Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 067 - The Philosopher King - Marcus Aurelius.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Philosopher King – Marcus Aurelius. A few years back, a philosopher named Tom Morris published a book called What if Aristotle Ran General Motors? It's a cute title, isn't it? But I have a question that blows it out of the water. What if a Stoic philosopher ran the Roman Empire? I mean, with all due respect to General Motors, they only make cars, whereas the Roman Empire was, well, the Roman Empire. Also, my scenario has a significant advantage, namely that it isn't hypothetical. A Stoic philosopher did run the Roman Empire. He reigned, first jointly and then on his own, for twenty years. He was praised by contemporaries and later Roman historians for his moderate lifestyle and justice, and considered the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. He faced numerous threats to the Empire, including a massive plague and wars with the Parthians and with German tribes. He also had to cope with the death of most of his children. His name was Marcus Aurelius. Marcus was born during the reign of the third good emperor, Hadrian, of wall-building fame. He was not in a direct line of succession to the imperial throne, but then neither was anyone else. Hadrian adopted as his official heir the future emperor Antoninus Pius, who, in turn, at Hadrian's request, adopted Marcus. This, by the way, was something of a pattern among the Five Good Emperors. The first of them, Nerva, had adopted his successor Trajan, of column fame, and Trajan in turn adopted Hadrian. The success of these good emperors was no coincidence. Each was hand-picked in a far more meritocratic system than would hold sway in the declining years of the Roman Empire. Some would argue that that decline began because of Marcus's one big mistake. Instead of choosing and adopting an heir, he allowed his natural son to succeed him. That son was Commodus, and if people talked about the Five Bad Emperors, Commodus would definitely be on the list. He was bad enough that, in the movie Gladiator, the happy ending consists in Commodus getting killed by Russell Crowe. But, apart from his megalomaniac son, Marcus had plenty to crow about. He ascended to the throne in 161 AD. He immediately displayed both confidence and intelligence, anticipating the later realization that multiple emperors would be needed to rule over a territory as vast as the Empire, he nominated a man named Lucius Verus to rule with him as co-Emperor. Marcus would be sole Emperor only as of 169 when Verus died, probably from the so-called Antonine Plague. This disease, which may have been smallpox, was only one of several existential threats to menace the Empire during the reign of Marcus. Like many emperors, he spent his years on the throne rushing from one military engagement to another. He waged war against the Parthians, these were the heirs to the Persians who posed an almost constant danger to the east of the Romans, just as the Persians had posed a threat to the ancient Greeks. Marcus also campaigned against numerous groups of Germanic barbarians along the Danube River. These wars were still going on when Marcus died in 180 AD. It was here on the frontier that Marcus supposedly composed a set of notes to himself, appropriately entitled simply, To Himself, and commonly referred to as The Meditations. It is a work of great power and influence, a literary legacy that just about makes up for the political legacy of bequeathing the purple robes of imperial power to Commodus. A note attached to the end of the first book informs us that the Meditations were written among the Quadi, a Germanic tribe. If we believe this note as opposed to dismissing it as a later scribal invention, then we must imagine Marcus late in life, retiring each night from his military endeavors, sitting down to collect his thoughts, and writing a series of admonitions aimed squarely at his own soul. He used Stoic ideas to combat his own fears, vanity, and irritability. No doubt the Meditations were also intended for a wider readership, but they are more than plausible as a work of self-examination and philosophical therapy. Some would doubt that anything much was personally at stake for Marcus when he wrote The Meditations. The historian Mary Beard has commented that if we scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus's inner conflicts, we might as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of a modern philosophy undergraduate. No doubt The Meditations does fit into a genre of ancient writing, in which philosophical themes were woven into an ostentatious display of self-conscious virtue. If we wish to read a radical reimagining of this genre, we should turn not to these Meditations, but to the Confessions of St. Augustine. Yet there are signs that Marcus is speaking genuinely for himself and to himself, not just trying to impress a learned