Nothing happens to anyone that he is not fitted by Nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he fails to realize that they have happened to him, or because he wants to display his strength of mind, he stands firm and remains unaffected. Is it not extraordinary that ignorance and self-conceit should prove more powerful than wisdom?38
Marcus reminds himself, though, that we can render everything that befalls us in life bearable by suggesting to ourselves either that it is in our interest to do so or that our duty somehow demands it. When we have a reason to endure something, it becomes easier. As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”39 It’s often easier to endure pain if we are confident that it’s doing us no harm or if we’re fixated on some goal. Boxers take punches without complaining to win matches. Their ability to do this puts philosophers to shame, even though the latter believe themselves to be motivated by something infinitely more important: the love of wisdom. Nevertheless, we can learn from observing others that anyone can endure great pain and hardship if they are sufficiently motivated to do so. STOICISM IN EARLY PSYCHOTHERAPY
You’ve learned how the Stoic techniques for coping with pain and illness described by Marcus resemble some of those employed in modern CBT. However, at the start of the twentieth century, long before CBT, there was another “rational” or “cognitive” approach to psychotherapy that competed with Freudian psychoanalysis but is now largely forgotten. The Swiss psychiatrist and neuropathologist Paul Dubois, author of The Psychoneuroses and Their Moral Treatment (1904), was the main proponent of what became known as “rational psychotherapy.” Dubois believed that psychological problems were due mainly to negative thinking, which worked like negative autosuggestion, and he favored a treatment based on the practice of “Socratic dialogue” through which he sought to rationally persuade patients to abandon the unhealthy ideas responsible for various neurotic and psychosomatic conditions. The influence of the ancient Stoics is clear from Dubois’s scattered references to them.
If we eliminate from ancient writings a few allusions that gave them local colour, we shall find the ideas of Socrates, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius absolutely modern and applicable to our times.40
Dubois was particularly interested in the way Stoicism could be used to help psychotherapy patients cope with chronic pain and other physical or psychosomatic symptoms.
The idea is not new; the stoics have pushed to the last degree this resistance to pain and misfortune. The following lines, written by Seneca, seem to be drawn from a modern treatise on psychotherapy: “Beware of aggravating your troubles yourself and of making your position worse by your complaints. Grief is light when opinion does not exaggerate it; and if one encourages one’s self by saying, ‘This is nothing,’ or, at least, ‘This is slight; let us try to endure it, for it will end,’ one makes one’s grief slight by reason of believing it such.” And, further: “One is only unfortunate in proportion as one believes one’s self so.” One could truly say concerning nervous pains that one only suffers when he thinks he does.41
Dubois quoted Seneca’s letters to illustrate the role of patience and acceptance, as opposed to worry, in helping us to cope with and avoid exacerbating physical illness. He also quoted Seneca’s remarks that the principles of Stoic philosophy consoled him during illness and acted upon him “like medicine,” strengthening the body by elevating the soul.
However, one of the most striking and memorable passages in Dubois concerns something that one of his patients said to him about the Stoics:
A young man into whom I tried to instil a few principles of stoicism towards ailments stopped me at the first words, saying, “I understand, doctor; let me show you.” And taking a pencil he drew a large black spot on a piece of paper.
“This,” said he, “is the disease, in its most general sense, the physical trouble—rheumatism, toothache, what you will—moral trouble, sadness, discouragement, melancholy. If I acknowledge it by fixing my attention upon it, I already trace a circle to the periphery of the black spot, and it has become larger. If I affirm it with acerbity the spot is increased by a new circle. There I am, busied with my pain, hunting for means to get rid of it, and the spot only becomes larger. If I preoccupy myself with it, if I fear the consequences, if I see the future gloomily, I have doubled or trebled the original spot.” And, showing me the central point of the circle, the trouble reduced to its simplest expression, he said with a smile, “Should I not have done better to leave it as it was?”
“One exaggerates, imagines, anticipates affliction,” wrote Seneca. For a long time, I have told my discouraged patients and have repeated to myself, “Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.”42
This diagram, added Dubois, illustrates that “he who knows how to suffer suffers less.” The burden of physical pain or illness is light when we look at it objectively, without “drawing concentric circles” around it, which multiply our suffering by adding layers of fear and worry.
By the time he wrote The Meditations, Marcus had a different relationship with pain than he had when he exchanged complaints with Fronto. According to the Stoics, our initial reaction to pain or illness may be natural and reasonable, but amplifying or perpetuating our suffering by complaining about it over time is unnatural and unreasonable. Animals may cry out in pain and lick their wounds for a while, but they don’t ruminate about it for weeks afterward or write letters to their friends complaining about how badly they’ve been sleeping. Marcus had learned how to suffer properly and thereby to suffer less, as Dubois would have put it. This is how he must have coped with both chronic pain and illness throughout the course of the First Marcomannic War, in which he led Rome to victory.
6. THE INNER CITADEL AND WAR OF MANY NATIONS
It was an ambush! Wave after wave of Sarmatian horsemen crashed out of the forest on the far side of the River Danube to engage the Roman legionaries head on. Some split off in a classic pincer maneuver, outflanking and encircling the men standing helplessly in the killing zone, midway across the frozen river. Marcus looked on quietly with his generals. The barbarians regularly sneaked across the river that marked the front line to raid settlements in the province of Pannonia. The Romans had learned that the enemy horsemen were most vulnerable when encumbered with loot on their return journey, so they would pursue them across the river, hoping to catch them as they slowed their pace to make the crossing back into their own lands. Sometimes, however, the raiders were just leading the Romans into a trap.
As soon as the Romans recognized the enemy ambush was being sprung, the infantry assumed their standard defensive formation, known as a “hollow square.” Officers and lightly armored troops were protected on the inside by legionaries facing outward on all four sides, their rectangular shields packed tightly together forming a protective wall. The Sarmatians knew that tactic very well. It worked as long as the Romans could hold formation, but they would be massacred if a cavalry charge managed to break through the square and throw them into disarray. That’s why the Sarmatians had lured them onto the river: their horses were trained to charge across the ice. When their lances smashed into the shields of the legionaries forming those defensive walls, the Romans would slip, lose their footing, and tumble like bowling pins.
The Sarmatians were a mysterious, intimidating enemy. They were actually a loose coalition of nomadic tribes led by King Bandaspus, ruler of the Iazyges, the most warlike among the tribes. Sarmatian men were tall and muscular, with fierce blue eyes and long reddish-yellow hair and beards. These exceptional horsemen rode into battle clad in a type of scale mail carved from hooves. Their unusual armor reminded the Romans of a python’s skin, perhaps even conjuring images of dragons. It was said that the Iazyges worshiped fire. They wore great helms and fought with huge wooden lances tipped with sharpened bone. However, what shocked the Romans most of all was the discovery, as they removed helmets from the corpses of slain Sarmatians, that many of the warriors were women.