Category: Stoicism

🤔 This new article is huge and it’s got a lot of great ideas especially for newbies to Stoic philosophy — great lists of resources.

What do you think? Would you recommend this to your friends if they wanted to learn about Stoicism?

My favourite book on Stoicism is probably The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot.

Tomorrow, Saturday 17th Oct, is Stoicon 2020, the 8th international Modern Stoicism conference. We originally had a limit of 1,000 attendees but have managed to extend our capacity by creating an overflow feature. So we’re now anticipating over 1,500 attendees, making this the largest Stoicism conference ever.

Ticket price is by donation – you choose the amount. We have 24 speakers in total, including some well-known authors and academics. See the event listing for full program details. Our keynote this year is from William B. Irvine, author of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

Don’t worry if you’re in a different time zone or can’t make the whole event for some other reason. All presentations will be recorded and available afterwards to registered attendees to watch at your leisure.

Book now to avoid missing out. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

You can’t grasp the negative view of Julius Caesar? He committed genocide and caused a civil war that ended the republic.

The piece in fact opens by stressing “The Spartans had their critics and enemies, of course.” And it goes on to explain, e.g., among other…

That’s okay, and your comment certainly didn’t cause me any “distress” whatsoever. I was just correcting what seemed to be a possible misreading of the content. You said you disagreed with the article, which seemed to imply that you were (incorrectly) attributing those views to what I’d written.

The piece in fact opens by stressing “The Spartans had their critics and enemies, of course.” And it goes on to explain, e.g., among other things, that “Spartan justice often seems brutal by modern standards”, and that some of the views about virtue attributed to specific Spartans presumably weren’t shared by the rest of their society, etc., etc.

I definitely didn’t say that the Spartans were role models, or that their culture was admirable overall. I totally agree with what you say here but it’s a straw man if you’re assuming that those are criticisms of my beliefs or opinions, because I’ve never said anything like that.

A Graphic Novel About the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius

A Graphic Novel About the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius

I’ve been immersed in writing a graphic novel about the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius for the past couple of years now.

I get lots of questions about the project so I’ve decided to finally break my silence and write about the whole experience of creating Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. From what I’ve learned, people approach writing comics and graphic novels in lots of different ways. This article is about how we went about things and what our experience has been like so far.

The book will be available in roughly a year’s time, published by St. Martin’s Press. It’s going to be about 250 pages, full colour. The illustrator, Ze Nuno Fraga, has just started inking and colouring the pages. So I figured it was a good time to pause and reflect on the experience as we’ve reached a crucial stage.

About that Title

We chose the working title Verissimus. At first it seemed a bit obscure and puzzled people but as the months passed I noticed that it had caught on. Everyone remembered it; so we kept it. One of the Roman histories tells us that as a child Marcus Aurelius was nicknamed Verissimus by his adoptive grandfather, the emperor Hadrian. It’s an odd nickname. Marcus’ family name was Verus, meaning “True” and Verissimus is a play on this, meaning “Most True” or “Truest”. It obviously seems, in some way, to foreshadow his wholehearted embrace of Stoic philosophy later in life, with its emphasis on truth and wisdom.

But it wasn’t just a childhood nickname… Marcus was “Verissimus the Philosopher” to the Roman people.

But it wasn’t just a childhood nickname. It seems that this name followed Marcus throughout his life, even as emperor. In a letter addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, the Christian apologist Justin Martyr refers to Marcus, in his twenties, as “Verissimus the Philosopher”. The name was also stamped on coins, such as those minted in the city of Tyras. Marcus was “Verissimus the Philosopher” to the Roman people.

An oddity about this is that his adoptive brother Lucius took the family name Verus, and served as his co-emperor, although somewhat as his junior. (Having married Marcus’ daughter, Lucius, who was nine years younger than Marcus, was viewed as more like a son-in-law than a brother.) That would make the two emperors Verus and Verissimus or “True” and “Truest” — which maybe comes across as a bit of a put-down of Lucius Verus.

A Bit of Background

I’m the author of six books on philosophy and psychotherapy. My most recent one, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, reached the #1 slot for philosophy sales in the US when it was released. Often people start work on a graphic novel before they have a book deal. We were lucky because I already had interest in the title from two different publishers. It was clear from the outset that this was going to be a major project. In addition to reaching a new audience, who are more into comics, we’re hoping that readers of my previous books will take a look, even if the graphic novel format isn’t normally their cup of tea.

So I’m used to writing, it’s basically my full-time job, but this is the first time I’ve ever attempted a graphic novel. Normally it takes me about a year to write a book. So it took me a while to adapt to the realization that Verissimus was going to take a lot longer. Not only do you have to write the script for a graphic novel, of course, but the illustrator needs to draw, ink, and colour all of the pages. That’s a lot of work. Halfway through the process I spoke to the illustrator for a bestselling graphic novel who told me that his book took six or seven years altogether to complete. We aimed to get ours done in a couple of years, though.

How it Started

This project started on 29th September 2018, at the Modern Stoicism (Stoicon) conference in London. I’d been contacted by an illustrator in Portugal, Ze Nuno Fraga, and had asked him to create three short webcomics about Marcus Aurelius. These were just a bit of fun really — I used them to promote my elearning courses, etc. I wanted to display something at the Stoicism conference, where I was speaking, and by sheer chance I stumbled across a shop in London that did Giclée printing, high-quality prints like the kind you’d display on your wall. On a whim, I emailed them some panels from the webcomic and had them turned into wall art, which we put out on display in the foyer of the University of London’s Senate House, where our conference was taking place.

It might be worth trying that this strategy of exhibiting samples at a conference if you have some artwork and want to get noticed by publishers.

What I’d forgotten was that people who work in the publishing industry often attend these events. A senior editor for a major publishing house saw the prints and came to me with the idea of doing a graphic novel. A few months later, we had a book deal. (Although in the end we went with my existing publisher, who also made an offer.) For me that happened by accident, and I don’t know if it would work for other people but, hey, it might be worth trying that this strategy of exhibiting samples at a conference if you have some artwork and want to get noticed by publishers.

The Concept

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor is a cross-genre book that combines philosophy, psychology, and biography. It contains lots of vignettes from the life of Marcus Aurelius, used to illustrate concepts from Stoic philosophy, which I discussed in relation to modern cognitive-behavioural therapy and self-improvement psychology.