readership with his erudition and integrity. For instance, he makes frequent reference to the stresses and annoyances of life at the top. At one point, he writes, never let anyone hear you complaining about court life again, including yourself. At another point, he compares the court to his stepmother and casts philosophy in the role of mother. Contemporary reports of Marcus's character lend some credence to the idea that he was more a lover of books than a lover of power, and he was described even in the ancient world as a philosopher-king. No less an observer than Julian the Apostate, the other philosopher-emperor of late antiquity, admired Marcus greatly. So, while we should not necessarily look to Marcus for innovations in Stoic doctrine, I think we may take The Meditations as a deeply felt application of that doctrine to an extraordinary life. The Meditations are divided into 12 books, the first of which could easily have been entitled How I Got to Be Such a Great Guy. Not that Marcus would ever allow such an immodest thought to go unchallenged in his own mind. He gives the credit for such virtue and wisdom as he possesses to a long list of teachers and relations. His adoptive father and predecessor as emperor, Antoninus Pius, receives particular praise for his comprehensive virtue, praise which culminates by comparing Antoninus to no less a figure than Socrates. But most of Marcus' influences were teachers. Nothing but the best would do for the young emperor-to-be, and the leading intellectuals of Rome were brought into his aristocratic home to school him in grammar, rhetoric, and, of course, philosophy. One of these was the Stoic Rusticus, who exposed Marcus to the work of Epictetus. For this alone we should join Marcus in being grateful to Rusticus. Bringing Epictetus to the attention of the future emperor was akin to giving Charlie Parker his first saxophone. The various teachers in Marcus' formative years taught him various lessons, but the Meditations is, above all, a set of variations on themes found in Epictetus. Of course, Epictetus himself had drawn on the earlier Stoic tradition, so that Marcus is also the inheritor of the ethics of Chrysippus and other early Stoics. Thus, his main theme, to which he returns again and again, is the importance of controlling his own judgments and desires. By putting Marcus on the throne, fate has presented him with wealth and access to limitless pleasures, but also with plentiful enemies. Marcus thus faced an unusually challenging set of temptations and opportunities for anger. Yet his fundamental advice to himself could be applied by anyone. When the world provokes you into a reaction, think first whether the reaction is the right one. Does a man offend your pride? Remember that he will be dead soon, as will you. Are you wrapped in the purple robes of unchallenged power? Remember that they are just rags dyed in ink. Are you consumed with desire for a woman? Do not pray that God will give her to you. Pray rather to be relieved of your lust. In one of my favorite passages, he recommends a method for confronting misfortune. Do not lament the misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of person who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you. Marcus describes this process of self-discipline and rational reflection as an art of living. It is an art, he says, more akin to wrestling than to dancing, because it requires that we always be on our guard. Now, I know what you're thinking. This advice could be inspired by practically any ancient ethical theory. Plato wanted us to subordinate desire to reason, Aristotle thought virtue is, in large part, a matter of using reason to steer our desires, and even the Epicureans thought hedonism means using reason to choose carefully between the pleasures that present themselves. The Stoics had no monopoly on the view that reason should rule over desire. And, in fact, Marcus sometimes sounds almost like a Platonist when he considers the role of reason in our lives. He describes the body as an instrument of the soul, which is the true man, and compares our rational capacity to the pilot of a ship, an image which recalls passages in both Plato's Republic and Aristotle's De Anima. Yet Marcus's Stoic allegiances are clear, and not only from the fact that the philosophy teachers he mentions in his intellectual autobiography were Stoics. For one thing, his picture of rationality is very Stoic. It's not just a matter of having the right beliefs and acting on them, but a matter of controlling our assent to the impressions the world presents to us. Marcus doesn't put the point in these technical terms, but it is certainly his picture of ethical action. Tellingly, he claims that banishing the belief that you have been treated wrongly is sufficient to banish the anger that would follow from such treatment. Thus, we have a fairly standard Stoic picture of human ethical life. An impression presents itself, we assent to