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little book club or you can just

Ryan Holiday (2:09)

grab the online guide that we're doing. All that's@dailystoic.com meditations but that brings me to today's guest because in honor of Meditations Month, I wanted to talk about a new biography of Marcus Aurelius. A friend of mine sent me this review of Meditations in the Wall Street Journal. Let me read this little piece. It's William Stevens and his new biographies. Mr. Stevens writes with vigor and verve and he refrains from flaunting the expertise he clearly possesses. It's to his credit that in this book he faces head on the controversies surrounding Marcus's reign. But one senses his eagerness to resolve all questions in Marcus's favor and preserve the luster of the philosopher king. And this isn't true of all the biographies. Not everyone loves Marcus Aurelius. I don't know what's wrong with these people, but some people obviously take the critical read of Marcus or they just find him uninspiring or uninteresting. That is not at all true in this new bio of Marcus, which I really, really enjoyed. But I wanted to have William on the podcast. I wanted to do a deep dive into Meditations because he does have some, dare I say, heretical views. For instance, he proposes that Meditations is the wrong title for Meditations. William Stevens is a philosopher who specializes in Stoicism and ethics. He's taught Mark cerealis for over 30 years at Crichton University. He is now a professor emeritus there. He's written extensively on the Stokes. But you can just tell that he loves Marcus. He loves practical philosophy. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was just a bubbly, joyful, curious, open minded guy. I really appreciated this conversation. I thought it was great. Anyways, really interesting conversation. So interesting in fact that at the end of an hour I was like, hey man, I think we gotta do a round two of this. So we're gonna schedule around two that will go up very soon as well. But in the meantime, here's part one of the Deep Dive and I'd love to see you go even deep reading this book and joining us in our session on Marcus Aurelius and participate in this sort of Marcus Aurelius month that we are doing. You can grab that@dailystoic.com meditations you can grab Professor Stevens book Marc, philosopher King. You can also grab his biography, Mark A Guide for the Perplexed, his translation of Epictetus in Karidian, and his book Stoic Ethics. You can go to his website williamostephens.com that's Stevens with a ph. I really appreciated this conversation. I thought it was great and I think you'll like him and the book as well. As I said, don't forget to join us on April 27 for the meditations Month Q and A. Just head over to the Show Notes for that link or go to dailystoic.com Meditations.

Ryan Holiday (5:00)

Go to this idea, which I think is one of the main arguments of your book, which is that meditation shouldn't be called meditations. It should be called Memoranda. So walk me through the history of the title and why you think they got it wrong.

William Stevens (5:13)

Right. So most scholars today believe that Marcus did not write these notes with the intention of anyone else reading them. Some scholars have started to question that. Some scholars wonder why they were preserved if Marcus wasn't okay with others reading them and reproducing them. We don't know. But the copies of the Meditations, the earliest that we discovered, did not have any title appended to them. And so these reek notes were. They were collected together, and they were edited and translated into various languages. And so it was up to the translator. The translator who produced these editions over centuries, starting, what, in the 1400s, if I have that right, I could be off by a century or so. They were free to put whatever title they wanted to on it. How would you describe. If it had no title? Right. How would you describe these? Right, yeah. And different people appended different titles to the work. And some of. Sometimes some people just call them reflections. Others leaned into the Greek and said to myself, or to himself, sometimes it was called the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. Right. So what's going to be, you know, descriptively accurate to capture the content of these writings? Different people put different things on there. And so I'm not going to claim the memoranda as original. I'm following Gregory Hayes in his introduction. He says, you know, it would be more accurate to describe these as. As memories memoranda. And I thought about that, and I thought about reasons for calling it that, and I decided that that is a better title, because although Meditations became a very popular, even conventional title, it's worth remembering that it's our title that we're affixing to Marcus's writings. He did not call them Meditationes in Latin, Right? Yeah. And the themes of memory, how he's going to be remembered, the Stoic doctrines he needs to remember and apply to his life every day. Memory is a really persistent theme in all 12 books. Right. And so that's why I thought, you know, as a philosopher, when you say Meditations, unless you're a Stoic fanatic, unless you're a fan of Marcus, the first thing you think of is not this work, but Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. And so there was a tradition. I have a medievalist colleague at Creighton who was not persuaded. He said, no, Bill, you gotta call it Meditations. Because there's this long history, for centuries of the medievals following this tradition, right? This medieval tradition of calling it the Meditationes in which they titled their works Meditations. But again, they're not following Marcus. The title is not from him, it's from a later editor. And I think it's misleading because you have the connotation of Transcendental meditation. It's got this kind of Eastern vibe. It's a meditative work, navel gazing. This ain't what the emperor's doing here. Right. And so it really, the connotations really kind of deflect you. If you're not familiar with the work already, you're going to have different expectations. If you pick up a book called Marcus Aurelius the Meditations and you're looking for these meditative practices, that's not the kind of therapy that he's applying to himself here.

