Fronto was embraced as a close family friend, and he remained so until his death around 166 or 167 AD, possibly a victim of the plague during its initial outbreak in Rome. Fronto later wrote down his glowing impression of Marcus as a youth: he was innately predisposed to all the virtues before being trained in them, we’re told, “being a good man before puberty, and a skilled speaker before donning the robes of manhood.”12 Fronto was important enough to Marcus to be one of the tutors cited in book 1 of The Meditations. However, Marcus mentions little about Fronto’s influence on his character and reserves greater praise for Alexander of Cotiaeum, his Greek grammarian, a lower-grade teacher. Despite the importance of their relationship, therefore, Fronto didn’t much inspire Marcus as a role model. He also tried to actively discourage his young student from becoming a Stoic.
We know Fronto worried that philosophers sometimes lacked the eloquence required by statesmen and emperors and risked making bad decisions under the influence of their peculiar doctrines. He wrote to Marcus saying that even if he achieved the wisdom of Zeno and Cleanthes, the founders of Stoicism, he would still be obliged, whether he liked it or not, to wear the purple imperial cloak “and not that of the philosophers, made of coarse wool.”13 Fronto meant that Marcus was required not only to dress like an emperor but also to speak like one, draping himself in purple and winning praise for his formal eloquence. In reality, though, Marcus preferred to dress down and talk plainly like a philosopher or, failing that, an ordinary citizen. Fronto’s job was to imbue the boy with the cultural sophistication befitting his station in life and train him to become an effective political speechwriter and orator. This was a very difficult time for the young Caesar, as he felt torn between rhetoric and philosophy. Yet Fronto’s influence gradually waned. Eloquence is one thing, wisdom another. We’re told that Plato’s saying was always on Marcus’s lips: those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers.
The contest between Sophists and Stoics over young Marcus had started shortly after Hadrian’s death, when Antoninus summoned the philosopher Apollonius of Chalcedon back to Rome. The Historia Augusta claims that Antoninus instructed Apollonius to move into the imperial palace, the House of Tiberius, so that he could become Marcus’s full-time personal tutor. However, Apollonius replied in laconic fashion: “The master ought not come to the pupil, but the pupil to the master.”14 Antoninus was initially unimpressed by this response and quipped that it was apparently easier for Apollonius to make the trip all the way from Greece to Rome than for him to get up and walk from his house to the palace. He probably assumed it was just arrogance for a tutor to insist that the emperor’s son should come to his home for tuition like everyone else. Apollonius was the main philosopher whose lectures Marcus attended in his youth, which suggests that Antoninus eventually relented and allowed his son to mingle with other students outside the palace. As we’ll see, many decades later, toward the end of his life, Marcus was still causing a stir by attending the public lectures of philosophers, as if he were a common citizen.
Marcus was impressed with Apollonius’s skill and fluency as a teacher of Stoic doctrines. However, what he admired most was the man’s character. The Sophists talked at length about wisdom and virtue, but it was all just words with them. Apollonius, on the other hand, was completely unpretentious about his intellectual prowess, and he never became the slightest bit frustrated when debating a philosophical text with students. He showed Marcus what it meant in practice for a Stoic to “live in agreement with Nature”—that is, how to consistently rely on reason as our guide in life. Indeed, Apollonius was no mere professor but exhibited the true constancy and equanimity of a Stoic even in the face of severe pain, long illness, and the loss of a child. Marcus also saw in him a clear example of what it meant for Stoics to engage in a course of action with great vigor and determination while simultaneously remaining relaxed and unperturbed about the outcome. (They referred to this as taking action with a “reserve clause,” a strategy we’ll examine in more detail later.) Marcus adds that Apollonius would accept favors graciously from friends, while neither demeaning himself by doing so nor showing any hint of ingratitude.15 This man was an inspiration to the future emperor, in other words, and the sort of person that Stoicism promised to help him become.
Apollonius taught Marcus the doctrines of Stoic philosophy while showing him how to apply them in daily life. Marcus would have learned that the Stoics believed there was a relationship between the sincere love of wisdom and greater emotional resilience. Their philosophy contained within itself a moral and psychological therapy (therapeia) for minds troubled by anger, fear, sadness, and unhealthy desires. They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions). To say that Apollonius taught Marcus Stoic philosophy is therefore also to say that he trained Marcus to develop mental resilience through an ancient form of psychological therapy and self-improvement sometimes described as the Stoic “therapy of the passions.” An important aspect of this training would have involved Apollonius showing Marcus how to maintain his equanimity by deliberately using language in the special therapeutic manner described by the Stoics.
However, before we turn to the Stoic use of language, we first have to understand a little more about the Stoic theory of emotions. The curious tale of an unnamed Stoic teacher provides our best introduction to this topic. We find it in The Attic Nights, a book of anecdotes written by Aulus Gellius, a grammarian who was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. Gellius was sailing across the Ionian Sea from Cassiopa, a town on Corfu, to Brundisium, in southern Italy, possibly en route to Rome. He describes one of his fellow passengers as an important and highly regarded Stoic teacher who had been lecturing in Athens. We can’t identify the teacher with certainty; it’s not impossible, though, that Gellius could have been referring to Apollonius of Chalcedon.
Out on open water their boat was caught in a ferocious storm, which lasted almost the whole night. The passengers feared for their lives as they struggled to man the pumps and keep themselves from drowning in a shipwreck. Gellius noticed that the great Stoic teacher had turned as white as a sheet and shared the same anxious expression as the rest of the passengers. However, the philosopher alone remained silent instead of crying out in terror and lamenting his predicament. Once the sea and sky calmed, as they were approaching their destination, Gellius gently inquired of the Stoic why he looked almost as fearful as the others did during the storm. He could see that Gellius was sincere and courteously answered that the founders of Stoicism taught how people facing such dangers naturally and inevitably experience a short-lived stage of fear. He then reached into his satchel and produced the fifth book of Epictetus’s Discourses for Gellius to peruse. Today, only the first four books of the Discourses survive, although Marcus appears to have read the lost discourses of Epictetus and quotes from them in The Meditations. In any case, Gellius describes Epictetus’s remarks, which he confidently asserts were true to the original teachings of Zeno and Chrysippus.