In this chapter we saw how the values Marcus learned from his birth family, such as simplicity and plain speech, clashed with those of the Second Sophistic and the rhetoricians at Hadrian’s court. This led him to embrace the Stoics’ radical use of language as a counterrhetoric, through techniques such as redescribing events in more objective language, free from value judgments—an ancient precursor to decatastrophizing in modern cognitive therapy.
Accepting this approach to describing our situation, whatever it may be, is a foundational step in learning the other Stoic practices. It leads to the next step: considering what resources or virtues you have that would allow you to cope better, or how a wise person might deal with the same situation. Whether we call it cognitive distancing or katharsis, we separate strong value judgments from external events by letting go of excessive attachment to things. You might find this a tricky concept at first, but coming back to Epictetus’s famous saying—“It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things”—will serve you well as a guide.
We’ve seen that Marcus’s disillusionment with court life and formal rhetoric gradually led him to embrace philosophy more deeply. His personal mentor Junius Rusticus would persuade Marcus to undergo a more thorough conversion to Stoic philosophy and embrace it wholeheartedly as a way of life.
3. CONTEMPLATING THE SAGE
As a young man, Marcus Aurelius frequently became very angry, often struggling to avoid losing his temper. Later in life he would thank the gods that he had been able to restrain himself from doing something in those moments that he might otherwise have regretted. He’d seen the damage caused by Hadrian’s temper. During one infamous tantrum, the emperor had poked out the eye of some poor slave with the point of an iron stylus, presumably to the horror of onlookers. Once he’d come back to his senses, Hadrian apologetically asked the man if there was anything he could do to make it up to him. “All I want is my eye back,” came the reply.1
His successor, Antoninus, was famously gentle and even-tempered, quite the opposite of Hadrian. In the first book of The Meditations, Marcus contemplates his adoptive father’s virtues several times, even referring to himself as Antoninus’s disciple, but Marcus makes no mention of any virtues possessed by Hadrian. Marcus clearly viewed Antoninus as the model of an ideal ruler, everything he aspired to become himself. Indeed, over a decade after Antoninus’s death, Marcus was still carefully meditating on his example.
The Stoics taught Marcus that anger is nothing but temporary madness and that its consequences are often irreparable, as in the case of the slave’s eye. They also provided him with the psychological concepts and set of tools he needed to master his own feelings of aggression. Marcus clearly wanted to be more like the humble, peaceful Antoninus than the arrogant and volatile Hadrian. He needed help achieving this, though. Ironically, he credits the man who most frequently provoked his anger with teaching him how to control it. Marcus’s Stoic mentor Junius Rusticus often infuriated him, but also showed him how to recover his normal frame of mind. As we’ll see, the Stoics had many specific techniques for anger management. One of them is to wait until our feelings have naturally abated and then calmly consider what someone wise would do in a similar situation. Marcus also learned from Rusticus how to be reconciled with others as soon as they were willing to make amends. Perhaps that was how Rusticus conducted himself when he detected that Marcus was becoming angry, providing an example of gracious behavior that Marcus studied and emulated.
Whereas Apollonius was a professional philosophy lecturer, Rusticus, also an expert on Stoicism, probably acted more as a mentor or private tutor. A Roman statesman of consular rank, Rusticus was roughly twenty years Marcus’s senior. He appears to have been the grandson of a famous Stoic called Arulenus Rusticus, a friend and follower of Thrasea, the leader of the Stoic Opposition—a political hero to Epictetus and his students. Rusticus himself was a highly esteemed man, both in private and public life. He was also intensely loyal to Marcus. Fronto, with typical hyperbole, says in his private letters that Rusticus “would gladly surrender and sacrifice his life” to preserve Marcus’s little finger. Marcus clearly revered Rusticus, soon came to view himself as the Stoic’s disciple, and remained devoted to him for decades, even after becoming emperor. For example, it was the custom in the imperial court for the emperor to greet his praetorian prefect with a kiss on the lips, but Marcus broke with this convention by always kissing Rusticus first when they met, as if he were greeting his own brother. This gesture made it clear to everyone that the philosopher occupied a special position at court. If Antoninus was Marcus’s role model as an emperor, Rusticus undoubtedly provided the main example he sought to follow as a Stoic. As Marcus said elsewhere, philosophy was his mother, the court merely his stepmother.2
There’s no doubt that Rusticus was the central figure in Marcus’s development as a philosopher. However, Marcus makes it clear that one of the most important events in their relationship was when his tutor presented him with a set of notes on the lectures of Epictetus from his own personal library. Marcus probably meant the Discourses recorded by Arrian, which he quotes several times in The Meditations. As we’ve seen, Arrian was a student of Epictetus who transcribed eight volumes of his philosophical discussions, only four of which survive. We also have his shorter summary of Epictetus’s sayings, the Handbook, or Enchiridion. Arrian was a prolific author in his own right and a highly accomplished Roman general and statesman. Hadrian made him a senator and later appointed him suffect consul for 131 AD, and he then served for six years as governor of Cappadocia, one of the most important military posts in the empire. During the reign of Antoninus, he retired to Athens, where he later served as archon, ruler and chief magistrate, before dying around the start of Marcus’s reign. It’s possible that Arrian is the missing link that connects Marcus and Rusticus to Epictetus.
Arrian was about a decade older than Rusticus, and they likely knew each other. Indeed, Themistius, a Roman philosopher of the fourth century, speaks of them together. Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus, he says, “pulled Arrian and Rusticus away from their books, refusing to let them be mere pen-and-ink philosophers.”3 The emperors didn’t let Arrian and Rusticus write about courage while remaining safely at home, composing legal treatises while avoiding public life, or pondering the best form of administration while abstaining from participation in the government of Rome, we’re told. Instead, they were escorted from the study of Stoic philosophy “to the general’s tent and to the speaker’s platform.” Themistius adds that while serving as Roman generals, Arrian and Rusticus “passed through the Caspian Gates, drove the Alani out of Armenia, and established boundaries for the Iberians and the Albani.” In reward for these military achievements, the two were appointed consuls, and they governed the great city of Rome and presided over the Senate. The examples of men like these who went before Marcus—statesmen and military commanders inspired by Stoicism—encouraged him to believe he could be both an emperor and a philosopher.