Verissimus is similar but also very different. It’s much more focused on telling the story of Marcus’ life and so there are no references to modern psychology. Instead, it tries to show how Stoic philosophy played a part in his personal journey, as he coped with various challenges along the way. So the philosophy is interwoven more carefully with biography. I’ve spent countless hours studying The Meditations as well as speeches and letters attributed to Marcus Aurelius in order to extract phrases and ideas to put in his mouth, in ways that (hopefully!) fit seamlessly into the story. So Marcus’ thoughts permeate the story, and hopefully the dialogue (though it will never be perfect) comes across as pretty authentic.

I had to pick a major theme so we decided to use the topic of anger as a way to engage with philosophy and psychology.

From the outset, I realized that it would be impossible to explain the whole of Stoic philosophy, in addition to telling the story of Marcus’ life, because it’s simply to big a subject. I had to pick a major theme so we decided to use the topic of anger as a way to engage with philosophy and psychology. Why anger? Because it plays a special role in Marcus’ biography. He tells us at the start of The Meditations that he struggled at first to manage his own temper, and he also returns to the theme of coping with anger over and over again throughout the text. There are also some great stories about anger from the ancient sources. So it was easy to see how we could use coping with anger as a way of exploring Stoic philosophy while keeping it relevant to the events of his life. Anger is also a preeminently visual emotion — it works well in comic book panels and makes for a more exciting story. Marcus wrestles with his own anger, and also has to deal with the anger and hatred of others.

I was already extremely familiar with the story of Marcus Aurelius’ life. So I wondered whether having it illustrated would change anything about how I perceived events. It definitely did. There were many small realizations I arrived at as I looked at the draft pages, over and over again. There are too many to mention here but I’ll pick a couple of the ones that interested me the most.

First of all, I realized that some of our scenes were turning into something resembling a horror story. That wasn’t intentional — it just emerged naturally from the source material. We can say glibly that Marcus lived through the Antonine Plague, that ravaged the empire for at least fourteen years, killed roughly 5 million people, devastated the legions, left whole towns and villages barren, and probably scarred the faces and mutilated the bodies even of survivors. Those are just words. Try visualizing that, though, as he goes about his daily business, and even has to defend the empire against invasion. Trust me: it’s a horror story. (At least, in places.) Roman warfare was also horrific. For instance, captured enemies were tortured and crucified outside the gates of besieged cities to terrorize their inhabitants into surrender. Try picturing those scenes. We tried to show the brutal reality of life in ancient Rome.

These and other details also made me realize something else. When Marcus contemplates his own mortality in The Meditations, it perhaps seems a bit abstract at times. However, for much of his life I imagine he probably woke up every morning, slightly surprised he was still alive. His own life was, I think, more continuously in peril, than modern readers tend to assume. Plague, invading armies, assassins, and his ongoing poor health in general all gave Marcus (and everyone else) reasons to feel that it would be no great surprise for the emperor to drop dead. The long catalogue of friends, colleagues, and family members who died during his lifetime also testifies to the stark consciousness Marcus must have had of his own mortality.

The Research

I also knew before we began that this book would be controversial because there’s no way we can write a graphic novel (of this kind anyway) that presents the story of Marcus life like a scholarly biography would. We had to tell a story without pausing every few minutes to question the evidence. Where there are multiple possible interpretations of the surviving evidence, we had to pick one, and make it work as a comic book story.

So this book is not intended as a historically accurate biographical account of Marcus’ life. Nevertheless, it was based on very thorough research, and we put a huge amount of effort into making it as historically accurate as possible. A comic book script is like a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, though. It’s entertainment, not an academic treatise. Some movies are more historically accurate than others — we tried to make our version of Marcus’ life as plausible as we could.

I think a lot of people just assume we have The Meditations and nothing else but that’s completely wrong.

The first thing I should stress is that we do know quite a lot about Marcus Aurelius. Some people who reviewed How to Think Like a Roman Emperor assumed the anecdotes about his life were fiction. (Although, if they read the introduction and looked at the endnotes they’d know that it was thoroughly referenced against the ancient sources.) I think a lot of people just assume we have The Meditations and nothing else but that’s completely wrong. There are many modern biographies of Marcus Aurelius, and others about related figures such as his father Antoninus Pius, his son Commodus, and even one about his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus.

We have three major surviving Roman histories of his life: The Historia Augusta, The Historia Romana of Cassius Dio, and Herodian’s History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus. There are also many lesser or fragmentary pieces of evidence in various other ancient texts, such as the Lives of the Sophists of Philostratus, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and so on. In addition to this we have archeological and numismatic evidence. Moreover, we have an entire cache of private letters between Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the Sophist and rhetoric tutor, and his friends and students, especially Marcus Aurelius. We also have a great deal of evidence about the Stoic philosophy itself from other sources, which shed light on obscure passages in The Meditations. We learn a great deal about the The Meditations, likewise, from modern academic commentaries, such as The Inner Citadel of Pierre Hadot.

I studied all the writings I could lay my hands on very closely and consulted with several classicists and philosophers who are experts in this field. Indeed, before I even started creating Verissimus, I’d been researching and writing about Stoicism, and the life of Marcus Aurelius, for roughly 25 years. My Greek’s pretty rusty but it’s good enough for me to be able to study the parallel texts closely and derive meaning from the original language, which sometimes leads to a more nuanced readings of The Meditations.

However, the challenge with Verissimus was to make a coherent story which could be presented in a visual format, like a movie script. (I like to joke that it only dawned on me halfway through that it kind of accidentally written a prequel to Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, but with a lot more Stoic philosophy.) So I went to stay in Carnuntum, in modern-day Austria, for a week, where Marcus was stationed when he wrote The Meditations. While there I interviewed the CEO in charge of the archeological park and the head of scientific research, to gather more information for the graphic novel.

I wanted to see the landscape of the Danube region first hand, which Ze would be drawing, and walk through buildings, such as the reconstructed Roman villa, which would play a part in our story. I’ve also spent many months living in Greece over the past couple of years. (I’m in Athens now, as I write.) I visited Sparta, Eleusis, and Delphi, and I’ve been to the Acropolis, the agora, and the museums many times, conducting research. You’ll see that Delphi and Eleusis, for instance, feature in Verissimus.

I explained to my publisher when working on the initial proposal that I wanted to avoid a graphic novel that was just a dialogue dump, with panel after panel of “old men in togas and sandals talking”. Stan Lee used to say that in his mind a great comic could almost be readable if you redacted all of the text. There’s a lot of drama and action in the life of Marcus Aurelius. So we wanted to show that as much as possible. There are some intense emotional scenes and a surprising number of large-scale (massive!) battle scenes.

