On this episode, Donald Robertson shares how he’s sharing the values of stoicism in a new and riveting way. Listen in as Donald and I discuss the process of creating his forthcoming graphic novel Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius as well the prevalence of stoicism in today’s culture including religion and society.
Donald Robertson is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer.
Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. He was born in Irvine, Scotland, and grew up in Ayr. He worked as a psychotherapist for about twenty years in London, England, where he ran a training school for therapists, before emigrating to Canada in 2013 to focus on his writing and training courses. He now divides his time between Greece and Canada.
He is an experienced public speaker. His therapy practice specialized for many years in helping clients with social anxiety and self-confidence issues. His work, and that of his colleagues, has often featured in the media of different countries, including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, etc.
You can learn more about Donald here: https://donaldrobertson.name/
Episode Transcript
Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioral therapist and author of several books on Stoicism, including the international bestselling, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which I highly recommend you pick up. We talked about this in the first interview that I had with him last year. In fact, if you’re into Stoicism, Ryan Holliday, author of The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle is Away, has said, quote, Donald Robertson is one of my favorite writers about Stoicism, and that says a lot. Donald’s latest offering is still about Stoicism. In fact, it’s about the life of Marcus Aurelius, but…
01:27
is being released as a breathtaking graphic novel. Verisimus, the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius comes out officially on June 14th, but is available now for pre-order. To learn more about all the incredible stoic materials that Donald is creating, including courses, upcoming virtual events, and the Plato’s Academy, go to dona Donald, thank you so much for being here again. And we talked about conferences. You gave me the opportunity to speak at your conference last year, the Stoicon X Military.
01:55
And thank you so much for that. That was a huge success. You had so many incredible people on that doc. That was awesome. Yeah. Thanks again for inviting me back on the show. And you just reminded me about that. We had a great time. And hopefully we’ll get to do another military event sometime in the future. We had a lot of speakers, about 40 speakers, wanted to see how many we could fit in. And we’ve got 700 or 800 people attended. So we could definitely do that again Monday. Maybe we’ll get you back to speak again at the next one as well. That’d be cool. I’d be honored to do so.
02:24
You were talking about Plato’s Academy a little bit. Can you tell us more about what that is? It’s kind of that way. Yeah, because you’re there right now, yeah? Yeah, I’m in Greece at the moment, but I’m on the coast outside Athens in a place called Glyphada. And the first thing people say when they mention Plato’s Academy, often to them, they say, does that still exist? Does that, they say, is that a thing? And yeah, it is a thing. I think it is. Yeah.
02:52
But it’s kind of weird because now it’s a park, it’s about 30 acres or something. It’s a public park in Athens and you go there and there’s people walking their dogs and doing martial arts and jogging and the kids are playing and stuff like that. And not many tourists go there, but it’s in central Athens and there’s some ruins there. And there’s a little Plato Museum, it’s pretty small, but there’s a little kind of digital museum of Plato’s philosophy there and a statue of Plato.
03:20
The reason I got involved with it was I went and I thought, I can’t believe there’s not an International Conference Center here. And so people heard me saying that and we got talking. And then I somehow got roped into setting up an organization. And before we knew it, we had the Board of Advisors and we’ve incorporated some non-profit in Athens. And so we have this whole project now to try and build an International Conference Center.
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at there or beside, you know, don’t worry, we’re not going to do it on top of it, it’s overlooking the original location of the Place of the Academy. So you can go there, hang out in the park. And also, just when we started that, we found that the local mayor and the Minister of Culture here had proposed a development plan. So they’re going to landscape the park, they’re going to build a new museum there, you know, the whole area, hopefully, which is one of the poorer suburbs of Athens. It really needs.
04:16
renewal and so hopefully this is a way of doing that to get people to come to events. So hopefully one day we’ll have people traveling to Athens to attend conferences at the original location of the Academy. That’s incredible and a shot in the arm to Plato’s Academy getting more international attention to it. I interviewed Sarah McMahon, she was the first female to compete in the wrestling Olympics and it was in Athens and she said that just being there and you and I were discussing
04:45
You know, just being on this sort of hollered ground, it really is humbling. Well, tomorrow I have to go first thing in the morning to the Panathenaic Stadium, which is the stadium in Athens, which was built for the first modern Olympics. So they built it in an ancient style out of marble, huge classical looking stadium. But it’s built in the end of the 19th century for the first modern Olympics. And we’re going to go and check that out because we’re using it for another event that we’re running hopefully.
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So that’s again, a really awe-inspiring kind of crazy location. But yeah, there’s a lot of other locations in Athens that are pretty awe-inspiring and relate to Stoicism and philosophy in general. So when you wrote your first book about Stoicism, did you ever think that it would be so far reaching, not just like to people, but that it would make the kind of impact and create the influence that it is now, even in Athens, because of the work that you’re doing? No, it came as a surprise. Of course not, yeah.
05:43
I just like the first book I wrote on stoicism was because this is like going back a long time when I first got into stoicism, you know, I know it sounds like kind of hipster saying I was into this bandit film, cool. So when I first got into stoicism, everyone kept telling me like it was like a really nerdy obscure subject and nobody was interested in it. And there weren’t really many books on it. This was like about 25 years ago, just after I finished my first degree in philosophy.
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and you don’t normally study stoicism in an undergraduate philosophy degree. So after I graduated I thought I’m going to check out stoics because I hadn’t studied aristocracy until I hadn’t studied the stoics and I got really immediately got really really into stoicism. I saw the connection with psychotherapy immediately but there weren’t a lot of books. I basically decided to write a book on it because I had a lot of notes and I thought why not turn this into a book but I didn’t imagine actually the first book I wrote was the philosophy
06:41
of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and it was aimed, it was published by a publishing house called Carnac that specialises in psychotherapy publications and it was meant for psychotherapists and philosophers to read but they didn’t read it and they still haven’t read it. But the people that read it were just the general public, they read it as a kind of self-improvement book so that kind of really surprised me, it wasn’t what it was written for and I realised there was this huge audience for stoicism outside of academia.
