Donald Robertson checked the length of Roman legionary swords before he let a single battle scene into his Marcus Aurelius graphic novel. That is the level of care he brings to the emperor. He trained as a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, wrote How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and knows the historical Marcus better than anyone I have spoken to.
We talked for over an hour. The full conversation is here:
The Marcus I had wrong
I went into this interview carrying a few assumptions about Marcus. Robertson took most of them apart.
The warrior-emperor image is mostly backwards. Marcus spent his last decade on campaign, but the criticism he faced in his own lifetime was for too much diplomacy. His instinct was to negotiate.
I had also filed Commodus as Marcus's great Stoic failure. Why would the philosopher-emperor hand Rome to that son? Robertson's answer is that there was no real choice to make. Commodus was the surviving birthright heir, and passing him over would have meant civil war. You can hold Marcus responsible for many things. The succession was not one of them.
And the persecution of Christians under his reign, which gets raised whenever someone wants to knock him off his pedestal, was mostly local governors acting on local politics. Not an imperial programme.
Logic as self-defence
The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is Robertson on logic. The ancient Stoic curriculum trained students in reasoning for years before anything we would recognise as life advice. That always seemed like the boring, skippable part to me.
Robertson's case is that it was the armour. A mind that can spot a bad argument cannot be easily manipulated, and a mind that cannot is at the mercy of whoever shouts loudest. He thinks Marcus would look at how we argue online and diagnose the problem in about a minute.
Three exercises from the interview
Robertson walks through three practices in the interview. The view from above: picture your situation from higher and higher up, the room, the town, the planet, until the thing gripping you shrinks to its real size. Decatastrophising: take the disaster your mind is forecasting and describe it again in plain, boring language. And the evening review: run back through the day and ask where you acted with wisdom, courage, justice or temperance, and where you did not.
I already close my days with Seneca's three questions, which is a cousin of that last one. Robertson's version swaps in the four virtues as the measuring stick. Same discipline, different ruler.
More from Robertson
- Donald Robertson's website: his essays, books and courses on Stoicism and CBT.
- Modern Stoicism: the nonprofit he co-founded, with hundreds of free essays.
The interview covers much more than I can summarise here: Marcus's tutors, the plague years, what a psychotherapist sees in the Meditations that a classicist misses. Watch it above.