I wanted to vary the appearance of pages by taking the reader on a bit of a tour of the ancient world so we’re not just in some generic building in Rome. We go to several different regions of Rome, to nearby villas, and other parts of the Italian countryside, to Carnuntum, Aquincum, Sirmium, Egypt (both rural and Alexandria), Cappadocia, Syria, Armenia, and Parthia, and even (based on a notorious fragment of historical evidence) to Han China. There are no generic “barbarians” here either. We meet the Lombards, Marcomanni, the Quadi, different Sarmatians tribes, the Egyptian Bucoli, the Parthians, and others.

We also introduced variety by including several imaginary or remembered scenes, and a few dreams and visions, etc. These fit pretty seamlessly into the story. For instance, Marcus almost certainly never met Epictetus, but we can show Epictetus in scalloped panels (indicated a memory) as another Stoic teacher recounts a conversation in his school. Likewise, there are some places where historical accounts are conflicting or unreliable, and basically appear like court gossip.

Instead of ignoring these we present them as gossip in a tavern, which allows us to depict interesting scenes as something imagined, while leaving it up to the reader to decide whether they believe the story or not. For instance, did the Empress Faustina, Marcus’ wife, actually bathe in the blood of a gladiator to cure her sexual lust? Probably not but we can bring this rumour up by presenting it as gossip in the graphic novel. Even if we don’t believe the gossip, the mere fact people spread such stories arguably reveals something about the atmosphere at Rome and the way the imperial family were perceived.

The Process

I knew very little about comics when starting this project. So I went out and consulted as many people as I could who knew more than me. I started hanging around comic shops in Toronto and Athens, talking to the staff, went to a couple of conventions, and made friends with a few people in that world. There are also a surprising number of good books about writing comics and graphic novels. I read a pile of them, especially Scott McCloud’s masterful Making Comics, which became my Bible. I immersed myself in reading comics and graphic novels. I also watched countless movies about ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, looking for ideas for the plot, ways of framing shots/panels, etc.

I wrote the script. So that’s a bit like being the Stan Lee of the process. Some scripts are mainly dialogue but ours went into quite a lot of detail about framing shots and the visual content, positioning text, etc. I read it and re-read it many times. Ze then had to draw the pages in pencil. I reviewed the drafts over and over again. They’ve also been read and checked online and in paper format by my “focus group” of helpers, including comic book fans and experts, and experts on historical details such as the design of military equipment, etc., as well as, of course, by our editor, Tim Bartlett. Then Ze inks the pages in black, which we review, before he also colours them. (Sometimes these steps are done by different people but not in our case.)

Over time, Verissimus has evolved from a series of anecdotes and vignettes into a much more rounded and unified story. Marcus Aurelius emerges as a more vivid and complex character, as do the supporting cast of Roman nobles and philosophers, who accompany him throughout life. I think his relationship with the “barbarians”, with whom he’s at war, also comes across as more complex and nuanced.

Conclusion

We’re still working away on what’s become a labour of love. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share more in the near future. (You can get your hands on some early Verissimus artwork samples, videos, articles, etc., from this freebie bundle I created.) I’ve definitely learned a lot more about comics or, to use the more sophisticated terminology, sequential art. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most are the opportunity to really explore the story of Marcus’ life and his reliance on Stoicism from this more visual perspective, which I really feel has deepened my own understanding both of Marcus, as a man, and of Stoic philosophy as a way of life. I’ve also had a great time working with Ze and meeting other people who are “passionate” (!) about graphic novels. I’m hoping that Verissimus will introduce Stoicism to a new audience, fingers crossed — or “fate permitting’ as Stoics like to say.

Review of “REBT a Newcomer’s Guide” by Matweychuk and Dryden

Review of “REBT a Newcomer’s Guide” by Matweychuk and Dryden

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is the main precursor of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). (Or the earliest form of CBT, depending on how you look at it.) It was developed in the late 1950s by Albert Ellis, who subsequently wrote dozens of books on the subject. Ellis had a forceful and engaging personality. In addition to writing textbooks for therapists he wrote some very popular self-help books for a wider audience. He also happens to have referred more often to Stoicism than any other famous figure in the history of psychotherapy. (The now almost forgotten Paul Dubois perhaps comes a close second.) My own background is in philosophy and CBT, so the relationship between REBT and Stoicism particularly interests me.

Ellis would often teach this principle to therapy clients by showing them a famous quote from the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus: “It’s not events that upset us but our judgments about events.”

In Ellis’ first major publication on what would later become known as REBT, he wrote that its central principle “was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers”. He meant the REBT principle that emotional disturbances, and associated symptoms, are not caused by external events, as people tend to assume, but mainly by our beliefs and attitudes about such events. Ellis would often teach this principle to therapy clients by showing them a famous quote from the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus: “It’s not events that upset us but our judgments about events.” However, many more references to Stoicism can be found scattered throughout Ellis’ writings. Indeed, even when he makes no explicit mention of Stoicism, traces of its signature ideas can arguably be found in other aspects of REBT theory and practice.

I’ve always felt therefore that Ellis was, quite possibly, more influenced by Stoic philosophy than he actually realized. Perhaps because he read the Stoics quite early in life, as a teenager, he underestimated the extent to which their writings may have inspired various ideas he developed many years later as part of REBT. My first book on Stoicism, The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (2010), reviews the parallels between Stoicism and REBT in depth, both in terms of theory and technique. So I won’t be providing another broad survey like that in this short article. Rather I’ll focus on what I think are some notable similarities between the fundamental principles of both Stoicism and REBT.

REBT: A Newcomer’s Guide

Walter Matweychuk is an REBT expert who is also very knowledgeable about Stoicism. Walter gave a talk about their relationship at Stoicon 2017 the international conference for Modern Stoicism. He recently published a neat little introduction to REBT called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy: A Newcomer’s Guide (2017). It’s co-authored by Prof. Windy Dryden, a prolific author on REBT and, by my reckoning, the most famous psychotherapist in the UK. Their book is a concise account of REBT for complete newcomers. So it provides a great way for those who are interested in Stoic philosophy to begin learning more about REBT, and I believe they’ll soon grasp the obvious relevance of Ellis’ psychotherapeutic approach to Stoicism.

REBT posits that in most cases the healthiest long-term strategy is to identify the rigid, irrational beliefs that create the emotional response, dispute them, and replace them with flexible, rational beliefs instead.

It starts, naturally enough, by introducing the famous “ABC Model” developed by Ellis. This provides a very simple way to illustrate the difference between healthy (rational) and unhealthy (irrational) ways of responding to any given situation.