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and outside of the psychotherapy field and then things really kind of start to take off. And so it surprises me the countries, like how to think of the Roman emperors who’s translated into 18 languages and so that always kind of baffles me because some of the countries were really popular. Like, it still doesn’t seem to be really big in Brazil, for example, which I had no idea. Like, there’s other countries that don’t seem that interested in it for some reason.
07:35
And then surprising ones were the Netherlands for some reason. I think there’s a bit of a historical connection with Neo-Stoicism, but Stoicism in books is not pretty popular in the Netherlands. I’m going to Belgium soon actually to speak at Stoic Onyx again. So it’s kind of taken off in Belgium as well. We are neighboring Holland. So, yeah, and then, oh, one of the places where Stoicism isn’t popular is here. And in Greece, they’re not particularly interested in Stoicism for some reason. So we’re still working on that.
08:05
We have to come full circle, yeah? We have to get back to most of the source. Huge in Canada, but not that popular in Greece. It’s bizarrely. Well, and your first book that you were referring to about cognitive behavioral therapy, it was very dense because I remember reading through it and for me, it reminded me of back in being in academia and having to go through and like, I would have to read that paragraph and then kind of internalize it, make sure I got it. And then again, I liked the way that you kind of pivoted with how to think like a…
08:33
an Emperor because that was something that was very palatable. For those of you that have read that book, then I would also recommend that you do the audible version because your voice and the way that you really just put it in there is tremendous. I had to do the audio recording. I wanted to do the audio recording. My publisher I worked in initially wanted a voice actor to do it, and I kind of insisted that I wanted to do it. It was hard because we had to rush it in the studio. On the last day when we were-
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I had my luggage outside the studio door, so I had to jump straight on a flight to Austria from the recording studio. And so actually that’s a weird bit. I tried, like, so at the end of How to Think of the Roman Emperor, when the book ends, and then that book stops, I immediately got on a plane to go to Curlingtum, where, straight from doing that recording, where Marcus Aurelius was stationed at the legionary fortress. I stayed there for a week and I shot a long video and I spoke to the museum director of archaeology and doing research.
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partly doing setups then for the graphic novel that you mentioned earlier, because I wanted to know more about what things looked like, because we were going to have to get them drawn. This is the first graphic novel on stoicism in history, like you’re breaking new ground yet again. And tell us about, because Tom Bilyeu, he created Impact Theory, he created Quest, and he’s using graphic novels now as a way, because when he, Reverse Ingenuity was saying, we have to get into the young people early to try to plant these seeds. So…
09:58
What was it that got you into this? And tell us about all the things, tell us about the name as well, because a lot of people are like, I thought this was about Marcus Aurelius, who is this other person? Well, I’ll tell you, there’s some interesting stories about the name. Like I kind of stumbled into it, to be honest. I hadn’t read graphic novels for a long time. I read comics a lot. When I was a teenager in Scotland, I read religiously this comic called 2000 AD, which is kind of aimed more at older kids or adults.
10:26
And it was a kind of training ground for a lot of people that went on to write graphic novels and to work in like stories that get made into movies and stuff like that. And that I think was kind of my training. Then I didn’t do graphic novels for a long time. So I stumbled into it by chance because an illustrator contacted me and I decided just to do some little web comics with him. Zé Nuno Fraga, he’s our illustrator in Portugal. He’s an award-winning illustrator.
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And he was working, he’d illustrated The Clouds by Aristophanes, which is a Greek satire, I mean, she’s Greek satire, no, sorry, not the assembly one, which I should say, another play. And he suggested doing this stuff on Marks Aurelius, and we did it. And then an editor saw the illustrations and said, do you want to do a graphic novel? And I said, I’ll give it a go, I don’t know what it’s like. I now know. I was interviewing
11:21
One of the best-selling graphic novels on philosophy is I think on logic comics, which is, was a New York Times bestseller and it was about the history of Western philosophy, the modern philosophy, like Wittgenstein, Freyda, and Bertrand Russell and guys like that. It’s a really good graphic novel. I spoke on a Skype call with one of the guys that worked on it, Al Koss, and he, in the middle of the conversation, he just kind of mentioned in passing it took him six or seven years to…
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finish it and my jaw kind of dropped because normally it takes a year to do a book and I thought wow really because it takes a long time to do the illustrations I now realise so it took us two or three years probably to do Veresmas we were working like you know hammer and tongs to get it done as quickly as we could that’s a huge amount where it’s quite a big book, it covers a lot of grounds, full colour as well so there’s a lot of work going into it. We tried.
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I mean, you could do a graphic novel that’s two old matchstick guys talking to each other. That’s perfectly legit. Some people do that, but we wanted to make it more classical and cinematic and to have as much historical authenticity as we could go for. So we hired a consultant who does regionally reenactments and is an expert in Roman military equipment and stuff. And so we went through the first thing. We had to chase each other.
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was kind of upset because he had to make all of the swords slightly longer. Because the first thing the consultant said was in the draft version, they were using their Gladius and said, no, it would be a Sparta, but it’s a slightly longer sword, possibly rounder. So little details like that, we adjusted brow and made sure we were getting it as authentic as we could within reason. That was quite an experience. You mentioned the name. So Marcus Aurelius.
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We’re told in two of the surviving Roman histories, in Cassio Dio and Historia Augusta, they both tell the story about how when he was a kid, we don’t know for sure what age, but I guess younger than six is my best estimate based on the other details. Mark’s and really his family were very close to the Emperor Hadrian. Mark has grew up under the Emperor Hadrian.
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And sometimes people say Marcus Aurelius kind of came, they think he came from a subtle obscure family, but that’s completely wrong. Marcus Aurelius’ family were one of the most influential preeminent families in Rome at the time. They were extremely well-connected senior politicians. And the reason that he seems more obscure than he should is that Marcus Aurelius’ father died when he was about three or four years old.
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So when Marcus was about three or four years old, his father died. His father never managed to reach the rank of consul because he didn’t live long enough. So part of the subtext there is that Marcus’s father would have been a consul, almost like a kind of prime minister or something, like a senior politician, a senior statesman. But he died too young to attain that rank. But his other family members were some of the most senior statesmen in Rome.
