general approved of suicide in the following circumstances: if the fatherland or your friends require you to do it; if a tyrant forces you to act dishonourably; if, afflicted by an incurable disease, the body is letting the soul down; if you are destitute or indigent; or if you go mad.141 But those who considered themselves disciples of Socrates faced the difficulty that he opposed it, as in Plato’s Phaedo. This particularly bothered Epictetus, whose remarks on self-slaughter are more than usually ambivalent: while allowing it in principle, he wanted to follow Socrates in permitting it only in exceptional circumstances.¹⁴² Interestingly, Marcus was much more forthright in accepting felo da se: this may be because temperamentally he was more pessimistic than Epictetus and could see less point in life; or it may be because, as an emperor, as opposed to an abstract advocate like Epictetus, he actually faced the daily reality of having to refrain from ‘inviting’ his political enemies to open their veins. He makes it clear that all the great Roman heroes who took their own lives to escape tyranny – Marcus Brutus, Cato the Younger, Petronius and even Seneca (for whom he normally had little time) – acted rightly. Suicide was always justified as an escape route from insuperable moral evil, whether imposed from within or without; it is better to depart this life than live in evil.¹⁴³ Marcus also thinks that as one’s mental faculties decay with old age, one may no longer be able to see clearly where duty lies; in these circumstances also the hot bath and the dagger beckon. He partly turns the tables on the ambivalent Epictetus here by quoting him, to the effect that one should leave a room if it it becomes full of smoke.¹⁴⁴ Yet above all suicide should always be a moral act. The life of liberty is the only true life, and when a good life is made impossible by the action of others, suicide becomes almost a moral duty; one should not lament if the impediment that thwarts moral activity is not one’s fault.¹⁴⁵ It is always better to shuffle off the mortal coil than to live in evil; if you cannot escape from vice, departing this life means that you have at least performed one good act. ‘What prevents you from being good and simple? Just resolve to live no longer if you are not. Reason does not demand that you should live if you lack these qualities.’¹⁴⁶

It has often been alleged that people adhere to religion chiefly in the hope of achieving immortality, that the real function of religion is to allay fears and enhance hopes. Did the secular religion of Stoicism offer any such comfort to Marcus? Here we see again the gap that separates him from Epictetus, for the Greek philosopher has no interest in whether the soul survives, whereas for Marcus the subject is of consuming interest.147 Most of the time he remains agnostic and remarks somewhat lamely that survival after death depends entirely on whether the gods think it necessary for cosmic order.¹⁴⁸ Seneca is certainly more optimistic and sanguine about the chances of posthumous survival than Marcus, though in no way more absorbed with the topic.¹⁴⁹ One Stoic idea was that only the true sage would be guaranteed personal survival, but then they faced the difficulty that probably no such person had ever existed; Marcus expressly and categorically denied that he could be considered a sage in the full Stoic meaning of the term. He also rebuked those who say that if the gods (or God) are both omnipotent and benevolent, they should have set it up so that the truly good people – those whose piety and good works brought them closest to the divine – survive to continue their benefactions.¹⁵⁰ These critics are in effect adumbrating a proto-Christian distinction between the blessed and the damned. Here Marcus gives the same answer as to the question of evil: ‘If that’s really true, you can be sure they would have arranged things differently, if that had been appropriate. If it were the right thing to do, they could have done it, and if it were natural, Nature would have demanded it. So from the fact that they didn’t – if that’s the case – we can conclude that it was inappropriate.’¹⁵¹ It seems abundantly clear that personal survival is ruled out on the grounds of pantheism, if nothing else, and Marcus hints broadly that this is the case.¹⁵² In the same passage he suggests that concern with survival in any case collided with the maxim that one should concentrate on the present; by definition such an approach ruled out anxiety about the future. Although it is fairly clear that Marcus did not believe in personal survival, he suggested that one should approach the issue in the spirit of a Pascalian pari: ‘You boarded the ship, you set sail, you made the passage. Now it’s time to disembark. If it’s for another life, well, it’s pretty clear there must be gods on the other side too. If to nothingness, just think, you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on dancing attendance on this shattered hulk of a body – so much inferior to that which serves it.’¹⁵³

Marcus’s original thoughts on the nature of God, evil and death show clearly that he is no mere parroting follower of Epictetus. Similarly he evinced originality in yet a fourth sphere, which Epictetus had adumbrated and expressed in inchoate form. The Greek sage asserted that a dutiful citizen of Rome should evolve beyond mere patriotism and treat his life as serving in God’s army, since each person vis-à-vis God has been given the rank of senator for life in the imperial city; he added that anyone whose judgements on the world are fallacious stands in the same position as a military rebel to legitimate government.¹⁵⁷ Marcus took these sketchy thoughts and elaborated a more ‘holistic’ vision, incorporating politics, philosophy and cosmology, thus imposing his own trilogy in place of the traditional Stoic triad of physics, logic and ethics. An important theme that appears in the Meditations for the first time in Book Five is the opposition between the court where he is obliged to live as an emperor and the life of philosophy to which he would like to devote himself entirely; Marcus proclaims himself as a dual man, at once the emperor and the man whose city is the City of the World. He ‘solves’ this disjuncture by a dialectical display of ‘holism’ that would have delighted Hegel.158 He argues that Rome is the microcosm of the City, which in turn in the microcosm of the Universe, which means that, in principle, there should be no ‘contradiction’ between sage and emperor and that a philosopher-king is feasible. He adds that holism is one more reason for preferring an interpretation of the cosmos via Providence to the atomic vision of the Epicureans, since atoms imply disjuncture whereas Stoicism underlines unity and interpenetration.¹⁵⁹ Marcus is aware that when he speaks of the Eternal City, this could be read simply as a metaphor for Rome, but stresses that he is aiming at something more – something remarkably similar to St Augustine’s City of God, itself an ur-version of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends: ‘mankind is a citizen of the highest city, of which other cities are like mere households’.¹⁶⁰ So: patriotism leads to love of our neighbour, which is like the marriage of Earth and Heaven, for the Earth loves rain, which comes from Heaven; and so what is good for Rome will ultimately be good for the cosmos. Holism stresses the fundamental unity of all things, a unity of which the sun, substance and the soul are three different manifestations; similarly universal Nature has made rational beings for the sake of one another, so that ethical perfection is possible. Yet it typifies the tension between the Panglossian element in Stoicism, of which Marcus was officially a practitioner, and his own pessimism that he ultimately declared the unitary project of Plato’s Republic (or his own holism) to be an impossible dream – one more reason to welcome death.¹⁶¹