A: Activation, meaning you find yourself in a situation or facing certain events about which you draw various inferences
B: Beliefs, you respond by imposing your underlying beliefs on the situation, in this case rigid, irrational demands
C: Consequences, you experience various consequences, particularly emotional distress, but also thoughts and behaviours

For example:

A: I’m giving a presentation at work and someone frowns, so I infer that they think I’m boring
B: I have the inflexible and irrational belief that everyone must find me interesting and if they don’t it’s absolutely awful and unbearable
C: As a consequence, I feel depressed and maybe drink alcohol and distract myself to cope

However, not everyone faced with the same activating event (A) will experience the same emotional consequences (C). Some individuals might have a more healthy and adaptive response. Why? Because they have more flexible and rational underlying beliefs (B), akin to preferences rather than rigid demands. This simple model is the foundation stone on which REBT is built. It’s therefore normally taught to clients during the initial orientation (“socialization”) phase of treatment. In more technical terms, it’s used to teach clients a simplified “cognitive” theory of emotion, in which the pivotal elements are their own beliefs (cognitions).

However, when the majority of clients arrive for their first therapy session they tend to talk and think as though certain situations (A) lead directly to emotional distress (C). “She criticized me and that made me feel depressed”, for example. They’re usually missing the cognitive link in the middle, the irrational beliefs (B) that really explain why they’re responding the way that they do. (“People absolutely must not criticize me, because if they do it’s unbearably awful.”) At first, people often try avoiding or changing the activating event (A), or suppressing the disturbing emotional consequences (C). However, REBT posits that in most cases the healthiest long-term strategy is to identify the rigid, irrational beliefs that create the emotional response, dispute them, and replace them with flexible, rational beliefs instead.

Ellis always saw his approach as being, in a sense, philosophical because it targets very fundamental beliefs. Indeed, often it could be described as an attempt to transform our underlying “philosophy of life” by disputing irrational beliefs and adopting more rational ones instead. Socrates was arguably the first person to really introduce the notion that rationally disputing our beliefs about what’s good or bad could be construed both as doing philosophy and also as a sort of psychological therapy. He liked to quote Homer, saying that it was the business of philosophy, not to speculate about the heavens, as previous thinkers had done, but to investigate “Whatso’er is good or evil in a house”, by asking questions of genuine practical significance to our daily lives. It was the Stoics, though, who really developed this therapeutic aspect of Socratic philosophy the most.

The ancient Stoics actually had a similar three-stage model to Ellis but their emphasis was slightly different. For instance, Epictetus describes this process:

A: There’s an event, such as being caught in a storm at sea, that automatically triggers certain reflexive emotional reactions (propatheiai) and automatic thoughts (phantasiai), such as feelings of anxiety and seasickness, etc.
B: We respond with the belief, or rather value judgement (hupolepsis), that what is happening is intrinsically bad and harmful to our very nature
C: Our initial thoughts and feelings then escalate into a full-blown irrational desires or emotions (called “passions”) and we become excessively upset about the situation

For Stoics, it’s therefore a specific kind of value judgement that’s the root cause of emotional disturbance, and certain behavioural problems in life. For simplicity, we could describe it as judging things outside of our direct control to be strongly good or bad. However, they actually based their therapeutic approach on a more subtle qualitative distinction between two different types of value judgement: one which causes distress and one which does not. They had to introduce jargon to express this, making a distinction between judging something to be supremely “good” (agathos) or “bad” (kakia) versus merely assigning a lighter kind of value (axia) to it for the purposes of planning future actions.

The Stoics believed that only our own character should be judged supremely “good” or “bad”, making these terms synonymous with “virtue” and “vice” respectively. Everything external to our character or acts of will is at best lightly “preferred” or “dispreferred”, advantageous or disadvantageous, but not truly “good” or “bad” in this strong sense. We can articulate this distinction between something being “good” versus merely “preferred” in several ways because the Stoics employed several definitions of the “good” and a variety of arguments to support their theory. One is that the “good”, in this key technical sense, is synonymous with what is truly beneficial for us, and the “bad” with what is genuinely harmful.

Assigning so much value to external advantages such as wealth or status, as if they were a “life or death matter”, is a recipe for neurosis, and the Stoics believed that it was also the root cause of certain vices…

We may rationally value some external things over others, such as preferring wealth over poverty, as long as we don’t actually confuse the value of such things with our supreme good or what is ultimately beneficial for us in life. Money might be useful or advantageous, according to the Stoics, but it’s not really the goal of life. Likewise, poverty might be a disadvantage that we prefer to avoid but in itself it doesn’t necessarily ruin our life. Assigning so much value to external advantages such as wealth or status, as if they were a “life or death matter”, is a recipe for neurosis, and the Stoics believed that it was also the root cause of certain vices, i.e., of immoral or antisocial behaviour and even crimes. In their view, external advantages like having wealth, good looks, or friends, merely gives us more opportunity or control over external events in life. Whether that’s ultimately good or bad, though, depends on how we use it. Political tyrants have immense wealth and power but, observed the ancient Stoics, that merely gives them more opportunity to exercise folly and vice. We go wrong, the Stoics say, when we’re duped into believing that fame, wealth, and other external advantages in life, are somehow more important than wisdom and virtue.

There’s another interesting way of expressing the Stoic qualitative distinction between what is supremely good (or beneficial) and the lighter value placed on externals such as health, wealth, and reputation. They believed that unhealthy passions (desires and emotions) are not only irrational but also excessive. They overreach themselves by demanding that they get what they want despite the fact that their aim is to get (or avoid) external things beyond our direct control. Nothing, say the Stoics, is truly under our direct control except our own will, or our ability to choose one thing over another (prohairesis). It’s therefore madness, or simply irrational and unphilosophical, to desire things in this demanding way.

‘What is it, Passion, that you want? Tell me this.’
‘What I want, Reason? To do everything I want.’
‘A royal wish; but tell me it again.’
‘Whatever I desire I want to happen.’ — Cleanthes

That’ll be an irrational, rigid type of demand then. By contrast, the philosophical attitude aspired to by Stoicism would require embracing the fact that our desires can always be thwarted by external events. Epictetus actually tells his Stoic students that there’s only one thing that they should rigidly demand in life, that they refrain from voluntarily engaging in vice in the here and now. That’s always, by definition, within their power to accomplish.