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So Marcus was part of Hadrian’s circle and Hadrian gave him a nickname and he called him Verissimus which is… Hadrian was virtually a sophist, he wanted to be a wannabe sophist and he loved kind of playing with language, he thought he wrote poetry and stuff like that and he thought he was kind of clever and so he made this play on Marcus Aurelius’ name. So Marcus Aurelius’ birth name, Roman politicians, Roman emperors changed their name several times.
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And Marcus’s birth name was Marcus Aeneas Verus. So his family name is Verus, which means true. And Hadrian’s joke was that he called him Verisimus, which means truest or most true. And we don’t know exactly why he called him that, but I think the subtext is kind of like the emperor’s new clothes. Like people are scared of Hadrian, and there are stories about how he would exile people.
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or persecute them if they disagreed with him or, you know, disputed things that he said. He was a very pretentious man. And it seems to be implied that this little kid was the only one that was able to say something frank and truthful to him. So he called him the most true. And early on, I would say the sum of debativeness, but I think pretty early on Hadrian was eyeing up Marcus Aurelius as a potential successor and was impressed with his character.
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And we know that this name stuck because apart from the fact that it’s in the Roman history, so it’s kind of public knowledge, there’s a letter from Justin Martyr, a Christian author, that actually addresses Marcus Aurelius as Verisimus the Philosopher. So it’s clear that everybody knew that this was his nickname. And there’s another weird thing about it. Marcus was co-emperor along with his brother, Lucius Verus. So Marcus gave
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his own sermon to Lucius when he became his co-emperor. But that means that the emperor and the co-emperor were called Verisimus and Verus, or Truist, or True and Truist, True and Truist, like Dumb and Dumber. Like, True and Truist. Right, so it kind of really, it doesn’t reflect well on Lucius. Like, he’s kind of inferior, like the secondary emperor.
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Marcus kind of pepsimidose with the truest title. And also Marcus apparently gave that name to his favorite son, who wasn’t Commodus. Yeah, he wasn’t Commodus. Not Commodus, he was also called, so he had a son called Marcus Anius Verus that he named after himself. Commodus is actually named after Lucius Verus, but he takes his family name. So Marcus had these two kids that he was lining up. They were both made Caesar, so they were both gonna
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be his successor and rose co-emperors and one of them died when he was about five, Marcus Annius Verus, who apparently he’d already nicknamed Verusmus as well. So this tells us that Marcus, who was, contrary to another thing people sometimes say which is false, Marcus was famous in his lifetime as a Stoic philosopher and I think that’s clear. And he made Stoic philosophy, became trendy during his lifetime in Europe. There were lots of people that got into it and he was known.
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is this guy that was obsessed with frankness and truth. And in the meditations, you can see him talking about truthfulness a lot. He’s kind of obsessed with it. And at one point, he even says that the most primordial God is called truth. So it’s like a religion to him in a way. Absolutely. And even then with the, this is sort of the beginning of even when Christianity started kind of making an appearance on the scene. And people say that Paul was very much influenced by this kind of stoic philosophy in the way that he would try to.
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interpret and apply it, even though it was a different kind of ideology in the process. Paul, in the New Testament, over there somewhere, right, there’s a, next to the Acropolis, around over there, there’s a big rock at the foot of the Acropolis called the Areopagus. And in Romans, Saint Paul gives a sermon at the Areopagus. And it says in the New Testament that he’s talking to a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.
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So not a lot of people are going deep into the Stoic trivia now. The Stoics are literally in the Bible, they’re in the New Testament, and he recites a couple of lines from what we believe is a Stoic poem to them from a guy called Aratus, who was a student of Zeno, who was a famous poet in the ancient world. And so he actually gives a sermon to the Stoic philosophers in Athens, weirdly. And so, yeah, people definitely knew Stoics, and some people have even called them a crypto-Stoic.
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like a secret stoic. Yeah, in the closet stoicism. Closeted stoic. Yeah, closeted stoic through the guise of Christianity with this idea. It’s so powerful, like you said, I love that you go to this depth and this attention to detail, whether it be making the gladiator a little bit longer to actually reflect the time, or again, there is something to be said for a person who’s actually walking that ground, being around it, seeing it, seeing it from the viewpoint, the vantage point. Like if we went to the lines during the Germanic Wars where Marcus Aurelius was,
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in the mud, in all this stuff, it would truly give us much more context as opposed to thinking that he’s on this throne, you know, everything, he’s warm and dry, and he’s writing this, this epic, you know, meditation, just like, it wasn’t quite like that, guys. No, and he suffered, he didn’t really like the cold weather. Like, Romans seemed to have thought that Austria was, in the winter, was really bitterly cold, and he kind of struggled with it. They didn’t really want to be there. But yeah, and also being in Athens and so, you know, you don’t…
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to go to these locations to study philosophy. But certainly if you’re trying to write about history and stuff it makes it a bit easier. You can smell the air and see the sounds. Marcus Irelius in The Meditation says we should treat the wickedness of bad people as being as inevitable as the neighing of horses or the crying of babies. He says it’s just something you can learn to accept as part of life and you’re not to be shocked by it. It’s part of how things are.
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But in Karunasama, he would have been surrounded by hundreds or thousands of horses that were stabled there from the cavalry units, right? So it would have been, you imagine that, it would have been kind of noisy, you know, horses potentially in these huge cavalry units, hundreds of them would have made quite a lot of noise. He talks about little birds, there are loads of little birds nesting in the bushes along the banks of the Danyan. And he talks a lot, many people have noticed that in the meditation, he uses a cliché, he uses many philosophical clichés.
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or tropes and one of them is this idea of the river of time from Heraclitus, you know, panterie, everything flows like a river, the impermanence of things, but Marcus often describes it as a flowing stream and he was stationed when he wrote this beside the Danube, this vast river like which was the beating heart of you know the province, it was marked the border, it was across it many wars and battles were fought in the frozen circus of it even.