it, or refrain from assenting, and our emotional reactions proceed accordingly. Another Stoic thread woven into the cloth of the meditations is the idea of fate. Indeed, Marcus compares his own life to a thread in fate's web, and reminds himself that his thread will unspool in a way that is for the best, since it is part of that divine web that is woven through the universe. When Marcus considers his own little patch of that web, he often emphasizes the fleeting, ephemeral nature of his life and everything it contains. As I've said, his remedy against feeling insulted is to remember the imminent death of everyone concerned, and that's a typical thought. He applies it to fame and honor. Why seek the approval of others when they will soon enough be dead? He applies it to misfortunes and suffering. Everything we undergo will be over soon, seen from the perspective of eternity. Of course, it takes a certain kind of person to take that amount of perspective on their own situation. Perhaps only a Stoic sage could go through life thinking of his own affairs as a mere speck in the great scheme of things. But Marcus reflects also on the more positive aspects of any upheaval we may face. Everything natural, he tells himself, depends upon change. For instance, we could gain no nourishment from food without its changing. When he compares the world to a flowing river, it's hard to escape the thought that Marcus is thinking not of the stable, providential universe of Stoicism, but the unstable, flux-ridden cosmos of Heraclitus, or rather of Heraclitus as portrayed by Plato. Remember, though, that from its earliest days, Stoicism had claimed Heraclitus as an intellectual ancestor. Although Marcus emphasizes the theme of constant change more than your average Stoic, it is an emphasis that fits into the school's philosophical lineage. Much the same could be said for Marcus' attitude towards Socrates. As we've seen in previous episodes, the Stoics joined other schools in claiming to be the heirs of Socrates. Epictetus, in particular, seems to have taken Socrates as a primary inspiration. This tendency is somewhat less prominent in Marcus, but it is evident nonetheless. In one passage, he remarks that Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Pompey, perhaps the three greatest political heroes Marcus could have named, led lives inferior to those of Socrates, Heraclitus, and Diogenes the Scenic. But elsewhere, with typical focus on inner life rather than outward seeming, Marcus reserves judgment about Socrates. We know only Socrates' words and actions, not the state of his soul. He was famous for facing his death without fear, but Socrates alone could know whether there was fear in his heart after all. So, Marcus has his philosophical heroes, and they are more or less the usual Stoic suspects. Yet he also quotes Plato with approval several times in the Meditations. Indeed, some entries consist of nothing but quotations from Plato and other authors. Clearly, these were passages Marcus found particularly helpful or powerful. The closest thing to a criticism of Plato is when Marcus tells himself that he can be satisfied with small successes rather than expecting to achieve perfection as envisioned in Plato's Republic. But even this seems more like characteristic acceptance of circumstances than a deep objection to Plato's idealism. More generally, the way Marcus uses philosophical authorities seems to be of a piece with his ethical outlook. He takes each authority in turn, accepts what he finds reasonable, and doesn't worry too much about points of disagreement. The best example of this is his handling of the Epicureans. One would think that Marcus, being a Stoic, would find little to value in this school. And, indeed, one of his favorite motifs is an anti-Epicurean one. He reminds himself numerous times that the world must be either a random jumble of atoms, as Epicurus claimed, or providentially ordered. Since Marcus finds the Epicurean alternative absurd, this leaves him only with the remaining hypothesis that the world is indeed guided by a sure divine hand. Yet, aside from this, Marcus usually mentions Epicurus and his school in order to agree with them. He apparently finds only one topic where he can agree with them, but it's a big one—the fear of death. Or, rather, the topic of not fearing death. At one point, he gives the Epicureans a rather backhanded compliment. Even these hedonists could avoid fearing death, reflects Marcus, so surely I can too. But elsewhere, he gives apparently unalloyed praise to Epicurus for the brave way that he met his end, and he also repeats the Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us because when we cease to exist, we will no longer have any sensation. Marcus constantly returns to this topic of death, which is one of the things that makes him distinctive in the Stoic tradition. It's as if he is trying to show that Stoicism can rise to this challenge, just as Lucretius