Epictetus called the first stage of training in Stoicism the “Discipline of Desire and Aversion”, which he says is the most urgent for his students to master. It’s basically the Stoic therapy of the passions. He says it boils down to the doctrine that irrational passions are fundamentally due either to being thwarted in getting what we desire or in getting what we seek to avoid in life (Discourses, 3.2). The frustration of certain desires, he says, is necessarily the cause of emotional disturbance, genuine misfortune, sorrow, lamentation, and even envy. He’s clearly talking about a particular type of desire that’s intolerant of being thwarted or remaining unfulfilled. He addresses this demanding quality of unhealthy desires at the very beginning of the Stoic Handbook:

Remember that [this type of] desire contains in it the profession (hope) of obtaining that which you desire; and the profession (hope) in aversion (turning from a thing) is that you will not fall into that which you attempt to avoid: and he who fails in his desire is unfortunate; and he who falls into that which he would avoid, is unhappy. If then you attempt to avoid only the things contrary to nature which are within your power, you will not be involved in any of the things which you would avoid. But if you [rigidly] attempt to avoid disease or death or poverty, you will be unhappy. Take away then aversion from all things which are not in our power, and transfer it to the things contrary to nature [i.e., irrational and unhealthy] which are in our power. (Handbook, 2)

Nevertheless, he adds that his students are to refrain from passionately desiring wisdom and virtue for the time being, in this strong sense, because that would be setting their sights too high at the beginning of their education in philosophy. He concludes by explaining that instead of employing this demanding, passionate form of desire and aversion his students should instead employ a light preference in selecting one external goal over another.

It’s the subtle knack of being able to say “I want this but if I don’t get it — so what? — it’s not the end of the world” rather than “I must have this!”

Moreover, Epictetus ends this passage by saying that even when pursuing things lightly in this way, Stoics should also remember to do so “with exceptions”. The meaning of this is usually lost in translation but he’s actually using a Stoic technical term: hupexhairesis. This is often translated as “with a reserve clause”. It means something very specific: undertaking our actions while calmly accepting that they might be thwarted. In plain English, the Stoic reserve clause is like saying: “I want to do xyz but if I don’t succeed, that’s not the end of the world.” Sometimes the “reserve clause” is expressed by qualifying desires and intentions with the clause: “if nothing prevents me”, “Fate permitting” or “God Willing”. Epictetus and other Stoics would also imagine specific setbacks thwarting their desires, which they practised accepting with equanimity and indifference. It seems to me that the addition of the “reserve clause” might be compared to what REBT means by holding “flexible” as opposed to “rigid” beliefs about what we want in life. It’s the subtle knack of being able to say “I want this but if I don’t get it — so what? — it’s not the end of the world” rather than “I must have this!”

REBT likewise shows clients that their irrational beliefs (B), in the form of rigid demands, are the key to their problem and that’s what the therapy focuses on helping them to change.

Note that failing to gain what we value is insufficient for emotional disturbance. REBT does not target unfulfilled values; rather it targets rigid attitudes that suggest the values we have absolutely must be fulfilled. Flexible attitudes specify a preference for what is valued and explicitly negate a demand for it. (p. 16)

For example, they might turn the rigid demand “I absolutely must succeed in valued areas of my life” into the flexible preference “I would prefer to succeed in valued areas of my life but do not have to do so.” In REBT it’s assumed that the strength of a desire alone isn’t what makes it into a rigid demand but nevertheless very strong desires are more likely to mutate into rigid demands. This distinction can be compared to the one made thousands of years earlier by the Stoics: between the sort of excessive desires or aversions that inevitably cause emotional disturbance when frustrated and the sort of light preferences that seamlessly adapt themselves to being thwarted.

REBT also distinguishes between three domains in which people hold such beliefs: about themselves, other people, or life in general. Stoicism actually employed exactly the same distinction. The early Stoics apparently began by employing a twofold distinction between internal and external nature, or ourselves versus the rest of the world. (This is probably the origin of Epictetus’ famous “dichotomy of control”, which distinguishes what is up to us, our own actions, from everything else.) However, at least by the time of Marcus Aurelius, this had evolved into a threefold distinction between ourselves, the rest of humankind, and the universe (or nature) as a whole — obviously similar to the tripartite model used in REBT.

Extreme Attitudes

This newcomer’s guide also covers three common “extreme attitudes”, which REBT believes are derived from rigid demands.

1. Extreme awfulizing

2. Discomfort intolerance

3. Extreme devaluation

These also have parallels in the Stoic literature, although for the Stoics, as we’ve seen, the root cause of suffering is the belief that external things, which are not entirely up to us, are supremely good or bad. Sometimes, to be fair, it’s difficult to separate these sort of toxic attitudes as they’re very closely intertwined. For that reason, the difference in emphasis between Stoic therapy and REBT is arguably less significant than what they have in common. Both approaches agree that broadly-speaking a nexus of irrational, evaluative, demanding beliefs are at the core of our emotional distress.

1. Awfulizing

REBT holds that extreme “awfulizing” attitudes often derive from rigid demands. For example, if I believe “People must treat me with respect” then as a consequence I may also have an extreme attitude that says “It’s awful when people don’t treat me with respect.” What’s meant by “awful” is defined as:

1. Nothing could conceivably be worse in terms of this situation

2. It’s worse than what we’d normally think of as 100% bad — it’s off the scale

3. Absolutely no good can be derived from something as intrinsically bad as this

4. There’s no way to transcend something this awful by responding constructively to it

The opposing attitude in REBT consists of asserting that the situation may be bad but it’s not awful, e.g., “It’s bad when I don’t succeed in valued areas of my life but it’s not awful”. We might also say “I don’t like it but it’s not the end of the world.”

As we’ve seen, the Stoics view rigid, irrational desires as the corollary of irrational value judgments. The two things are basically synonymous. What Ellis meant by awfulizing can be compared to what the Stoics meant by someone judging an external event to be supremely “bad” and “harmful”, in their special technical sense. This involves the belief that some external misfortune is so bad that it harms our fundamental interests, striking at the very core of our being. The Stoics believe this attributes a form of extreme “badness” to external events that they simply cannot possess: only the corruption of our own character, by folly and vice, can actually ruin our lives in this way.

To paraphrase one of their metaphors: imagine a set of scales with folly and vice on one side. No matter how many external misfortunes we pile up on the other side, it should never be enough to tip the scales. The form of “badness” attributable to external misfortune, no matter how severe, is inherently inferior and qualitatively different from the sort of “badness” possessed by our own descent into inner wretchedness. In plain English, both Stoicism and REBT agree that much of our emotional disturbance is caused by the belief that apparent misfortunes in life are not only “bad”, in the ordinary sense, but terrible or awful in an exaggerated and disproportionate sense. It’s right off the scale, in fact, and the Stoics would say that’s because it makes the error of conflating two different sorts of value.

2. Discomfort Intolerance

REBT believes that many problems are due to the belief that discomfort is unbearable, which causes people to feel overwhelmed and give up prematurely when perseverance is required. Tolerance of discomfort happens to be essential to most psychotherapy, though. For example, treatment for many forms of anxiety requires repeatedly confronting our fears, which is impossible without a willingness to accept and tolerate a certain amount of emotional discomfort. Put crudely, we usually have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone in order to achieve significant changes. In fact, discomfort intolerance can be a severe handicap in many areas of life. When we tell ourselves “I can’t bear it”, we’re usually wrong. It’s often just fear or laziness speaking. We can bear a lot more than we tend to assume.