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And it was a highway. It was a major trade route as well. The Romans had a Navy, a fleet that sailed along the Danube as well. So this was kind of absolutely central to his life. And when he talks about time as a river and the transience of things, he’s looking at it as he writes that. Yeah, it has much more, much more impact, like you said, when you’re there and you feel and smell and taste these things, hearing those sounds. Again, even those little birds, right? If you were to walk down there and hear a bird.
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You would literally be hearing the same species that he was listening to thousands of years ago. It makes it easier just to kind of put yourself in his shoes in some ways. And another thing, here’s a real deep dive bit of trivia. There’s a bit in the Meditations where he says, famously, the mind freed from violent passions is like an impenetrable citadel. And for ages, you know how sometimes something kind of bugs you and you just never get round to checking it out? So for ages I thought, what is the Greek word for citadel that they’re translating?
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And I always meant to go and look it up, but I never kind of got around to it. So normally I look at the Greek, but I just never checked that passage. And then one day I checked and hit me the word in Greek is Acropolis. Like, of course it is. So I thought, hang on a minute, even in Marcus Aurelius’ time, there are many Acropolises around the ancient, well, it just means a port on top of a hill, but he literally means higher part of the city or higher place.
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But even at his time, there was one iconic apocryphalist that anyone who’s having my own views that way, and that’s the Apocryphalist of Athens. And then another passage, he says, well, imagine that you’re in an elevated space looking down on law courts, tradesmen, people arguing, getting married, getting divorced, clamoring their tongues in the legal course, political assemblies. And I thought, geez, that sounds like…
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Agora or city centre. In that passage he uses the word the plural of Agora and the Athenian Acropolis of course looks down on the Agora which incidentally was where Socrates was put on trial and executed. So all the drama of human life even the most iconic dramatic event in the history of Western philosophy is what you would have been looking down at from the Acropolis and what the
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I think it’s quite plausible, although actually at that time, we’re almost certainly had a meaning to Athens, but at the time it went later, he probably has in mind, and he’s probably referring to earlier philosophers that lived in Athens that have at the back of their mind this idea of looking down from the Apocylis onto the city centre or Agora and having this elevated perspective. And what’s in the Athenian Apocylis is the Arthena.
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the temple of the goddess of Dina, the goddess of wisdom. So there’s a kind of resonance, there’s a subtext to some of the passages in Mark’s release that you can link into the, if you like, the geography or the archeology of the area. And that’s so powerful that as that additional dimension, that third, fourth, fifth dimension, like you said, to truly take the high ground, to truly remove yourself, to have this perspective, to be above the fray. And that’s where we can truly have that genuine reflection of what’s truly going on without.
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emotive language without fear, without internal dialogue shading or framing the interpretation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s one of his favorite themes and we find it in a lot of other ancient philosophy, not just the Stoics. The other location, the location that we know that Marcus went to is the Temple of Eleusis where they initiated people into the Eleusinian mysteries, which is just outside Athens. It’s kind of like a neighboring town and these initiations
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taken place at the temple of Demeter, the goddess of the grain and the earth mother, if you like. So Marcus went there and was initiated into the mystery religions, which are all about processes of nature, coming to terms with loss, coming to terms with your own mortality, which are of course major themes that run through the meditation. So there’s a huge archaeological site at Elucidus, it’s called Elucina, today is a modern…
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Greek version of the name. So in Elscina you can go and see the place where Marcus went. Now during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, during the the Marcomannic Wars, the whole border erupted and a tribe from around about Romania to the Charles all the way down through the Balkans and they tried to reach Athens but they only got to Eleusis and they sat the temple there, that’s where all the money was.
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raised it to the ground and later Marcus swore an oath that he would go to Lucis and be initiated after the war was over. When he went there he paid to have the temple rebuilt and they put a bust of Marcus Aurelius over the main gate. It still exists today. So that you can see that sculpture of Marcus Aurelius and it’s surrounded by engravings of poppy flowers. He’s one of the
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She was the goddess of the grain of wheat. And it just so happens that poppy flowers often grow in the wheat fields. So the ancient groups associated those flowers with the method of the meter. You’ll see Marcus as the patron of the temple of the Eleusinian mysteries. You can go and still see that statue today. That’s incredible. I can’t wait to get over there and just even touch the, get a glimpse of these things you’re talking about. That’s something I’m looking forward to now that things are becoming a little bit more travel friendly.
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In the research that you were doing for this incredible book, this graphic novel, was there anything about Marcus Aurelius that you just rediscovered or things that kind of shocked you? Yeah. The main thing I realized is if you’re writing a pro, I’ve also just finished writing a pro. I’ve just written three books about Marcus Aurelius in a row. I’ve just finished writing a prose biography often for Yale University Press. So it’s a lot more of an academic, in-depth kind of biography and also edited meditation as a little preface to it. So I’ve kind of written three and a half books about it.
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But they, you know, I’m completely immersed in it. That’s a lot of matured men. Definitely moving on to doing something else next. But the thing about writing a prose biography, weirdly, is you’ll describe an event and then you kind of move on from it and describe what happens next. So in a visual medium, it’s more obvious that things overlap in time. And a really good example of that is the Antonine Plague. So if you were reading a biography on Marcus Aurelius, it would say like,
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around about 166 AD, after the end of the Carthaginian War, this plague started spreading across the empire. You talk about how horrible it was and how it affected society. And then you would move on to talking about the next thing that happened, which is this huge war on the northern frontier with the Germanic tribes that it had. But then you kind of potentially forget a bit that everyone is still dying of the plague. Like, whereas if you make a movie or you draw a graphic novel of it, it’s easier to kind of keep that in focus.
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that yeah, he’s fighting the Germanic tribes, but people are also still dying of plague at the same time. So that drives home how horrendous and how overwhelming the situation was. Things went crazy for Marcus Aurelius and became very, very dark. And also this plague was quite visual, as from what we know, there were cartloads of bodies being transported out of the city of Rome.
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probably were disfigured by it. They may even have lost fingers and maybe even became blind. So, and to treat it, the Romans would have burned incense everywhere to try and purify the air. So you couldn’t just kind of put it in a hospital ward and forget about it. Like it’s in your face everywhere. You constantly smell in the air, the medicinal, the myrrh and frankincense that they’re burning to try and purify the air. And you would see people that had been scarred by it and stuff.