Yet it is not Marcus’s original contribution to Stoicism of which he was, ironically to be the last major exponent that has won him the accolade of the ages, so that the Meditations always appears in any list of ‘One Hundred Great Books’. John Stuart Mill thought the twelve books of reflections were the equal of the Sermon on the Mount, while Renan called them ‘the most human of all books’. It is the pantheistic mysticism of Marcus that has had most resonance. One passage thought especially beautiful is the following: ‘I say to the world: your harmony is mine. Whatever time you choose is the right time, neither too late nor too early. I say to Nature: Whatever the change of your seasons brings me is like the fall of ripe fruit. All things are born from you, exist in you and return to you.’162 This has been compared to Thomas à Kempis’s ‘I am in Thy hand, spin me forward or spin me back.’¹⁶³ Still others point to passages on the sun that would have appealed to the later sun-worshipping emperor Julian the Apostate.¹⁶⁴ There are also those who construe certain obscure passages in Marcus’s writings as evidence that he believed in spirits that walk the Earth – a common belief in the seventeenth century.¹⁶⁵ But the most fruitful source of analogies has been Eastern philosophy: the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Buddhism’s Dhammapada and Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, with their emphasis on meditation, the soul, detachment and renunciation.¹⁶⁶

Marcus’s critics say that he was a second-rate philosopher and a second-rate emperor and that, instead of trying to be a philosopher-king, he should either have abdicated to become a professional teacher of Stoicism or junked the philosophy and spent more time on imperial affairs. Many consider that he had a poor understanding of human nature, and that this was confounded by the ‘impossibilism’ of Stoicism; some conclude it would have been far better if he had never studied philosophy.¹⁶⁷ Moreover, the self-sufficiency taught by Stoicism did not encourage either wide administrative experience or exposure to a wide range of human beings.¹⁶⁸ Others say that he lacked the imagination to be a great ruler of Rome. His neglect of social and economic issues, and his seeming ignorance of social structure and socio-economic dimensions – given that his entire interest was focused on individual human psychology and motivation – put many of Rome’s deep-lying problems beyond his ken.¹⁶⁹ Some go beyond this to say that Marcus has been overrated as a writer. Where Pierre Hadot and others saw him as a poetic master, taking basic themes by Epictetus and providing them with a set of brilliant variations, rather like Brahms with Haydn or Vaughan Williams with Thomas Tallis, always using fresh imagery and never degenerating into stock metaphor or cliché,¹⁷⁰ the anti-Marcus faction has seen it very differently. Cynics in the modern sense claim that Marcus rams home the message about eternal repetition with an eternal repetition of his own; that he exhibits the worst fault of Dickens, whereby nothing can be left understated or allowed to speak for itself, but must be hammered home ad nauseam, often in the selfsame phrases. For such people, it is not just in content that the Meditations often resemble Indian philosophy; the notion of the mantra is here as well. Above all, it is said, Marcus is sometimes that worst of didactic creatures: the utter bore.171

The response to Marcus’s thought and writing is bound to reflect the temperament of the reader; there is no point in disputing about taste, as the ancients said.¹⁷² His greatness as a human being, though, is incontestable, and it comes down to two main propositions. Marcus had the very highest standards of integrity and responsibility; perhaps no man in history ever had a more elevated sense of duty. But as a Stoic emperor, he faced the problem that on the one hand he had to love mankind, but on the other he despised what they wanted and hated what they loved. He had to seek the happiness of his subjects in ‘indifferents’ – and he accepted that this was his duty – but recoiled from the mob’s worship of things that had no value for him.¹⁷³ He tried to comfort himself with the thought that the gods also seemed lenient towards the human desire for ‘indifferents,’ as when they helped them through dreams and oracles.¹⁷⁴ Yet to encourage what one is convinced is ‘false consciousness’ is a hard furrow to plough; only the very greatest human geniuses can manage this. To put the false values of others before one’s own, out of a sense of duty, is something very few individuals in history have ever compassed. The other obvious sign of Marcus’s greatness was that he himself was a standing refutation of the famous dictum of Lord Acton: ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Marcus had absolute power, but never used it for selfish, evil, despotic or corrupt purposes.¹⁷⁵ Unlike those who contrast the will of the people with their ‘real will’ or the ‘General Will’, Marcus never imposed his own world view on those who hankered after trivial pleasures like chariot races or gladiatorial contests, as so many authoritarian personalities (in modern history from Cromwell to Stalin) have done, even though he was convinced he knew what was best for his people.¹⁷⁶ Marcus had a duty both to the Roman people and to his beloved Stoics, but he fully lived out the meaning of whatever was best in that doctrine, while suppressing his own pessimistic doubts and never playing the dreaded role of the professor in politics.177 The greatness of the Meditations is that they show us all his internal conflicts going on simultaneously.