Marcus Aurelius: A Timeless Guide to Life from the Philosopher King

Roman emperors are perhaps remembered for their notoriety more than anything else. We remember Julius Caesar, after whom all the subsequent rulers took their name, as a brilliant commander (and because he wrote an awful lot of histories about himself) but he is most famous for his actions against the dying Roman Republic, for which he was ultimately murdered.

Caesar of course was not an emperor: that line properly started with his grand-nephew Octavian. But who of the other emperors stood out? Caligula is remembered for his madness and cruelty, Nero for his incest and depravity, Hadrian because of his wall.

And in many ways this is a crying shame. For there was amongst the earlier emperors of Rome, before the barbarians came knocking at the gates in the fifth century, an extraordinary man, possessed of a mind of the first order. This was Marcus Aurelius, a true philosopher king.

His was an extraordinary reign in several ways. He was the last emperor of Rome’s golden age, two centuries of relate peace and stability known as the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. He is considered the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors, largely benevolent rulers and empire builders without whom the fledging empire would likely have crumbled.

• The Radioactive Guardian of the Egyptian Afterlife
• The Jersey Devil: Unpicking the History Behind the Mystery

His rise to the top was on merit as much as on birthright. He spent his adult life in government, serving as consul three times in the two decades before he became emperor. And although Rome fought many wars in the two decades of his rule he is said to have always looked for peace within his borders, hoping for a world where citizens of Rome could walk unchallenged across the Empire simply for being Roman.

So much for his reign, but this is not why he deserves a prominent place in history today. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher of the Stoic school, a brilliant and agile mind who saw the world for what it was and understood much that resonates still to this day.

Iti is his masterpiece Meditations which is his true legacy to the world. Written over a ten-year period and arguably unfinished even at his death in 180 AD, has been studied ever since and is considered one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written.

What then was the wisdom of the greatest philosopher king to ever live?

Stoicism and Self-Honesty

What then could this second century emperor have to teach us? Well, in his Meditations Marcus Aurelius sought to strip away the trappings of Imperial rule and to look at himself not as an emperor, but as a man who needed to be brutally honest about his own shortcomings.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the texts not for fame or recognition; he had those already. It is very likely that he never intended them for publication, writing them instead as his own private and personal guide to self-improvement.

In doing so he allowed himself a breathtaking degree of honesty with regards to his position, something which could have been politically dangerous were it to be publicly known. The Emperor had to appear a cut above everyone else, and to be exposed as a man would invite disaster.

What then did he conclude? Perhaps the most important and recurring theme in his work is the fleeting nature of existence. Putting aside religious considerations, he recognized that time stretches apparently eternal both before his life and after, and whatever the truth of his own existence beyond life might be it was demonstrably not here. He invited himself to stare at death, to become comfortable with its inevitability and to live his life in the awareness that it would come to an end for him as much as for anyone else.

He also placed a heavy emphasis on self-scrutiny, and sought to understand his own internal biases and prejudices, and how they could color his judgement of others. By recognizing these and stripping them away he sought to improve himself and his ability to draw conclusions.

The answer to conquering these lay in logos or rationality. A satisfactory life for him came from seeing both the world for what it was and in truly understanding what he wanted to achieve within it. Only with clarity on both counts could he achieve his true goals, anything else was essentially a self-deceiving fiction.

Other conclusions came from this core concept. Marcus Aurelius encouraged the enjoyment of things in life, craving rich experiences and seeking to indulge himself. A life spent too long in pursuit of a goal was a life half-wasted, and one should be sure to live in the “now” and not postpone enjoyment too much.

His word almost, charmingly, contained a lot of self-help mechanisms to allow him to live this life of personal honesty and clarity which his conclusions had mandated in himself. Many of these sound like the kind of motivational phrases scattered around modern offices, which makes sense: where do you think those came from originally.

Marcus Aurelius sought to declutter his life: it was only fleeting, after all. He broke down his plans into individual tasks and removed those which were unnecessary, leaving only the essential to which he would fully commit. He shed himself of unnecessary possessions and trappings and tried to live as a minimalist, as much as a Roman Emperor could.

He advocated for forming habits in order to make effective progress towards the goals he wanted, including planning each day and reviewing his progress once it was over. He made sure to never lose sight of his ultimate goals and to consider his current tasks within the context of these wider aims.

He also planned for bad outcomes, something which all of us fear. He wanted contingency plans in place in case of utter failure, and forced himself to be prepared for such disaster. A significant part of this was his insistence that he live in the moment, and recognize that his current situation should be appreciated to the full, not just passed over in favour of the future.

In his private musings, he looked at himself with a frank objectivity all of us would do well to attempt. His conclusions were brilliant but it is his candour, about who he really was and who we all are, which echoes down the centuries.

With his death came the ending of the first, and greatest phase of the mighty Roman Empire. And yet, in a true accounting of his legacy, it is the loss of the man and not the Emperor which is the greater burden.

Would that we could all look at ourselves with the honesty of Marcus Aurelius.

Header Image: Bust of Marcus Aurelius in the Louvre. Source: Bob3321 / CC BY-SA 4.0.