Ancient Stoicism was never about being emotionally detached. It was about emotional mastery, about developing a deep sense of brotherhood, resilience, and wisdom.
Watch the full clip with Donald Robertson on the kindness of Marcus Aurelius:
Say "Stoicism" to most people and they picture a man with a clenched jaw enduring everything and feeling nothing. I sat down with Donald Robertson, who has written several books on Stoicism and a biography of Marcus Aurelius, to talk about why that picture is wrong, and about the man who disproves it best: the Roman Emperor who ruled from 161 to 180 AD and treated kindness as a form of strength.
What follows is the companion piece to that conversation: who Marcus Aurelius was, whether he actually deserves his reputation, and what his version of Stoicism asks of us.
Reading about Stoicism is the easy part.
The free 7-Day Stoic Challenge gives you one short audio lesson and one exercise a day for a week. By day seven you'll have trained more than most people who have only read about it.
Start the challengeWas Marcus Aurelius a good emperor?
By most historical accounts, yes, and by the standards of Roman emperors, remarkably so. Born in 121 AD, Marcus ruled through one of the worst stretches Rome ever faced: near-constant war on the northern frontier, a devastating plague, and an internal rebellion. He had absolute power and the worked example of plenty of predecessors who let it rot them. Instead he lived modestly, governed with an unusual concern for fairness, and kept a private notebook, the Meditations, in which he mostly criticises himself. Historians count him among Rome's "Five Good Emperors". The Britannica biography and this History.com overview cover the reign in detail.
He was not perfect, and the honest version of this article has to say so. The standard charge is Commodus: Marcus failed to stop his own son becoming one of Rome's worst emperors, the reign that inspired the villain in Gladiator. There are other criticisms too, which Robertson has collected and examined from the Roman histories. What the Meditations shows is not a flawless ruler. It shows a man under enormous pressure trying, daily and often unsuccessfully, to be good. That is exactly what makes him usable.
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one." (Meditations, 10.16)
The misconception about Stoicism
The modern, lowercase use of "stoic" means bottling things up. Donald was emphatic in our conversation that the ancient Stoics would have rejected that outright. Modern psychology even uses "stoicism" as a label for unhealthy emotional suppression, which has muddied the word further. The ancient philosophy trained something else entirely: examining your emotions, understanding the judgements underneath them, and changing the judgements. That is why Stoicism became the direct ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy, a lineage covered well in this Guardian piece.
And Marcus's own writing is full of feeling. His word was philostorgia, the natural affection of family, and he treated it as a virtue to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be managed:
"All men are made for one another. Either instruct them, then, or put up with them."
A man commanding armies wrote that about the people he was fighting. Whatever Stoicism is, it is not coldness.
"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." (Meditations, 4.3)
Strength means self-mastery
The most striking story we discussed comes from the civil war. When the general Avidius Cassius rebelled, Marcus's own soldiers expected vengeance, and his enemies mocked him as a "philosophical old woman" for his restraint. He refused the bait. He planned to pardon Cassius, and when the rebellion collapsed he protected the conspirators' families instead of purging them.
Marcus's position, repeated across the Meditations, is that the angry man is the weak one. Rage is a loss of command over the only territory that is fully yours. The man who keeps his judgement while provoked is displaying more power than the man who lashes out, not less. Two thousand years before anyone coined the phrase "toxic masculinity", a Roman warrior-emperor had already made the argument against it. National Geographic has a good piece on his style of leadership.
Brotherhood, even in war
Stoicism is a social philosophy, which surprises people who came to it for personal resilience. The Stoics taught cosmopolitanism: all humans belong to one rational family, and justice and kindness are owed across the whole of it. Marcus held this position while literally at war:
"We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes."
"Adapt yourself to the life you have been given, and truly love the people with whom fate brings you together." (Meditations, 8.7)
He saw the tribesmen across the Danube as fellow humans rather than monsters, and the Meditations keeps returning to the duty owed even to difficult people. Especially to difficult people.
This is the part of Stoicism I lean on most as a father. The philosophy's promise is not that you stop feeling frustration with the people closest to you. It is that you get better at not handing the frustration the steering wheel. I do not always manage it. That is rather the point of a practice.
Two practices from Marcus Aurelius
Two exercises from our conversation that you can run today.
The view from above. Close your eyes and zoom out: above your street, your town, your country, the whole turning planet. Hold the image of your current problem at that scale. This was a real Stoic meditation, not a modern invention, and it does two things at once: shrinks the petty frustrations and makes the brotherhood point viscerally, because from up there the borders are invisible.
The pause. When anger arrives, do nothing for one breath. Ask whether the response you are about to give is aligned with the person you are trying to be, then choose. This is the whole of Marcus's strength-as-self-command idea compressed into a habit. It is also much harder than it reads.
More practices in the same vein are in The Marcus Aurelius Cheatsheet, free on this site.
Why he still matters
Eighteen centuries on, Marcus Aurelius remains the best evidence that Stoicism works under load. His philosophy fed directly into CBT, the most validated talking therapy we have (Harvard Health on the connection), his Meditations outsells most books written this year, and his most-quoted lines circulate because they were earned in a job that destroyed nearly everyone else who held it.
So, was Marcus Aurelius a good emperor? Yes. Flawed, pressured, and by his own account frequently falling short, and still the closest thing history offers to Plato's philosopher-king. The lesson he left is the one this episode circles: kindness held under pressure is the most expensive kind of strength there is.
"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury." (Meditations, 6.6)
Go deeper: watch my interview with Donald Robertson
The full conversation covers Marcus's life, his writings, and why Stoicism is so widely misread today.