Ryan Holiday (9:17)

It's also interesting to sort of realize that, yeah, for potentially hundreds of years it didn't have a title like the, the later Romans weren't calling it Meditations.

William Stevens (9:27)

No, absolutely not. And that's why the relationship between the work and its title is much looser. Right. And that's why I don't, I don't think I've been an iconoclast by proposing a different title for it because he didn't give it one at all. And so this is just a kind of historical accretion. This is just a residue of centuries old decision that one editor made that several others thought, oh, okay, I'll call it that too. Oh, okay, I'll call it that too. But it's not a very deliberative way to come up with the title for a work just as shorthand. Right.

Ryan Holiday (10:07)

And when you're, when you're reading it, do you feel like this was the

William Stevens (10:10)

order he wrote it in or do

Ryan Holiday (10:13)

you feel the hand of an editor moving stuff around?

William Stevens (10:17)

That's really hard to answer. I mean, book one makes sense coming first. Why? Because it's basically equivalent to a modern day dedication. It's his list of acknowledgments. Right. Here are all of his family members, teachers, mentors who have had a formative influence on him. And he's expressing gratitude to all of. And he does a marvelous job of taking inventory of all the different character traits, positive character traits, life lessons in how to be in the world, how to respond to people, how to treat people, how to talk to people, how to dress, how to behave, how to speak, how to listen, how to be patient. All of these different virtues, dozens of them, that he ascribes to his formative influences. Right. And he thanks them and, and Gratitude to the gods, too. Right. So it really is a very dedicatory book. My view is that you can read the books in any damn order you want to. Start with 12, jump to 6, then go to 2, then go to 4, then go to 7. He was repeating the same themes over and over and over again. That's where it really does sort of feel like a journal. Right. He doesn't have dates corresponding to each of the entries because it doesn't matter. It's just whatever his thoughts are at the end of the day, when he's leading his campaign in the. In the forests of. You know, along the Danube, trying to keep the Roman Empire from being invaded by these displaced peoples. Right. I really don't know how heavily it was edited after book one at all. I don't see a real narrative arc from books 2 through 12, do you?

Ryan Holiday (12:11)

It does seem to end with him dying. You know, like those seem like his

William Stevens (12:16)

last words, the writing of it, or.

Ryan Holiday (12:18)

No, no, no. I mean. I mean, the last passage in. In meditation is.

William Stevens (12:21)

Oh, in 12.

Ryan Holiday (12:22)

Yeah. In book 12 is. Let me. It's because it's worth reading. It's so good. You've lived as a citizen in a great city, 505 years or a hundred, what's the difference? The laws make no distinction. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by nature, who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor. But I've only gotten through three acts. Yes, this will be a drama in three acts. The lengths fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace. The same grace shown to you. Either that was written as he lay dying, or he wrote it after a health scare and they moved it back towards the end when they knew how the story ended.

William Stevens (13:11)

Right. It's as good a place to end as any. But of course, he's talked about, you know, hurrying up and dying anyway. Pages earlier. Right.