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it took over. It changed the atmosphere throughout the whole of the empire and he had to live through that for the rest of his reign while he’s then fighting these wars and so on. So what comes out I think working the graphic novel was that these things are much more pervasive in the rest of his life than we would normally assume from a prose biography. And the other thing that struck me as I was writing it, and this sounds like a bit of a glib way of doing it, but it came home to me much more
30:32
when Marcus Aurelius is writing a bit coming to terms with his own mortality, this is a guy who I can only imagine woke up every morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, I’m just checking I’m still actually alive, like you know, still here right, because he could have been assassinated, he could have been massacred by the enemy, he put himself on the front line, so reputedly at the beginning of the war the Romans lost 20,000
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troops in a single battle that come into him. So he knew there’s a possibility that he could actually have died there. And he went there and stationed himself, he was right in the meditation fair where they had 20,000 soldiers slain just like a few years earlier. He lost some of his senior officers in battle in the Northern Frontier, so he could have died. He probably wasn’t fighting in battle, he wasn’t close to the troops, but even in a fortified town or a fortress, it could have been surrounded and besieged by the enemy.
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He could have been assassinated, he couldn’t die the plague, you know, his health was failing anyway, like he had chronic illnesses. So Marcus Aurelius, if we imagine all of this going on around him, must have woken up every day and thought this, like, I’m not, I’m not just doing philosophy when I say this might be my last day on earth. You know, it’s quite plausible. And that’s the power of philosophy, right? If we choose to have the courage to actually employ it and deploy it in the real world.
31:57
it has a lot more power. The philosophy is only as good as the people that are willing to put it into play. And that’s why I love the way that you write. Even during these conferences, you have people that truly know of which they speak, they walk the walk. And that’s what keeps us very honest and it gives it much more gravity. Yeah. I mean, I think so. Like Marcus really is, to my mind, really did exemplify Stoicism in his daily life. And I guess that another side of we’re already quite deep into discussing the history, but I should back that and say there are some people
32:27
who believe incorrectly that we don’t know anything about Marcus Aurelius. And, you know, I’ve spoken to people over the years who say, well, we don’t know anything about this guy’s life, you know, and yeah, it’s crazy, right? I don’t know if you’ve heard, but he was kind of a big deal. He was kind of a big deal to me. I love rock star. So, it’s kind of a big deal. Yeah, like he was the most powerful man in the known world. And so we have at least three major surviving Roman histories that we’ve written. We have a cache of private letters that he wrote.
32:57
to his rhetoric tutor. We have numismatic evidence from coins and medallions and descriptions. We have many sculptures of him and the people that he knew. But we also, and the most obscure piece of evidence is that we have evidence from Roman legal digest, which show the legislative agenda that he pursued. So we have all these different types of evidence that people often aren’t really that aware of.
33:24
And even in the meditation, if you look really closely, one of the odd things about meditations is that on the one hand, it’s a very personal thing. Most scholars believe, and I’m among them, that it doesn’t look like it was intended for publication for a number of reasons, but it also, it says weirdly personal things, but it’s also artfully vague. So on the one hand, he’ll say, oh, you know that letter.
33:51
that Junius Rustic just wrote to my mum from Senusa. And you’re like, no idea what you’re talking about, buddy. Like, you’re the only person that would know what that means, right? And he says, oh, you know that argument Antoninus Pius had with the customs officer? No idea. So that’s not intended for publication, presumably, and he’s the only person really that would know what it meant. But he also says things like, every morning when you’re awake, tell yourself that you’re going to meet ungrateful, meddlesome people. And you’re like, who?
34:20
Name names, yeah. Oh, Beansmarket, who are these people? So he’s thinking so generally that you think, but dude, literally every morning as Roman Emperor, the first thing we did in the morning was to meet people that came to see him, including envoys from foreign tribes and stuff. So he must at some level when he says that be referring to the foreign envoys. And he’s writing it in Perunntum or somewhere like…
34:49
kingdom, or some may have been the frontier. And the weird thing is he’s talking about the guys that he’s fighting. He doesn’t really make that explicit. He seldom says anything about the war and the meditations, but every time he refers to other people, he never says Roman citizens except like once or twice in passing. He always says, my fellow men and other people. So it’s really weird about that and what people forget, but it should be obvious if you imagine him in the situation, you visualize him. He’s literally meeting
35:18
you know, big bearded German dudes that have been chopping the heads off legionaries the day before and they’re now arguing with him about whether we’re going to chop the heads off some more legionaries or whether they’ll maybe kind of switch sides and join the Romans or stuff like that and he’s saying I have to view these guys as my brothers and I mustn’t get angry with them, you know, we’re all part of the same cosmic city together.
35:47
talking about those guys. He’s at war with them. And that’s who he says, be prepared in advance for them to betray you. And they did betray him on a huge scale. They conspired against him and launched an invasion. He had a civil war. It’s a massive betrayal. And so when he’s saying, every morning, tell yourself you’re going to meet people who are treacherous and deceitful, we naturally think, well, that guy that works across from me in the office, he’s a bit like that.
36:16
you know, and we kind of relate to it. That’s why people love Marxist realists, because it’s so artfully vague. You can just fill in the gaps with your own experience related to your own life. But if you fill in the gaps with his experience, he could be talking about his mother-in-law, but it’s quite plausible he’s talking about these world-historic events, like, that shaped the history of the Roman Empire and the massive betrayals that led to the Marcomannic War and the Civil War and stuff like that. But he doesn’t say that. So it’s quite frustrating in a way.
