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Ep. 26: Dear City of Zeus · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  An emperor sits in a camp tent, somewhere along the northern frontier.
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  Outside, there are soldiers, horses, couriers with bad news.
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  Inside, there's a lamp, a notebook, and a man who has more power than almost
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  anyone alive.
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  And he writes a line of poetry, not to rule anyone with it,
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  but to correct himself.
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  This is Ep.
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  26 of The Morning Stoic, and I'm Julian Vale.
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  Last time we followed Marcus Aurelius into the inner retreat,
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  the quiet room he says is always available inside the mind.
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  Today the door of that room opens outward, onto something much larger.
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  Marcus ruled the Roman Empire.
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  He was its supreme magistrate and its commander in the field.
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  And in his years of war along the Danube, against peoples such as the Quadi and the
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  Marcomanni, he carried the weight of supply lines, of frontier raids,
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  of civic trouble back home.
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  I imagine the days were long, and the nights were not much shorter.
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  Yet in his private notebook, the one we call the Meditations,
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  he does something odd for a man in his position.
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  He quietly demotes his own city.
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  Not out of disloyalty, but out of a larger loyalty.
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  To see how, we need to meet the poet he quotes, or rather, the little that's left of
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  him.
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  Start with the name Cecrops.
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  In Athenian tradition, Cecrops was a founding king of the city,
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  often pictured as half man and half serpent.
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  So when someone says, city of Cecrops, they simply mean Athens,
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  said the way you'd say it about a place you love.
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  The line Marcus quotes comes from comic poetry.
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  It's a lost fragment, commonly attributed to Aristophanes, and the old index of
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  Marcus's names says the same.
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  I'd hold that attribution lightly, since we only have the one line.
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  But what the phrase meant is clear enough.
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  Dear city of Cecrops.
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  It's affection.
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  It's the ache of belonging to a particular place, with its hills,
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  its streets, its own bread and weather.
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  I imagine an Athenian audience hearing that and feeling a little lift in the chest.
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  Everyone has a version of it.
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  A town, a neighborhood, a flag.
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  A place you are for.
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  Now, Marcus does not sneer at this.
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  That matters.
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  He quotes the poet as the poet, and he lets the line stand.
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  What he does next is ask a question of himself, and I'll read the whole passage
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  first, in George Long's translation, word for word.
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  Meditations, Book Four, section twenty three.
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  Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee,
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  O Universe.
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  Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee.
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  Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee
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  are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.
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  The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say,
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  Dear city of Zeus?
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  Notice first that it isn't an argument.
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  There's no therefore, no step by step.
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  It sounds more like a prayer, or a hymn.
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  Marcus is speaking to the Universe directly, the way you might speak to someone you
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  trust.
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  Take the first part.
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  Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee.
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  In plain terms, whatever fits the whole fits me.
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  Marcus is not asking the world to arrange itself around his plans.
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  He's agreeing, in advance, to the arrangement it already has.
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  And then, nothing is too early, nor too late.
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  Think of what that means for a man at a frontier, where plans fail constantly.
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  A messenger arrives late.
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  A campaign stalls.
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  A season turns against you.
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  Marcus writes that whatever comes in due time for the Universe is in due time for
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  him.
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  I'll say plainly, that is my reading of it, and a hard thing to mean when it's your
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  own army out in the cold.
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  Then the image I like best.
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  Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring.
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  Fruit.
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  Not only the sweet ones, but whatever the season hands over.
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  I imagine him thinking of a harvest, where nothing is wasted,
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  and even the sour weather helps the grain along.
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  Marcus seems to want his hardships treated as that kind of crop,
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  something to be taken in and turned into character.
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  Then comes the line that holds the rest together.
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  From thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things
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  return.
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  It's a circle.
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  Nothing arrives from outside the whole, and nothing leaves it.
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  If that's true, then the person who resents the universe is a bit like a hand
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  resenting the body.
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  And that is where the poet's line gets its turn.
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  Dear city of Cecrops, says the poet, and wilt not thou say,
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  Dear city of Zeus?
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  Marcus takes the old civic love and stretches it past every wall.
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  Zeus, for the Stoics, stands for the reason that runs through everything.
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  So the city of Zeus is the whole ordered world.
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  Elsewhere in the same book, in section four, Marcus lays out the reasoning in a
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  chain.
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  If our reason is shared, then the law is shared; if the law is shared,
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  we are fellow citizens, and the world is in a manner a state.
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  I'm paraphrasing there, so take it as my summary, not a quotation.
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  But you can see the logic.
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  The city of Zeus is the one city whose citizens include everyone able to reason.
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  Now, the irony is almost too neat.
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  The man writing this is the head of Rome.
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  He could have said, dear city of Romulus, and no one in the empire would have
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  blinked.
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  Instead he writes this in a notebook meant for no one else.
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  And I think, though this is my interpretation, that it works as a check on his own
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  station.
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  Rome is where he happens to serve.
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  It isn't where his deepest allegiance lives.
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  That doesn't make him a worse emperor, I'd say.
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  It may be the reverse.
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  A man who believes every stranger across the river is also a citizen of the same
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  great city, has a reason to govern with some care.
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  Though I'll be honest, Marcus also fought hard wars on that same frontier,
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  and the notebook doesn't resolve every tension in his life.
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  He doesn't pretend it does either.
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  Put the two episodes side by side.
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  Last time, he told himself to retire into his own soul, since no seashore or
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  mountain beats it.
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  Today, he steps out of that room and looks up, and finds the room sits inside
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  something enormous.
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  The inner retreat and the cosmic city aren't rivals.
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  One is the door, the other is what's on the far side.
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  I imagine the lamp burning low in that tent, and the man closing the notebook.
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  Outside, the same cold frontier.
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  The same tired soldiers.
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  But a little more room around him than there was an hour before.
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  That's all for this morning.
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  Thank you for spending it here.
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  Tomorrow, we'll look at a different sort of morning altogether,
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  and what it takes to get out of bed.
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  Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr.
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  George Long, Project Gutenberg number fifteen eight seventy seven.