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Ep. 22: Begin the Morning · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  An emperor wakes before the petitioners do.
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  I imagine a lamp, a cold room, and a man in his fifties who has not slept well,
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  because he rarely does.
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  His name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
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  He was born in the year 121, and he ruled Rome from 161 to 180.
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  For some time now we've been in a schoolroom in Nicopolis, with a lame former slave
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  talking to students.
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  Today we move to the other end of Roman life.
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  Not a classroom, but a private notebook.
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  An emperor writing to himself.
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  And that word, private, matters.
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  Nothing suggests Marcus wrote these pages for readers.
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  They weren't a book meant for the public, and they certainly weren't advice for
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  strangers.
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  They were reminders, written late in his life, and the tradition has long said that
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  many were composed on campaign, along the Danube frontier.
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  Wars against tribes like the Marcomanni and the Quadi.
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  A plague moving through the empire.
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  A court full of ambition.
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  Now, I'm no scholar, so take this as a storyteller's picture.
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  But an emperor's mornings were crowded.
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  Petitioners, senators, officials, flatterers, rivals.
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  I imagine the line forming before he'd finished his thoughts,
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  every person in it wanting something, and some of them wanting it dishonestly.
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  So the first words of the second book of his notes are not about courage,
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  or glory, or empire.
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  They're about the people he is about to meet.
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  Here is the passage, in George Long's translation, from Project Gutenberg.
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  Marcus writes: "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the
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  busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious,
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  unsocial."
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  A list.
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  Six kinds of difficult person, before breakfast.
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  And it's easy to hear that as a sneer.
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  A tired ruler bracing himself against a hostile world.
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  Many people read it that way, as a kind of armor.
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  But keep reading, because the next line turns.
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  He goes on: "All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is
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  good and evil."
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  Ignorance.
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  Not wickedness to be hated, but blindness to be understood.
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  That's Marcus's reading of the people in the line.
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  Then he turns to himself: "But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is
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  beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong,
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  that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates
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  in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity,
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  I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly,
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  nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him."
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  Kinsman.
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  The liar at the door, the envious senator, the ungrateful official.
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  Kin.
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  Then comes the image that I think is the heart of it: "For we are made for
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  co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and
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  lower teeth."
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  And then: "To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting
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  against one another to be vexed and to turn away."
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  This is my own interpretation, so weigh it as that.
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  What strikes me is where the hurt is placed.
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  Marcus says no one can fix on him what is ugly.
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  The insult may arrive, but it stays theirs unless he answers with the same ugliness,
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  with hatred, or with that small sour turning away.
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  And notice that the list is not a shield against people.
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  It's a rehearsal for staying joined to them.
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  Teeth meet teeth.
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  Hands work together.
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  An emperor reminding himself, in private, that he is not a different kind of
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  creature from the man who annoys him.
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  I'd add, honestly, that we can't see inside his days.
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  We don't know how often he managed it.
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  A notebook of reminders suggests he needed reminding.
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  That is, to me, the most human thing about it.
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  So I imagine the lamp, the line at the door, and a tired man
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  steadying himself before he opens it.
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  Not to harden his heart.
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  To keep it open, one difficult face at a time.