36:45
or, you know, it’s a riddle as a historian to read the meditations and trying somehow link it to the historical events that were going on around the middle time. So many people think that because Marcus Aurelius was emperor and we have such regard for him now, he must have been popular and everybody must have loved him and no matter what he did, they agree with it. But like you said, even after the Civil War, when he chose to forgive those people that were conspirators, many people were, especially at that time, were like, why are you not crushing these people? These people are going to come back for you. These
37:15
get you at some point. I mean, Roman historians are really biased. And so like, the, you know, it has to be written by the Vixens or whatever, and that can be more true than of the Roman historians. So Cassius Dio, who’s one of our main sources, was a senator under Commodus, and he clearly cannot stand Commodus, like, and really liked Marcus Aurelius, right? So there’s an obvious kind of bias in it, although there may be some…
37:45
truth in that as well, in what he says. But there are actually in the Roman histories, there are many references to criticisms of Marcus Aurelius. They’re often presented as gossip or rumors. Many of them, I think, if you look closely from a kind of historian’s point of view, look like they’re propaganda intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the succession. So they may be linked to the Civil War. But the best
38:12
piece of evidence we have of Marx Aurelius’ divided opinion about him. He was undoubtedly a very, very popular emperor during his life time. However, there was a large faction of people that wanted to overthrow him, and it wasn’t just Avidius Cassius. He commanded seven legions, so there were seven generals at least under him, and commanded those legions. There were other senior Roman officials, there’s references to senators, the kings of neighboring countries that all joined this.
38:42
civil war conspiracy against Marcus. So all these senior people in Roman and neighboring countries has something against Marcus Aurelius. And that raises a really interesting question that people don’t often ask, which is what was it that why did they want to overthrow him? Because I think they assumed they were just reading for power or something, but they must also had criticisms of him and reasons for believing that Avidius Cassius might make a better emperor. And contrary again
39:12
tried to say about Marcus Aurelius. I think many other things that people say about Marcus Aurelius on the internet are very superficial. And so one of them is people will say he was like a warmonger or something. And that’s just because he was engaged in war. Their argument for it is just, well, he’s a Roman emperor and they killed lots of people, so therefore he must have been a warmonger. But actually, in the context of Roman society, I really think it looks, the evidence suggests that Marcus Aurelius was seen as too much of a military dove.
39:37
And the frustration was that the Mark of Manic War went on too long because he was negotiating peace with some of the tribes and then they would betray the Roman Empire. And I think Avidius Cassius was much more of a whore and people thought can’t we just kill them all? Like and solve the problem like a Scot’s the Earth kind of policy. Couldn’t we just enslave a lot of them or you know just burn them up like you know
40:06
There’s a story about Viteous Cassius just chaining dozens of sermations together and shoving them in a river to drown, but it’s a form of mass execution. He tied them to a huge pole on top of a hill and set fire to it to terrorize the neighboring tribes. That was his way of handling things. Whereas Marcus resettled, captured tribesmen in the Roman Empire and tried… That’s a method that the Romans used to disarm enemies.
40:35
Because one of the problems in the ancient world is if you defeat an enemy, what do you do with them? If you capture them, you can’t just go, okay, so you guys promise not to do that again, and off you go home, like, because they’re going to do it again. So you’ve got to think, well, why do we start them? You could auction them as slaves, you could execute them all, you could resettle them inside the empire, which would allow you to disarm them potentially, and make sure that they don’t manufacture weapons again.
41:02
or you could recruit them into auxiliary units in the army and send them to fight at the other side of the empire where they’re less likely to be involved in an uprising. So Marcus favored resettling captured enemies and recruiting them into auxiliary units, whereas Avidius Cassius seems to have favored just killing lots of them or perhaps enslaving them. And so I think that these guys thought Marcus was too soft and he was taking too long.
41:31
to secure the modern frontier. Like you said before that, the Roman’s policy was where the hammer, the nail, iron fist, here we go. We were talking about Communists. We just touched on him, but for people that don’t understand, Marcus Aurelius was a tremendous philosopher, leader, et cetera. So it’s not fair to compare his son to him. That’s not fair. But you were mentioning how Marcus had another son who he did really favor. He doted on and clearly, Communists would know this. Do you think that that may have influenced the way he brought a lot of this into play?
42:01
It could be. Commodus is a weird one. I think at Herodian, or one of the historians says that Commodus wasn’t a bad man by nature, but he was gullible and easily swayed. And he was surrounded by what we would call a kind of bad clique of friends. And they kind of persuaded him just to abuse his power to become a celebrity and drink and party. Actually, it’s pretty clear that he did several things that just completely lost the confidence of the military.
42:30
and the Senate. So a good Roman, ideally, like in a way the most successful Roman emperors are popular. You have the Senate, the military and the people and ideally they’d all like you and you get on with them all. But you can kind of just get by with just the military on your side or you can potentially get by, you know, like mainly just having the Senate on your side, even if you’re not that popular in the general population.
42:58
But if you blow it with the military and the Senate, then you’re in a really toxic position, because you can only really hang on to power by becoming a celebrity, like a reality TV star today, and courting popular opinion. And the only way you can do that is by squandering loads of money and trying to make a cult around yourself and throwing big celebrations and games, like Saniro did that.
43:25
and comets got into doing that. And it’s partly traceable back to the fact that he blew it with the military and the Senate and then had to fall back on quoting the love of the people by dressing up as Hercules and going and fighting in the arena to make himself into a weird celebrity and doing crazy stuff. Like he used to release hundreds of ostriches into the Coliseum and had special crescent-shaped arrows made that he’d use to shoot all their heads off.
43:54
So they would kind of run around like headless chickens in the Coliseum and stuff. Yeah, like, so you have to do kind of dramatic, unusual things and people thought, I’ve never seen that before. Why, that’s pretty weird. Like, and he was like, yeah, come back next week for more. And this is why you guys should keep me in power. Like, you know, didn’t get that under Marcus Aurelius. That was not popular with the Senate and the military. And so they were quite against him, but Marcus.
44:22
tried to prepare Commodus for power and failed. He maybe didn’t really know Commodus that well until he was a bit older, because Marcus was away from Rome for most of the time. Commodus was maybe mainly raised by other people. So it could be that it was, Marcus was just not around as much as he should have been in order to get to know his son. But the other thing I’d say about the Commodus thing is, who’s the alternative?