The Stoics remind themselves of this quite frequently. One of the recurring themes in The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is the claim that we are, by nature, capable of bearing more discomfort than we realize. For example, Marcus tells himself not to overwhelm his mind with exaggerated worries but to divide troubling events into small parts and focus on one aspect at a time. I call this the Stoic technique of “Depreciation by Analysis.” (A term borrowed from the early 20th century psychotherapist Charles Baudouin, who was influenced by the Stoics.) When we calmly ask ourselves “What is there about this particular aspect that’s actually unbearable?” we come to realize how absurd that question is because there’s almost always a way to cope.

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: ‘What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?’ You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own. (Meditations, 8.36)

By focusing on the here and now, and one aspect at a time of a larger situation, Stoics learn to cope with even the most challenging misfortunes in life. Marcus, like other Stoics, also frequently asks himself what “virtue” or coping ability nature has given him that he could use to deal with the situation he faces. This is related to the Stoic emphasis on studying role models and learning coping strategies from them, which Marcus does extensively in Book One of The Meditations. One way of increasing our appraisal of our ability to cope with adversity and tolerate discomfort is by reminding ourselves how other people have managed to cope with similar situations.

Devaluation and Acceptance

REBT holds that a great deal of emotional disturbance is caused by beliefs rigidly deprecating oneself, other people, or life in general. This is typical in clinical depression but it can manifest in many other types of emotional problem as well. These extreme attitudes are interpreted as derivatives of rigid demands. For example, someone who rigidly believes “You must not ignore me” may conclude “You are a bad person if you do ignore me.” The essence of this attitude is a global rating of negative value. Something is judged to be bad as a whole, whereas in reality most things have a mixture of positive and negative qualities. It’s a form, therefore, of overgeneralization. REBT recommends that these attitudes should be replaced with more flexible ones that actively refrain from attaching a global negative rating to oneself, other people, or life in general. Even better, we should learn to accept ourselves and others unconditionally even if we object to specific attitudes or behaviours.

Epictetus actually says that when you fail to distinguish between things that are up to you and things that are not… you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men.

This sort of extreme negative evaluation is similar to what the Stoics mean by judging externals, including life as a whole or other individuals, to be bad in the strong sense described above. Epictetus actually says that when you fail to distinguish between things that are up to you and things that are not, and invest too much importance on the latter, as a consequence “you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men”, i.e., railing against life in general (Handbook, 1). The Stoics repeatedly warn us not to indulge in judging other people to be “good” or “bad” in the strong sense they’re concerned with, similar to a global rating of value.

Epictetus says that someone who is uneducated in philosophy blames other people, someone who is partially educated blames himself, and someone who has completed his education blames neither himself nor others (Handbook, 5). Human nature is fundamentally something sacred to the Stoics because, despite our flaws, our very nature contains the seeds of wisdom and virtue, the potential for good. Rather than condemning themselves others in this global deprecating sense, therefore, the Stoics encourage us to view our many passions and vices as, ultimately, being irrational mistakes made by beings that are fundamentally capable of doing good as well as evil.

Conclusion

There are many more comparisons we could make between REBT and Stoicism. For example, one of the methods of Socratic disputation employed in REBT, known as “functional disputation”, involves evaluating the consequences, emotional and otherwise, of holding rational versus irrational beliefs. That’s very similar to one of the most common methods cited by the Stoics, which involved comparing the consequences of living rationally versus those of being ruled by unhealthy passions, i.e., desires and emotions based on irrational beliefs. The Stoics often allude to this through the shorthand method of stating the paradox that irrational fears typically do us more harm than the things of which we’re afraid — highlighting the harmful consequences of irrational beliefs.

[Remember] that the anger and distress that we feel at such [objectionable] behaviour bring us more suffering than the very things that give rise to that anger and distress.(Meditations, 11.18)

Anger, they say, does us more harm than the person with whom we’re angry ever could, because it poisons our very character with temporary madness.

I’ve only been able to touch briefly on some similarities between REBT and Stoicism here. So I’ve focused on some of the key similarities in their conceptualization of emotional disturbance because that’s of absolutely fundamental importance, underlying as it does most of the other concepts and techniques employed in both approaches. As I mentioned at the beginning, my book The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy attempts to provide a fairly comprehensive overview of the similar concepts and techniques found in REBT and Stoicism. So, in particular, if you’re interested in looking at the practical therapeutic techniques that go with the theory described above that would be worth reading.

However, this newcomer’s guide by Matweychuk and Dryden explains the core techniques of REBT more thoroughly, in plain English, in a way that I think will be of interest to those studying Stoic philosophy. For anyone looking for a quick introduction to REBT, it’s perfect in that respect because it’s very concise and yet covers the key concepts of the approach very well.

The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman is a new book that explores the teachings of Stoic philosophers by telling the stories of their lives.

Holiday and Hanselman are well-known to many as the authors of the bestselling The Daily Stoic. Holiday is also the author of a trilogy of successful books inspired, among other things, by his interest in Stoic philosophy: The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key.

Lives of the Stoics is due for publication in the US on September 29th, by Penguin Random House, and will be available in audiobook and ebook as well as hardback format. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance review copy. I’m an author myself and so I receive a lot of new books to review but I can honestly say this is the one I was most looking forward to reading.

Let’s begin by noting that it stands in the venerable tradition of such works as Diogenes Laertius’ classic 3rd century Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. That’s one of our main historical sources for biographical information on Stoic philosophers. Though invaluable to scholars, it’s incomplete, as only seven of the original 27 chapters dealing with Stoics survive today. Moreover, the original ended with a 1st century AD Stoic teacher called Cornutus, and never touched upon the lives of the ancient Stoics who are most famous today: Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Holiday and Hanselman’s work, however, gives us a comprehensive set of biographies covering the most famous Stoics of antiquity.

What I really want to stress, though, is the fact that this isn’t a book just for scholars. In the ancient world, philosophy was taught through lectures, discussions, books, essays — means not dissimilar to those used in academic philosophy departments today. It’s largely forgotten now that philosophy was also transmitted through stories, anecdotes, and biographies. Diogenes Laertius’ Lives is the best example of this but there are many famous anecdotes about the lives of ancient philosophers. We know virtually nothing about Diogenes the Cynic, for instance, except through stories about his life and notorious behaviour. Plutarch’s Lives is another celebrated work designed to teach readers about wisdom and virtue, by exploring the character and actions of famous historical figures.

Of course, ancient philosophy was also frequently transmitted in the form of dialogues, such as those of Plato and Xenophon. These often (but not always) embed philosophical insights and arguments within dramatic stories about the lives of their subjects. We cannot fully understand the words Socrates utters in Plato’s Apology, for instance, without knowing the drama of the historical context in which it takes place — he’s a man standing trial, about to lose his life.

When I wrote my most recent book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, I adopted this biographical approach to exploring the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius — and it works! Modern readers, perhaps especially those who are not academic philosophers, invariably find it easier to engage with and understand ancient philosophy when they know more about the lives and personalities of the philosophers themselves. As a student of philosophy myself, many moons ago, I was an avid reader of biographies about great thinkers from Wittgenstein to Freud. When you can imagine the thinker, their thoughts take shape more easily in your mind too. Holiday and Hanselman have provided us with an encyclopedic account of the lives of no less than twenty-five important Stoic philosophers — plus Cicero, an Academic, who gets an honorary inclusion. And, yes, one of them was a woman. (I’ve appended a list of the philosophers covered to this review.)

I think it’s obvious that this book will be indispensable to anyone who genuinely wants to learn about Stoic philosophy. It covers a wealth of material that’s not easily obtainable elsewhere and it does so with scholarly prowess, while managing to stay readable. The characters come to life and you’ll understand who the Stoics were in a way that will help you to understand what they stood for. This is more important than it might seem at first glance because, among other benefits, it helps to dispel some of the most common misconceptions about Stoicism:

1. Stoics were not only men — see the chapter on Porcia Catonis.

2. Stoics were not all wealthy statesmen— see the chapters on Zeno and Cleanthes.

3. Stoics did not all dogmatically agree with one another — see the chapter on Aristo.

4. Although Seneca supported the Emperor Nero, other Stoics opposed such tyrants — see the chapters on Thrasea and other members of the Stoic Opposition.

The misconception that Stoics are politically passive, because they emphasize emotional acceptance of our fate, is dispelled by the stories of political engagement throughout their lives. Many held important political offices, such as Junius Rusticus, a senior Roman statesman, and the mentor of Marcus Aurelius. Stoics were often advisors to powerful rulers and they wrote books about politics and kingship. Inevitably, by learning about their lives, it becomes easier to see how their philosophical beliefs influenced their actions both in private life and as members of society.

I find that many readers today still assume that we don’t know anything about the lives of the ancient Stoics just because they’ve never been introduced to the relevant historical sources. They even assume nothing is known about Marcus Aurelius, and yet we know a great deal about him because he was a Roman emperor and several histories survive of the period, as well as man fragments of textual evidence, and even numismatic and archeological evidence. A lot of this evidence requires patience to unearth and present in an accessible format. Holiday and Hanselman have done that for you in their Lives of the Stoics. I don’t know of any other book that compares to this in terms of the range of material it contains. If you read it, for sure, you’ll learn many valuable things about Stoicism that you wouldn’t otherwise have known.

Contents

• Zeno the Prophet

• Cleanthes the Apostle

• Aristo the Challenger

• Chrysippus the Fighter

• Zeno the Maintainer

• Diogenes the Diplomat

• Antipater the Ethicist

• Panaetius the Connector

• Publius Rutilius Rufus the Last Honest Man

• Posidonius the Genius

• Diotimus the Vicious

• Cicero the Fellow Traveler

• Cato the Younger, Rome’s Iron Man

• Porcia Cato the Iron Woman

• Athenodorus Cananites the Kingmaker

• Arius Didymus the Kingmaker II

• Agrippinus the Different

• Seneca the Striver

• Cornutus the Common

• Gaius Rubellius Plautus the Man Who Would Not Be King

• Thrasea the Fearless

• Helvidius Priscus the Senator

• Musonius Rufus the Unbreakable

• Epictetus the Free Man

• Junius Rusticus the Dutiful

• Marcus Aurelius the Philosopher King

The Art of Paraphrasing Philosophical Maxims

The Art of Paraphrasing Philosophical Maxims

If thou would’st master care and pain,
Unfold this book and read and read again
Its blessed leaves, whereby thou soon shalt see
The past, the present, and the days to be
With opened eyes; and all delight, all grief,
Shall be like smoke, as empty and as brief.

This epigram is found at the end of a Vatican manuscript of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, one of the most widely-read spiritual and philosophical classics of all time. Readers of The Meditations are usually aware that Marcus was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. However, they often don’t realize how much more we know about him.

Marcus studied rhetoric under Fronto for many years, and learned certain techniques from him that appear to have shaped the writing of The Meditations.

In my recent book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, I drew upon the surviving evidence to make connections between Marcus’ life and thought. We have three main contemporary biographical sources: The Historia Augusta, Cassius Dio’s Historia Romana, and Herodian’s History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus.

In addition to these, one of our most important sources is a cache of letters belonging to Marcus’ family friend and rhetoric tutor Marcus Cornelius Fronto. These were discovered in the early 19th century by the Italian scholar Angelo Mai. They give us a remarkable window into the private life of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher.

We learn, for instance, that Marcus was, in private, an exceptionally warm and affectionate man. He also shows evidence of being adept at diplomacy and at resolving conflicts between his friends. As we’ll see, Marcus studied rhetoric under Fronto for many years, and learned certain techniques from him that appear to have shaped the writing of The Meditations.

Stoics versus Sophists

Fronto was officially Marcus’ main Latin rhetoric tutor. The Meditations, of course, is actually written in Greek. Marcus was also a student of the most celebrated Greek rhetorician of his day, Herodes Atticus. Both of these men were part of the broad cultural movement known as The Second Sophistic and they can both be described as Sophists. Although, from the time of Socrates onward, there was a historical rivalry and conflict between Sophists and philosophers, perhaps especially Stoics, they were more what we call today frenemies. Indeed, some of Socrates’ best friends were Sophists and he liked to quote their sayings and speeches, although often putting his own twist on their words.

Sophists, especially by Marcus’ time, were typically very well-read in philosophy, although they approached it more a source of arguments and ideas than as a way of life. Despite the historical conflict between Sophists and Stoics, therefore, it should come as no surprise if we find one or two topics being discussed by Marcus and Fronto cropping up in The Meditations. However, what caught the eye of scholars was the obvious similarity between the method of writing described by Fronto and the format of The Meditations.

