In marked contrast to the Marcus of Fronto’s letters, he states very bluntly in The Meditations that the wise man neither strikes a tragic attitude nor whines about what befalls him. He’s certainly not referring to his rhetoric teachers, Fronto and Herodes Atticus. However, when he wrote these words, he probably had their rivals in mind: his philosophy teachers, the men who trained him in Stoicism and provided him with a living example of mental resilience. For example, the way Apollonius of Chalcedon endured severe pain and several long illnesses made a lifelong impression on Marcus. Apollonius had maintained his equanimity through it all, never allowing any setback to knock him off course, always remaining committed to his life’s goal of acquiring wisdom and sharing it with others.7
However, Claudius Maximus, another one of Marcus’s Stoic tutors, seems to have left an even more powerful impression on him. Marcus mentions Maximus’s illness and death three times in The Meditations. Like Apollonius, Maximus was completely resolute in his commitment to the pursuit of wisdom despite severe illness. He wasn’t a Stoic professor, like Apollonius, but a high-ranking Roman statesman and accomplished military commander. He was also a tough and profoundly self-reliant individual, renowned for his commitment to Stoicism—the sort of man who stood upright of his own accord, as Marcus liked to put it, rather than having to be set upright by anyone else. He remained unwavering in his resolve and cheerful in the face of any predicament.8 It seems likely that Maximus became ill and died not long after the Senate appointed him proconsul of Africa in 158 AD, and his loss seems to have affected Marcus quite deeply.
Indeed, Marcus appears to compare Maximus to the Emperor Antoninus. Both men showed impeccable strength of character, self-discipline, and endurance in the face of pain and illness. Antoninus took good care of his health, so that throughout most of his long life he seldom required the aid of physicians. However, he did suffer from severe headaches, and as he grew older, he became so doubled over that wooden splints were required to keep his torso upright. Marcus noticed that while recovering from a severe headache, his adoptive father would simply get right back to his duties as emperor with renewed determination. He didn’t waste time worrying about his ailments or allow the pain to stop him for long. As Marcus was writing The Meditations, he found himself looking back on the peaceful manner in which Antoninus had passed away over a decade earlier, at the venerable age of seventy-four.9 Like Maximus, Antoninus was always contented, always cheerful. It’s said that even as he lay dying, with his last breath he whispered the word equanimity to his guard, which was emblematic both of his character and of his reign. We can clearly see that Marcus’s attitude toward pain and illness was shaped by studying the characters of these men. Perhaps he also wanted to become less like Fronto and the other Sophists, whose love of high-flown rhetoric risked amplifying their complaints by turning common misfortunes into personal tragedies.
Although Marcus was a Stoic, he also drew inspiration from another, more surprising source when it came to coping with pain and illness: the rival philosophical school of Epicurus. The Epicureans believed that the goal of life was pleasure (hedone). They described pleasure, though, in a notoriously paradoxical manner, as consisting mainly of a state of freedom from pain and suffering (ataraxia). Minimizing the emotional distress caused by pain and illness was therefore extremely important to them.
Marcus quotes from a letter purportedly written by Epicurus nearly five hundred years earlier. We know from another source that Epicurus was afflicted by severe kidney stones and dysentery, which eventually caused his death:
When I was ill, my conversation was not devoted to the sufferings of my body, nor did I chatter about such matters to those who visited me but I continued to discuss the main elements of natural philosophy as before, and this point especially, how it is that the mind, while being aware of the agitations in our poor flesh, is unperturbed and preserves its specific good. Nor did I allow the doctors to assume grand airs, as though they were engaged in something important, but my life proceeded as well and happily as ever.10
Marcus must have been struck by the contrast between this letter and the sort of correspondence he had been having decades earlier with Fronto. Just as most of us do, Marcus had engaged in precisely the sort of chatter and complaints about the “sufferings of the body” that Epicurus had warned against. Although he was in poor health, Epicurus didn’t complain or dwell on his symptoms. In fact, he used his illness as an opportunity to converse in a dispassionate manner about how the mind can remain contented while the body suffers terrible pain and discomfort. He simply carried on doing what he loved: discussing philosophy with his friends.
Marcus quotes this letter and then exhorts himself always to act as Epicurus did: remain focused on the pursuit of wisdom even in the face of illness, pain, or any other hardship. This advice, he says, is common not only to Epicureanism and Stoicism but to all other schools of philosophy. Our main concern should always remain the use we are making right now, from moment to moment, of our own mind.11
Marcus returns to the teachings of Epicurus concerning pain and illness several times in The Meditations. He’s particularly interested in one of Epicurus’s famous maxims, or Principal Doctrines, which contains advice for coping with pain. We should remind ourselves, Epicurus said, that pain is always bearable because it is either acute or chronic but never both. The Church Father Tertullian neatly summed up the same idea by saying that Epicurus coined the maxim “a little pain is contemptible, and a great one is not lasting.” You can therefore learn to cope by telling yourself that the pain won’t last long if it’s severe or that you’re capable of enduring much worse if the pain is chronic. People often object to this by saying that their pain is both chronic and severe. However, earlier in The Meditations, Marcus paraphrased the same quote from Epicurus as follows: “On pain: if it is unbearable, it carries us off, if it persists, it can be endured.”12 The point is that chronic pain beyond our ability to endure would have killed us, so the fact we’re still standing proves that we’re capable of enduring much worse. Although this can be hard for some people to accept, participants in my online courses who have suffered for many years with chronic pain have reported that this Epicurean maxim has been a great help to them, just as it was for many people throughout previous centuries. We have to practice to keep looking at things this way, though, just as we must practice to overcome unhealthy habits and cravings.
Why exactly did the ancients find this particular strategy so helpful as a way of coping with pain? When people are really struggling, they focus on their inability to cope and the feeling that the problem is spiraling out of controclass="underline" “I just can’t bear this any longer!” This is a form of catastrophizing: focusing too much on the worst-case scenario and feeling overwhelmed. However, Epicurus meant that by focusing instead on the limits of your pain, whether in terms of duration or severity, you can develop a mind-set that’s more oriented toward coping and less overwhelmed by worry or negative emotions about your condition.