44:50
like what’s plan B and the alternative is Avidius Cassius, right? So that obviously Marcus thought Commodus is pretty bad, that Avidius Cassius is possibly a lot worse. Commodus is just going to hang out with Rome and shoot heads on ostriches and be a bit of an idiot. Like Avidius Cassius is going to slaughter millions of people, you know, like he’s going to have these huge wars and stuff like that. And he’s going to potentially
45:18
pursue this really aggressive military policy. So the Roman, my belief is, the thing I think people miss often in evaluating this situation is that one of the biggest fears that the Senate and the population in general had in the Roman Empire was civil war. They were terrified that civil war could just tear the empire apart at any moment. And I think basically the issue of a bad emperor is better than a civil war.
45:47
So they thought, okay, Commodus is an idea. We can probably live with him. He’s going to annoy people at Rome. People in the provinces probably couldn’t care less, as long as he’s not going to bother them too much. But a civil war would affect the entire empire, like including the provinces and even neighboring countries. So I can imagine them thinking, this is better. The real problem was that Marcus had sons, and that meant if he’d…
46:14
adopted someone else and tried to make him his successor, Commodus would have always been in the wings as a rival contender and that would have fueled factionalism and the risk of civil war in the future. So he was kind of stuck with him once he was born as his successor, unfortunately. But the succession was really complicated because he started off making of Lucius Verus’ co-emperor, who was younger than him. So he would have been assumed to succeed more.
46:44
And then comets would have co-ruled along with this Marcus Aeneas Verus who died. And then we’re also told that Marcus tried to adopt and appoint Caesar Tiberius Pompeianus, who was his senior general, who’s a bit like the Maximus character in a way in Gladiator. Gladiator is not a historical myth, but actually weirdly the bits in it that people think are least historical are actually the bits that are kind of confusing.
47:14
But there was a Roman general that Marcus allegedly wanted to appoint Caesar. And then the other thing that people think is really weird in the gladiator is that Richard Harrison says he is going to return to the Roman Republic and get rid of the office of emperor and he wants Maximus to be an interim ruler to see through the process of returning to the Roman Republic. Now, Marx really has never said that. But in the meditations, in book one, he describes his political ideals.
47:44
and they’re weirdly Republican. And he names a bunch of Roman Republican heroes, like Cato and Tricea. And he seems to say some pretty weird stuff that implies not having… So he says that everyone should be equal under the law in the ideal society, which, including the emperor, like, is then, well, like a kind of president or something, rather than…
48:13
like an autocrat or a monarch. He says that he’s ideal as a society in which the freedom of every subject is the highest priority of the ruler. In fact, including slaves, like women instantly is how far would you go with that? So he paints a very idealistic political vision that clearly clashes with the way that the role of emperor was designed. But his legislative actions, the history of them, the Roman legal, the legal digest.
48:43
does suggest that he was very slowly, in small steps and stages, pursuing a very progressive agenda in relation to the rights of women and slaves. So he made it progressively easier for slaves to win their freedom. And it looks like, you know, he had this ideal. And he says in the meditation, you mustn’t expect to achieve the ideal republic immediately, but as long as you’re making small steps in the right direction, you should be satisfied with that.
49:13
And I think that’s what he was doing. That he had this high ideal that was very different and that he saw himself as making very gradual steps in that direction. That’s what’s so powerful because this is where that philosophy is truly permeating into him and it’s becoming a part of every decision he makes, every breath that he takes literally. And this is, like you say, it’s amazing how much that can influence millions of other people in the process of those singular decisions with the stuff that we have. Yeah, absolutely.
49:41
The graphic novel helped me to realize that in a way, as I really tried to visualize his life and make more flesh and blood of the character. I mean, I always thought Marcus was more influenced by his philosophy than many biographers assume. But when I really tried to visualize his life, I became more convinced the real Marcus Aurelius fulfilled the role of emperor, or tried to in a way that was more consistent with his stoic ideals than people normally want to assume.
50:10
makes so much sense because we look again, like you say, all these things that are going on around him. Sometimes you have that singular almost stoic mantra that kind of keeps you focused. If it’s endurable, then do it as opposed to having the audacity to be surprised that the barbarians are at the gate or that your son’s going to be doing bread and circuits instead of actually ruling in a way that we want. Yeah. And he seems relatively unfazed by some of the things that he had to deal with. He took his responsibilities very, very seriously. You know, he trained.
50:39
night and day to become emperor. He studied jurisprudence and politics. He was co-emperor for many years alongside, virtually co-emperor alongside Antoninus Pius in order to kind of prepare himself. So he wasn’t one of these guys that just treated it like an opportunity to act like a king or something like that. He was like a career politician and he was a statesman. Throughout his life, the Roman emperor was also like a Supreme Court judge.
51:09
and he oversaw, he presided over legal hearings even towards the end of his life and we told that he spent a lot of time in court and continued to study the law and debt while he was commanding an army. Also, Martin really has never served in the military which was not unusual for a Roman noble at that time but Hadrian had served in the military. He achieved the states of emperor by progressing up through the ranks in the army and he’s seen a lot of military service.
51:38
Marcus hadn’t, he’d stayed at Rome, but he found himself having to take command of a huge army. I mean it’s actually inconceivable. The army that he massed on the northern frontier, rough estimate, would have been about 140,000 men, like a massive army. I think at first they thought, this is a joke, this guy’s like just a massive bookworm and he’s never left Rome.
52:06
He doesn’t know, he’s never been anywhere like this before. He’s got no idea what he’s doing here. But Marcus Aurelius was the kind of guy who would immerse himself in something and take it very, very seriously. So by the end of the Marcomannic War, the legions idolize him. Like, they seem to attribute these battlefield miracles to him even. So they think of him as like the gods have put.
52:34
Marcus Aurelius in command of the legions and he seems to have become an accomplished general by the end of his life but he also surrounded himself for the best. The other reason they hated him, the reason that Avidius Cassius hated him was Avidius Cassius was a man of royal pedigree. He was actually descended from Herod the Great, the famous king of the Jews.
