After listening to her for a while, Hercules was approached by the second goddess, Arete, a less boastful and more modest woman, who nonetheless shone with natural beauty. To his surprise, she wore a grave expression. She warned him that her path led in a very different direction: it would be long and difficult, and would require a great deal of hard work. Speaking plainly, she told Hercules that he would suffer. He would be doomed to walk the earth in rags, reviled and persecuted by his enemies. “Nothing that is really good and admirable,” cautioned Arete, “is granted by the gods to men without some effort and application.” Hercules would be called upon to exercise wisdom and justice and to face mounting adversity with bravery and self-discipline. Overcoming great obstacles through courageous and honorable deeds, the goddess said, was the only true path to fulfillment in life.
Hercules famously chose the heroic path of Arete, or “Virtue,” and was not seduced by Kakia, or “Vice.” Armed with a wooden club and dressed in the pelt of the Nemean lion, symbolic of a more primitive and natural way of life, he wandered from one place to another, as if the whole world were his home. The gods forced him to undertake the legendary Twelve Labors, including slaying the Hydra and ultimately entering Hades, the Underworld itself, to capture Cerberus with his bare hands. He died in extreme agony, betrayed by his jealous wife, who tricked him into wearing a robe soaked in blood contaminated with the Hydra’s poison. However, Zeus was so impressed by his mortal son’s greatness of soul that he granted him an apotheosis, elevating him to the status of a god in his own right.
Not surprisingly, Hercules was the mythic hero most admired by Cynic and Stoic philosophers. His labors embodied their belief that it’s more rewarding to face hardship voluntarily and cultivate strength of character than to take the easy option by embracing comfortable living and idleness. Hence, the satirist Lucian, a contemporary of Marcus, portrayed the legendary sale of Diogenes the Cynic at a slave auction as follows:
BUYER: Is there anyone whom you strive to emulate?
DIOGENES: Yes, Hercules.
BUYER: Then why aren’t you wearing a lion-skin? Though I’ll admit that your club looks like his.
DIOGENES: Why, this old cloak is my lion-skin, and like him I’m fighting a campaign against pleasure, not at anyone else’s bidding, but of my own free will, since I’ve made it my purpose to clean up human life.3
Like the Cynics before them, the Stoics saw the myth of Hercules as an allegory about the virtues of courage and self-discipline. “What do you think Hercules would have amounted to,” Epictetus asks his students, “if there had not been monsters such as the Nemean lion, the Hydra, the stag of Artemis, the Erymanthian boar, and all those unjust and bestial men for him to contend with? Why, if he had sat at home, wrapped up asleep in bedsheets, living in luxury and ease, he would have been no Hercules at all!”4 Epictetus tells his students that just as Hercules cleansed the earth of monsters—without complaining—they should set about conquering themselves by purging the base desires and emotions from their hearts.
For Stoics, in other words, the tale of Hercules symbolizes the epic challenge of deciding who we really want to be in life, the promise of philosophy, and the temptation of giving in to pleasure and vice. The moral is that it often requires a Herculean effort to keep to the right path. But wasn’t Hercules’s life unpleasant? As we’ll see, from the Stoic perspective Hercules remained cheerful, despite the terrible things he endured. He enjoyed a profound sense of inner satisfaction knowing that he was fulfilling his destiny and expressing his true nature. His life had something far more satisfying than pleasure: it had purpose.
All of this must have been familiar to Marcus and Lucius from the education they received in Stoicism. Lucius gradually lost interest, though, and turned his back on philosophy. Indeed, while Marcus was busy studying and tirelessly engaged in public office, Lucius was gaining notoriety for his debauchery and his growing infatuation with popular Roman spectator sports. He got himself in hot water by siding with the Greens at the races and thereby offending fans of rival teams, particularly the Blues. He took a golden statue of the Greens’ most prized horse, Volucer, everywhere he went. He also had an enormous crystal wine goblet made that he named in its honor, which “surpassed the capacity of any human draught,” another testament to his notoriety for binge drinking.
By contrast, Marcus, like Hercules in the fable, chose to avoid these sorts of distractions, or at least keep them to a minimum. The unnamed slave from whom he learned so much as a child had wisely counseled him not to take the side of the Greens or the Blues in the chariot races or back different factions in the gladiatorial lists. These were the main forms of public entertainment in imperial Rome, and it seems the “masses” were just as addicted to them as many of us are to spectator sports and reality television today.
Marcus came to loathe all such public events, but he was obliged to attend them at the insistence of his friends and advisors. He seems to have found unnecessary bloodshed vicious and barbaric. Indeed, as emperor, Marcus began to impose many restrictions on the cruelty of the games. He insisted that the gladiators before him use blunted weapons so that they would be fighting like athletes, without any risk to their lives. The thrill of the chariot races was likewise about bloodlust, as horses and charioteers were frequently maimed or killed in this dangerous sport. Marcus tried to see beyond the excitement of the crowd. He adopted a more philosophical attitude to the events unfolding before his eyes, asking himself, Is this really what people consider fun?
For Stoics, feelings of pleasure in themselves are neither good nor bad. Rather, whether our state of mind is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, depends on the things we take enjoyment in. Marcus compares Roman society to the idle pageantry of a procession, where people seem distracted by trivialities, but he reminds himself that he must take his place in it with good grace. Nevertheless, a man’s worth can be measured by the things upon which he sets his heart.5 Enjoying the suffering of others is bad. Taking pleasure in watching men risk death or serious injury would therefore be considered a vice by the Stoics. In contrast, enjoying seeing people flourish is good. You might think that’s obvious; however, we can be blinded by pleasure to its consequences for both others and ourselves. Marcus had been taught by his Stoic tutors to examine the sources and consequences of pleasure very closely. He was therefore able, to some extent, to see beyond the prejudices of his own culture. We should likewise learn to enjoy things that are good for us and others, not things that are bad for us. Indeed, there’s a type of inner gratification that comes from living consistently in accord with our deepest values, which can make ordinary pleasures feel superficial by comparison. Marcus has that in mind when he repeatedly tells himself that the goal of his life is not pleasure but action.
At first the people ridiculed Marcus as a snob and a bore because at the games they could see that he was reading legal documents and discussing them with his advisors. He’d been told that he had to show his face at these events to keep the crowds happy, but he wanted to use the time to address the serious business of running the state. Even his tutor and close friend, Fronto, denounced him for being too serious: