The sight of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sarmatian horsemen charging across the frozen Danube must have been terrifying. Marcus had learned to gaze calmly on these fearsome warriors and the carnage of the battlefield by recalling the Stoic precepts he’d studied as a young man. He took a slow, deep breath as he watched the first wave of lancers collide against Roman shields. Almost immediately, his general and son-in-law, Claudius Pompeianus, turned toward him and smiled. Their plan was working: this time the Sarmatians were in for a surprise. The legionaries held formation perfectly as the lances struck their shields and glanced off harmlessly. Marcus’s infantry had learned a new trick. Men on the interior of the square had laid their shields on the ice, holding them fast in place. The legionaries forming the outer wall then braced their rear foot against their comrades’ shields. So far, that was proving good enough to stabilize them against the impact of enemy lances.
As the Sarmatian horsemen reeled from the shock of their failed charge, the Roman counterattack began with deadly efficiency. Skirmishers darted out between the legionaries’ shields. The Romans quickly grabbed hold of the horses’ bridles and used their own body weight to make the horses slip and fall sideways onto the ice, dismounting their riders. The Roman legionaries thrust spears at the Sarmatians from behind their wall of shields. The ice was soon awash with blood as bodies piled up. The remaining barbarians found themselves struggling to keep their footing. Unable to flee back to the safety of the forest, they were thrown into disarray right where the Romans wanted them. Before long everyone was slipping, caught up in a melee, Romans grappling with Sarmatians on the bloody ice. However, Marcus’s legionaries were trained in wrestling. If a Sarmatian knocked a Roman down, the Roman would pull his assailant on top of him while lying prone on the ice, then kick him off with both legs, throwing him onto his back and reversing their positions. The tribesmen had little experience of this kind of disciplined close-combat fighting and, caught off guard by the change of tactics, were eventually routed.
Marcus had successfully turned the ambush around and inflicted a major defeat on King Bandaspus. After several initial setbacks, the tide of war now began to turn in Rome’s favor. The Sarmatians could no longer depend on using the terrain to their advantage. Voluntarily walking into an ambush had obviously been a dangerous strategy for the Romans. It required immense discipline and careful preparation—the troops had trained in secret during the winter months. And it worked. They had kept their nerve in a chaotic situation, facing their most fearsome enemy, and snatched victory from the very jaws of defeat. HOW TO RELINQUISH FEAR
Epictetus taught his students to think of Stoic philosophy as being like the caduceus, the magic wand of Hermes: every misfortune is transformed into something good by its touch.1 Marcus had learned to become adept at this sort of thinking. Stoics calmly envisaged different types of misfortune on a daily basis as part of their contemplative training, learning to view them with relative indifference. Indeed, envisaging feared catastrophes as if they were really happening can be viewed as a kind of emotional battle drill, a way of preparing for worst-case scenarios. Stoics would mentally rehearse ways of responding to these events with wisdom and virtue, turning obstacles into opportunities where possible. One consequence of embracing our fears is that we’re more likely to creatively turn apparent setbacks to our advantage, as the Romans did in their battle on the Danube. These Sarmatian ambushes must have seemed like military catastrophes to the Romans at first. What if they concealed the opportunity to spring a deadly trap, though, that could turn the tide of the war? The obstacle standing in the way becomes the way.
These opportunities came more readily to Stoic leaders because they were trained to be unafraid of seeming misfortunes. After all, Fortune favors the brave, as the Roman poets said. However, for the Stoics, the supreme goal was to remain composed and exercise wisdom even in the face of great danger, whatever the outcome. Marcus tells himself to always remember when he starts to feel frustrated with events that “this is not a misfortune, but rather to bear it nobly is good fortune.” After Lucius’s sudden death in 169 AD, Marcus had been unexpectedly left in sole command of the troops assembling along the Danube for the First Marcomannic War. In his late fifties, with no military experience whatsoever, he’d found himself in command of the largest army ever massed on a Roman frontier. He stood at the head of roughly 140,000 men who awaited his orders, unsure what to expect of him. It must have been incredibly daunting. Yet he embraced his new role completely and turned it into an opportunity to deepen his Stoic resolve.
There should be no question that he risked his own life in stationing himself at the front. At the outbreak of the war, Pannonia had been completely overrun by a huge coalition army led by Ballomar, the young king of the Marcomanni. Ballomar had secretly brought together many smaller tribes, but he was also supported by a huge army of the Marcomanni’s powerful neighbors, the Quadi. The Romans had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Carnuntum, reputedly losing twenty thousand men in a single day, including the praetorian prefect in command, Furius Victorinus. Nevertheless, Marcus remained very close to the action. In The Meditations, he vividly describes the sight of severed hands, feet, and heads lying at unsettling distances from their bodies.2 Indeed, he makes a point of noting down that he’s writing at Carnuntum, the main legionary fortress on the front line, and “on the Granua, among the Quadi,” which puts him farther east, presumably later, across the Danube inside enemy territory.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the danger that he faced, Marcus never really mentions anxiety about the terrors of war in The Meditations. It does seem as though he was a natural worrier at first, anxiously burning the midnight oil as he worked obsessively on matters of state. By the time he was writing these notes to himself on philosophy, though, he seems to have become a much calmer and more self-assured man. Perhaps he redoubled his efforts to assimilate Stoicism following the death of his tutor Junius Rusticus, and that accounts for the transformation. When he arrived in Carnuntum to take command of the legions, he was both physically frail and an absolute novice—an “old woman” of a philosopher, sneered the future usurper, Avidius Cassius. Everyone must have questioned Marcus’s competence to lead such a massive campaign. However, both his practice of Stoicism and the long and grueling wars against the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians were slowly molding his character. Seven years later we find him a hardened veteran, and the northern legions, having learned to revere their new commander, are now fiercely loyal to Marcus Aurelius.
The soldiers firmly believed that the gods were on their emperor’s side, and they even attributed two legendary battlefield miracles to Marcus Aurelius’s presence. The first, called the “Thunder Miracle,” occurred in 174 AD, when the troops claimed that Marcus’s prayers had called down a lightning bolt that destroyed a siege engine being used by the Sarmatians. A month later, in July 174 AD, it was claimed that Marcus brought about a “Rain Miracle.” A detachment of men from the Thundering Legion, led by Pertinax, found themselves surrounded, vastly outnumbered, and out of water. According to one account, Marcus raised his hand and prayed: “With this hand which has never taken life, I turn to Thee and worship the Giver of life.” (That would surely be the Stoic Zeus, although Christians later implausibly claimed that Marcus was praying to their God.) At that moment, a torrential rainstorm ensued, and as they fought on, it’s said the Romans gulped down water from their helmets, mixed with the blood running from their wounds. Marcus wasn’t superstitious, as we’ve seen. The legions, however, clearly believed that he was blessed by the gods and acclaimed him their victorious commander. We’re told that when he eventually passed away, the soldiers wept loudly. THE STOIC RESERVE CLAUSE