Fronto’s Method: Finding the Right Words

Fronto says that he greatly admires the writings of Cicero as the very “head and source of Roman eloquence.” Nevertheless, having scoured Cicero’s writings for this purpose, Fronto claims that he finds in them “very few words indeed that are unexpected and unlooked for”, by which he means unusual words and phrases of the sort encountered mainly in old poetry. Fronto describes how these must be “hunted out” with great care and the stored up in the memory of an orator as though in a treasurehouse.

By an unexpected and unlooked-for word I mean one which is brought out when the hearer or reader is not expecting it or thinking of it, yet so that if you withdrew it and asked the reader himself to think of a substitute, he would be able to find either no other at all or one not so fitted to express the intended meaning. Wherefore I commend you greatly for the care and diligence you shew in digging deep for your word and fitting it to your meaning. — Fronto

A great orator spends time finding the perfect word, or phrase, to express his meaning. He avoids cliché where possible. Fronto stresses that he doesn’t just mean using obscure words in a pretentious manner. He means taking more care than normal to express our ideas very clearly.

But, as I said at first, there lies a great danger in the enterprize lest the word be applied unsuitably or with a want of clearness or a lack of refinement, as by a man of half-knowledge, for it is much better to use common and everyday words than unusual and far-fetched ones, if there is little difference in real meaning. — Fronto

Of course, anyone can do this. However, most of us fall into the habit of over-using the most common words and phrases. These don’t hold our attention or stimulate the imagination, though, and a more careful choice of words can allow our meaning to ring out more loudly and clearly. A master rhetorician like Fronto would invest a great deal of his life in the process of refining his vocabulary in this way.

I hardly know whether it is advisable to shew how great is the difficulty, what scrupulous and anxious care must be taken, in weighing words, for fear the knowledge should check the ardour of the young and weaken their hopes of success. — Fronto

Fronto’s Method: Making Paradoxes Intelligible

Although Marcus trained extensively in rhetoric, for many years, he became progressively more drawn toward the study of philosophy. Fronto obviously considered Marcus to be a very gifted student. He’s very concerned about the risk of losing him to philosophy. He therefore likes to remind Marcus that rhetoric and philosophy should be viewed as complementary disciplines. Philosophers need to know how to express their ideas powerfully and clearly.

Nor, in my opinion, can philosophers dispense with such artifices any more than orators. — Fronto

He tells Marcus repeatedly to paraphrase philosophical maxims, and other wise sayings, perhaps such as the quotes from Greek poets that we find in The Meditations alongside sayings from Socrates, Epictetus, and others.

You must turn the same maxim twice or thrice, just as you have done with that little one. And so turn longer ones two or three times diligently, boldly. — Fronto

Marcus enjoys these exercises but sometimes finds them hard work.

Now, if never before, I find what a task it is to round and shape three or five lines and to take time over writing. — Marcus Aurelius

Fronto explains to Marcus that he pushed him to find the right words to express himself clearly precisely because of his philosophical nature. Even as a young man, Marcus was wrestling with profound ideas, which are not easily expressed in plain English, or even plain Greek or Latin.

You had, [Marcus] Antoninus, but one danger to fear, and no one of outstanding ability can escape it — that you should limp in respect of copiousness and choiceness of words. For the greater the thoughts, the more difficult it is to clothe them in words, and no small labour is needed to prevent those stately thoughts being ill-clothed or unbecomingly draped or half-naked. — Fronto

Socrates and the Stoics were famous for their paradoxes, a word which literally means “contrary to (popular) opinion” in Greek. We have whole lists of words that we’re told the Stoics were at pains to explain were being used in a novel and technical sense — different from the way they were normally used. For instance, Diogenes Laertius, one of our main sources for early Stoic teachings struggles to explain the following distinction:

Now they [the Stoics] say that the wise man is “passionless” [has apatheia], because he is not prone to fall into [passions]. But they add that in another sense the term “apatheia” is applied to the wretched man, when, that is, it means that he is hard and unrelenting. — Diogenes Laertius

Or to put it more simply, they mean that the goal of Stoicism is to be self-possessed and free from unhealthy emotions but not to be cold-hearted or unemotional as though our hearts were made of stone. Philosophers are experts at making subtle conceptual distinctions and working out their implications. Rhetoricians, however, are experts at explaining ideas more clearly so that we can better understand what is meant.

Fronto refers — in Greek, the language of philosophy—to the problem of handling “new and paradoxical ideas” or arguments. This passage, in particular, could easily be viewed as describing the approach followed by Marcus in writing The Meditations.

I warn you, therefore, again and again, my Marcus, and beseech you to remember, as often as you conceive in your mind a startling thought, think over it with yourself and turn and try it with various figures of speech and dress it out in splendid words. For there is a danger that what is new to the hearers and unexpected may seem ridiculous unless it be embellished and made figurative. — Fronto

Fronto has no problem using unusual words or phrases, as long as the audience understand them. However, he feels very strongly that radical new ideas, such as the paradoxes of Stoicism, will confuse people and be misunderstood unless philosophers learn to take more care and express them clearly. Fronto was concerned that Marcus, given his position as Caesar, and later as emperor, needed to be especially careful in this regard.

Speaking the Truth

If we didn’t know this, it would perhaps come as a surprise to find that Marcus praises Fronto, a Sophist, for teaching him how to put the truth into words.

It is that I learn from you to speak the truth. That matter (of speaking the truth) is precisely what is so hard for gods and men: in fact, there is no oracle so truth-telling as not to contain within itself something ambiguous or crooked or intricate, whereby the unwary may be caught and, interpreting the answer in the light of their own wishes, realize its fallaciousness only when the time is past and the business done. — Marcus Aurelius

Again, although it’s difficult enough to grasp the truth ourselves, if we wish to share our wisdom with others that’s even more hard work.

Interestingly, although Fronto tells Marcus to paraphrase the same philosophical maxims repeatedly as an intellectual exercise he nevertheless thinks that to do so in a speech or essay is obnoxious. In fact, he’s absolutely eviscerates Seneca for having done so.

You will say, there are certain things in his [Seneca’s] books cleverly expressed, some also with dignity. Yes, even little silver coins are sometimes found in sewers; are we on that account to contract for the cleaning of sewers? The first and most objectionable defect in that style of speech is the repetition of the same thought under one dress and another, times without number. — Fronto

In Marcus’ case, though, we find something else. We find him struggling with the same ideas over and over again in The Meditations, rephrasing them in different ways, not for the sake of others but for his own sake. The approach Fronto taught him, of finding exactly the right words by repeatedly paraphrasing maxims, has become a method of rendering Stoic wisdom clearer, more impactful, and more memorable, in the privacy of his own mind. Indeed, “The Meditations” was the title given to Marcus’ notes by modern editors. The earliest manuscript version was titled in Greek: To Himself.