and other Epicureans had done. Perhaps there were also personal considerations in play here. They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, and as emperor Marcus didn't have to pay any taxes, which left him only death to worry about. And, if it's true that the meditations were written during his final campaigns along the Danube, Marcus was not far from death himself as he wrote them. In any case, he was plagued by poor health throughout his life and saw four of his children die, so even earlier he would have had plenty of reason to reflect on his own death and on death in general. Of course, the considerations he uses to combat anxiety and grief in other areas of life apply here, too. Thus, he points out that if all natural things are fleeting, it would be irrational to object to our own end. Or, that death, too, is part of the divine plan that governs the universe wisely. Or, that in the great scheme of things, it matters little whether we die today or decades from now. In fact, one of his more striking pieces of advice about death is this. Imagine that you will die today. Assuming that you don't in fact die, you will be able to look on every day from now on as an unexpected gift. Marcus also urges us to see death, along with aging and other apparently regrettable aspects of life, as part of a natural cycle. As we've seen, he thinks that all things change, but he also thinks that they change in ever-repeating ways. At the most global level, there is the stoic idea that all events in the universe will recur in future world cycles. Marcus alludes once to this notion, but usually he has a more humble idea of cycles in mind, for instance the stages of life from youth to old age. He even applies this to his own situation as emperor, reflecting that his own court will be like a repeat performance of a play staged earlier in the courts of Alexander, Hadrian, and other rulers. It's characteristic of Marcus to show awareness of a technical stoic notion like world cycles, but constantly to draw attention back to the ethical situation that he faces himself. For instance, he mentions that his soul is nothing but a vapor exhaled from the blood, not because he wants to set out some theory of human nature, but to remind himself not to take praise too seriously. His suggestion that he is merely acting out the part of emperor, a part played by others before him, is equally characteristic. This gets us to what, for my money, is the heart of Marcus's achievement as a philosopher. If Marcus anticipates Shakespeare in considering all the world to be a stage, he also anticipates Shakespeare's greatest character, Hamlet, by withdrawing into a rich inner mental life that is no longer fully identified with the role that he plays. This interiority did not paralyze Marcus as it does Hamlet. The Parthians and others could testify to this, having suffered the slings and arrows of Marcus's legions. But Marcus would agree with Hamlet that there's nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. He was a man of action who did not identify himself with his actions, but rather with his thoughts. In theory, at least, Marcus considers it a matter of no importance that he plays out the role of emperor rather than the role of a farmer. Marcus himself is not the character he plays outwardly, but the soul that lives inwardly. Just as much as the emperor, the farmer has a soul that can make peace with divine fate or wage futile combat against it. This is why the Meditations is a work that can speak to anyone, even if it was written by an emperor for his own benefit. What Marcus offers us is a crash course in therapy for the soul, and this therapy asks us to withdraw into an invulnerable detached self, what Marcus calls his inner citadel. The philosophical basis for this is already present in Epictetus, but Marcus articulates the interiority of Roman Stoicism with unmatched directness and, usually, with stylish charm, rather than the withering wit of Epictetus. It is appropriate that Marcus should offer such effective medicine for the soul, given that he employed the greatest doctor of his age, indeed of just about any age, Galen. A towering figure in the history of medicine, and no midget in the history of philosophy, Galen was employed as doctor to Marcus and to his son Commodus. I mention this simply because in a few episodes down the line, we'll be taking a look at Galen and the relation between ancient medicine and ancient philosophy. But first, there is a final major Hellenistic school to look at, the skeptics. In two weeks, we'll be retracing our steps and returning to the days of Aristotle to look at the man credited with being the first skeptic, Pyro of Elis. First, though, I want to linger here in the Roman imperial period and consider the whole contribution of Roman Stoicism. So, join me for an interview with John Sellers, an expert in the Stoic art of living, next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.