Ryan Holiday (13:19)

That's what I mean. Right.

William Stevens (13:19)

I mean. But yeah. So he's talked about how to get his head on straight when it comes to death. Or for 11 books. Right. And death. And it's epic, Ted. The philosophy is very epictetan. Right. Death has change. Death has change. Birth is change. Teeth coming in has changed. Wrinkles are changed. Your hair falling, turning gray, falling out. It's changed. So there's birth, growth, maturation, decline, and death in everything and all plants, in all Animals and all human beings and all civilization. Sure. Every house, right. Every structure has a life, and it comes to an end. And, you know, that's nature recycling its bits, its parts and your parts of the whole. So his myriology, that's something I try to emphasize when I write about the memoranda, hearts and wholes. This is very, very stoic, right. See yourself as a part within the whole. What are the different wholes of which you play a part? And it gives you a holistic perspective, the view from above. Right.

Ryan Holiday (14:24)

Well, one of the things I think is so remarkable about meditations, and obviously you see it highlighted better in different translations. You know, the better the translator, the better he comes off. But I was reading last year, yeah, exactly a year ago, the estate of Joan Didion published this. This thing called Notes to John. And what they found after she had died is that she had written, after every one of her therapy sessions, she'd written a series of notes about what she just talked about with her therapist. She was struggling with some stuff with her daughter, who was drinking herself to death. She wrote these notes to her husband about what they talked about so he could. He could sort of help as a parent.

William Stevens (15:04)

And what you're.

Ryan Holiday (15:05)

You're reading this thing that Joan Didion never intended to publish, and you read some of these sentences and you go, she just cannot write poorly. Like, here she is scribbling some notes to herself not, you know, intended only for one other person's life.

William Stevens (15:19)

Eyes.

Ryan Holiday (15:20)

And you just see the Joan Didion, you know, bursting through.

William Stevens (15:24)

Right.

Ryan Holiday (15:25)

And there is something remarkable about meditations that it's. There's no other way to say this. It's so fucking well written that it almost defies belief that he could have written this. Not intending other people to look at it.

William Stevens (15:39)

Absolutely agree. And yet, if you read different translations, it's remarkable how the texture and the flavor, how different it is. Yeah. I've been participating in a stoic meetup for several years now, and it's a wonderful group. And sometimes there are only three of us there, and sometimes there are 15 or 20 of us there. We meet every other week. Right. And the decision was made when we decided to read the memoranda, or as they. As you persist in calling it. Despite my good arguments, Ryan, you still insist on referring to it as the meditation, even though that's a distortion. It's all right.

Ryan Holiday (16:19)

I'm dead. Naming meditations to borrow a modern.

William Stevens (16:23)

We could be neutral and just say his notebook or Marcus's notes. Right. The decision was made to use the Gregory Hayes translation. And I'm very familiar with the Haze because I taught it for years at Craig, and it's got a kind of poetry to it. And the introduction is good, and it's translated by a classicist, but he's not primarily a philosopher, so it's really more of a kind of literary. He likes to be rather telegrammatic. He likes to keep his Marcus short rather than a more expansive. What is he really saying with these few Greek words here? Yeah. So I was familiar with the Haze, but we would compare it with other translations, and I really started poking through the Greek more closely. Hays is not true to the Greek.

Ryan Holiday (17:17)

He really.

William Stevens (17:17)

Oh, no, don't tell me this. It's true. I know. I know you like the Hays translation, but we compared it to more recent translations. And the water field, also great. It's really good. He's got the great notes. He knows his Greek inside out. He knows the idioms in Greek. He knows how to present them in a graceful way. In readable English. Right. In smooth English. So the water field. Wonderful. One thing I have noticed. I don't know. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds with philology unless you want to. Sure. But the Farquharson is really favored by a number of scholars. I was a little surprised by that, because it's older. Yeah. But if you read the Farquharharson, it's got its own kind of literary poetry to it, too. And of all my ancient texts that I have, even including Plato, I have more different translations of this work than I have of any other. More than the Republic, more than the Symposium, other marvelous pieces of literature. Right. Because each decade, each few years, for centuries, different translators have taken a whack at rendering Marcus Greek into English or Italian or French. Right. Yeah. Or German. Right. And so there's so many different English translations that it's really neat to see how they've changed over decades and even over centuries. What.