53:03
and he was also a distant descendant of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. So his mother was a Judean princess, right, so he was thoroughly, he had blue blood, he was thoroughly regal. And Marcus promoted guys that were from more humble origins, like the equestrian class, they were of the senatorial class. Pertinax, for example, one of his senior generals, was the
53:32
Perthinax actually later went on to become briefly emperor. So the Roman emperor at one point was a dude, his father had been a slave, which is kind of mind-boggling. We don’t have that type of social mobility even today. No we don’t. But Pompeianus was an equestrian originally, so Marcus promoted him to senatorial right and both he and Avidius Cassius came from Syria. So I think Avidius Cassius looked at this guy and went, he comes from my neck of the woods, from my country.
54:01
But he’s like middle class and I’m a descendant of the first emperor and of Eastern monarchies. Like, why am I not marrying Marcus’s daughter and, you know, being lined up to succeed him? Pompeianus’s senior general married Marcus’s daughter, who had previously been married to Lucius Verus, so she still had the title Augusta. So Pompeianus, this guy that’s a bit like Maximus, married an empress, technically. I think Avidius Cassius was like, no.
54:30
like this meritocracy thing, we’re not ready for that. You know, I’m royal, this guy’s nobody, it’s just wrong. And so we have a letter attributed to him where he complains a lot about that. It may or may not be authentic, but it probably represents the kind of things that these guys were complaining about. So one of the other things that Marcus faced was pushed back against him trying to introduce more progressive meritocratic approaches to.
54:58
giving people senior positions in the military and the Roman civil service. Yeah. And like you said, he was trying to do this based on the merit of their character, about their attributes, about what they brought, what he’s seen. And almost like what you were saying before, he knew that he had to be on the front lines, even if he didn’t want to be, even though it was cold, even though there was a plague going on, even on all this was going on. Because if he wasn’t there as a leader, how can you get the respect of your men? Right? Well, it’s funny. Sometimes we see like history, you have to be very careful. But occasionally you’ll see things that kind of line up from…
55:28
very different sources. So in the Roman history, they kind of say he didn’t like it because it’s too cold and his health wasn’t very good. And if you look in the Meditations, you’ll see those passages where he says, you know, the piece of green fields can be yours. You don’t have to go to a mountain retreat or to the seaside. He’s clearly fantasizing about thinking, geez, I wish I was back in Italy, like in one of my villas, the countryside, or wherever, and not like here freezing in the northern frontier.
55:56
And so the history is kind of lined up with the sentiment that you get in meditations there as well. He didn’t really like it very much. He’d rather be at home. He grew up surrounded by, he was brought up mainly by his mother and his mother was an intellectual. She was a Hellenophile, a Greek scholar, very wealthy, successful woman. She would be what we call a construction magnate. She ran a brick and tile factory. We know that in part because
56:25
archaeologists have found many brick with her name stamped on them, like they were manufactured from her clay fields in her factory. So she’s a very wealthy woman, a wealthy philanthropist, but she surrounded herself with academics and intellectuals. So Marcus grew up attending his brother’s intellectual salons and talking to the most famous academics of his era. I mean that would be like, you know, the leading professors and academics today hanging out in your living room.
56:54
when you were a kid. So it’s no surprise that he got into philosophy. I don’t know this for sure. It’s a bit of a leap and we don’t quite have evidence to make a connection. I don’t think I would. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was partly Marcus’s mother that introduced him to Stoicism. There’s a hint that she knew his main Stoic tutor, Junius Rusticus, and she was more into rhetoric, I think.
57:20
plays and stuff like that. There’s not a lot of evidence that she was really into philosophy, but she loved Greek culture and that was part of her family history. So I really wouldn’t be surprised if it was Marcus’s mother. One thing we know is it was usually Roman matriarchs who chose the Tudors for their sons. Now is there anything unusual about Marcus’s Tudors? Yeah, there are loads of Greek rhetoric Tudors.
57:48
and only one Latin rhetoric to mention. His education is weirdly skewed towards greed. And also there are loads of philosophers teaching him stoicism. And if his mum chose those teachers, then in that sense we can say, yeah, it was his mum that set him up for a future as a stoic. I could talk to you forever. I always learn so much from you. The book comes out in June, but we can pre-order it now, correct? Yeah. You can pre-order it now. Actually, if you pre-order it on Amazon, I think, and
58:18
if you pre-order Kindle or maybe actually if you pre-order any book on Amazon you potentially get it cheaper because they have this price offer guarantee thing. Also my publisher is running a whole bunch of giveaways so there’s a bunch of prizes and things that people can get if they want to pre-order a book. People ask me if it’s meant for kids. I’d say it’s definitely PG. Like there’s crucifixion and torture and some pretty heavy philosophy about…
58:45
into terms of your own mortality and things, it’s kind of a bit more adult. Although I think older teens might possibly get into it. But I hope that people will find that it reaches a different demographic or audience and maybe allows them to perceive Marcus Aurelius from a slightly different perspective. Maybe they’ll get more out of the meditations by reading this. If anything, it’s a great companion to it. If anything, it’s a great visual to it, like you said, to make him human, to show that, again, people that we put on a pedestal, it’s hard for us to really…
59:13
understand because it’s easy for us to say, well, that was Marcus Aurelius. I can’t do that. It’s like, well, actually, if you go back to these histories and you see this, you will see that he is human and we’re all in this kind of same compose. I mentioned there are some criticisms of Marcus. I think Marcus is a great man and he kind of overcame most of his weaknesses and some of the criticisms are maybe propaganda, but there’s probably some truth to them. He gives the game away himself in the meditations. He kind of admits that he had a bad temper as a young man.
59:42
and maybe he still had that to some extent later in life. Although the histories say he was renowned for being calm. Now those two things are not incompatible because maybe he was a man with a quick temper that had learned to control it. And that’s how I perceive him. And also the stuff he says about doing as Rusticus kind of implies that at least as a teenager, he was kind of pretentious. So he says, Rusticus really irritated me because he corrected my character and he challenged me.
01:00:10
And then he gives a bunch of examples of vanity and pretentiousness. So it may be that he was quite a kind of arrogant, pretentious teen with a bad temper. And that still kind of knocked him into shape. And that’s what they’re supposed to do, right? If we blind spots, we can’t get better with it. Thank you so much. I want to respect your time. I look forward to many more conversations with you in the future.
