Indeed, one of the most common themes in Marcus’s writings was his commitment to serving others, that notion of sympatheia and a duty to act for the common good, first advanced by Zeno but carried on by Chrysippus and Posidonius in the centuries since. The phrase “common good” appears more than eighty times in Meditations, which for a Stoic makes sense but is surprising considering how nearly all of his predecessors viewed the purpose of the state. Yet here we have Marcus writing, “Whenever you have trouble getting up in the morning, remind yourself that you’ve been made by nature for the purpose of working with others.”
But he did have to remind himself of that regularly, as we all must, because it is so easy to forget.
Marcus used this private journal as a way to keep his ego in check. Fame, he wrote, was fleeting and empty. Applause and cheering were the clacking of tongues and the smacking of hands. What good was posthumous fame, he notes, when you’ll be dead and gone? And for that matter, when people in the future will be just as annoying and wrong about things as they are now?
“Words once in common use now sound archaic,” he wrote. “And the names of the famous dead as welclass="underline" Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus . . . Scipio and Cato . . . Augustus . . . Hadrian and Antoninus and . . . Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend and soon oblivion covers it.” Alexander the Great and his mule driver, Marcus writes, both died and both ended up buried in the same cold ground. What good was fame or accomplishment? It didn’t hold a candle to character.
At Aquincum, the Roman camp near present-day Budapest where Marcus Aurelius visited the Second Legion and is believed to have written parts of Meditations, archaeologists have uncovered a larger-than-life limestone statue of an emperor in a toga. At first glance it looks like the head has been broken off. But a closer inspection reveals that the head was designed to be replaceable. The statue was part of a shrine for the cult of the emperor, and they wanted to be able to swap the head out each time a new one took the throne.
Knowing that he was only a placeholder helped Marcus prevent his position from going to his head. He built few monuments to himself. He didn’t mind criticism. He never abused his power.
Hadrian once got angry enough that he stabbed a secretary in the eye with a writing stylus. Of course, there were no consequences. Marcus could have taken advantage of this freedom to behave as he liked. Instead he kept his temper in check, refused to lash out at the people around him, even if they would have let him get away with it. “Why should we feel anger at the world,” he writes in Meditations, cribbing a line from a lost Euripides play, “as if the world would notice.”
It cannot be said, for all his dignity and poise, that Marcus was a perfect ruler. No leader is, nor would Marcus have expected he could be. He must be faulted for persecutions of the Christians under his reign—a stain on both him and Rusticus. Yet even here, he was considered by Tertullian, an early Christian writer who lived through the last years of his rule, to be a protector of Christians. Although he made some minor improvements in the lives of slaves, he was—like all the Stoics—incapable of questioning the institution entirely. For all his talk of being a “citizen of the world,” and his belief in a unity between all dwellers on this planet, he regarded large swaths of the world’s population as “barbarians” and fought and killed many of them. And of course, for a successor, he ultimately chose—or was forced to choose, as only the second emperor since Augustus to have a male heir—to pass the throne to his son Commodus, who turned out to be a deranged and flawed man.*
It’s unfair to compare Marcus only to his own writings, or to the impossibly high standards of his philosophy. Instead, he should also be looked at in the company of the other men (and women) who held supreme power, which Dio Cassius did well when he observed that “he ruled better than any others who had ever been in any position of power.”
The rule is that sensitive, thoughtful men like Marcus Aurelius turn out to be poor leaders. To be a sovereign or an executive is to come face-to-face with the messiness of the world, the flaws and foibles of humanity. The reason there have been so few philosopher kings is not just a lack of opportunity—it’s that philosophers often fall short of what the job requires. Marcus turned out to have the ivory shoulders, as well as the sharp mind, required for the job. “Don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic,” he reminded himself. He had to take reality on reality’s terms. He had to make do with what was there. For an idealist and a lover of ideas, Marcus was also, like Abraham Lincoln, impressively pragmatic. “The cucumber is bitter?” he said rhetorically. “Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know.” Nothing better expressed his leadership style and his view of progress than this quote:
You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible—and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom.
But what if some other area of my action is thwarted?
Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately take its place, one that better fits the life you are building.
This seems to be how he thought about the politicians he worked with as well. Instead of holding them to his standards or expecting the impossible—as many talented, brilliant leaders naturally do—he focused on their strengths and was tolerant of their weaknesses. Like Lincoln again, Marcus was not afraid of being disagreed with, and made use of common ground and common cause as best he could. “So long as a person did anything good,” Dio Cassius writes, Marcus “would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention; for he declared that it is impossible for one to create such men as one desires to have, and so it is fitting to employ those who are already in existence for whatever service each of them may be able to render to the State.”
Ernest Renan, a nineteenth-century biographer of Marcus, puts it perfectly: “The consequence of austere philosophy might have produced stiffness and severity. But here it was that the rare goodness of the nature of Marcus Aurelius shone out in all its brilliancy. His severity was confined only to himself.”
Musonius Rufus, some forty-odd years before Marcus was born, had been approached by a Syrian king. “Do not imagine,” he had told the man,
that it is more appropriate for anyone to study philosophy than for you, nor for any other reason than because you are a king. For the first duty of a king is to be able to protect and benefit his people, and a protector and benefactor must know what is good for a man and what is bad, what is helpful and what harmful, what advantageous and what disadvantageous, inasmuch as it is plain that those who ally themselves with evil come to harm, while those who cleave to good enjoy protection, and those who are deemed worthy of help and advantage enjoy benefits, while those who involve themselves in things disadvantageous and harmful suffer punishment.
Could Musonius have imagined—persecuted and abused by five consecutive Roman emperors—that his vision would one day take hold in such a man? That everything the Stoics had spoken of and dreamt about would come true so beautifully and yet so fleetingly? He had said it was impossible for anyone but a good man to be a good king, and Marcus, who had read Musonius, did his best to live up to this command.