Ryan Holiday (18:49)

It's much easier to compare, you know, book 536 and book 536 and book 536, because you're. You're able to put these little snippets side by side. So it also lends itself quite easily to be translated and retranslated. And, of course, illustrating that idea that nothing is really stable, everything is changing, everything is subjective, all of life is opinion. Ironically, the book itself becomes kind of an illustration of that idea.

William Stevens (19:22)

Yes. It just doesn't get old. Fresh translation to make certain. It really. It really changes how you See his thoughts, how you feel, the ideas that he's conveying, and it's good. It'll keep translators, you know, employed for a long, long time. Because in another, another 10, 20 years, there'll be maybe sooner than that. They'll be, in fact. Oh, my gosh. I was. I was asked to take a look at this book proposal where this guy was offering a new translation, but he wasn't translating the Greek. He was repackaging an earlier English translation, changing the English, making it fit what he wanted Varkas to say. Right, right. And I thought this was odd, right? I mean, because you're translating a translation. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you want to get as close to Marcus thoughts as you can, then take a course in ancient Greek, get yourself a big fat Greek to English lexicon and man up. Learn ancient Greek and then read it in Greek. But for many of us, you know, many of us want to be classicists such as myself, I'm a philosopher. I'm not. I'm not a classist who I can't pick up Herodotus or Thucydides and read it fluently, but I know enough philosophical Greek to puzzle through the sentences. And so we rely on translators. And that's understandable, right? Because reading Greek is hard. It takes a lot of hard work to learn how to read Greek. But reading Marcus in Greek, I'm sure it's a joy.

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Ryan Holiday (23:43)

So, moving on from the memoranda, there's a line in this book, Marcus Aurelius a great man or the greatest man? Because you say.

William Stevens (23:51)

I would say none of the above.

Ryan Holiday (23:53)

Yeah. You say Marcus is neither a villain nor a hero.

William Stevens (23:57)

Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for asking me this question, because I will confess that there was a review of my book written by two I respect in the Wall Street Journal.

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Ryan Holiday (24:09)

James Rome.

William Stevens (24:09)

He's a good guy. He's a good guy. He faults me for treating Marcus as a sage throughout my book. And in the last chapter, as you know, because you've read my book closely, I explicitly say that Marcus was not a sage. He was not a sage. Because there are no sages. Sure. Epictetus was not a sage. Seneca was not a sage. Marcus was not a sage. And he knew that he wasn't a sage. He was a good man. Yeah. Based on the historical record, my judgment is that he was a good man. Was he a great man? Well, he was maybe a good emperor, but he wasn't faultless in that regard because there were Christians who were brutally executed during his reign, not, not directly by him, but as a result of the policies that he inherited from Antoninus Pius and the actions of provincial governors who treated Christians who refused their religious faith, which was against the law. Right. They were enforcing Roman law. They were given chances to. Three chances, apparently, to say, no, I'm not a Christian. And if they refused to do that three times in a row and make a little sacrifice to the Emperor who was divine, and to the gods, then they would be executed and executed, sometimes in brutal, brutal fashion. And Marcus, you know, his other warts include, as we know from the memoranda, his admission that, you know, he was glad that he didn't take sexual advantage of a couple of his slaves.

Ryan Holiday (25:45)

Wow.

William Stevens (25:45)

Good job. Yeah, exactly. I mean, talk about no informed consent. Right?

Ryan Holiday (25:52)

The bar is on the floor.

William Stevens (25:53)

Right? Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, the big one he's faulted for is anointing Commodus to be his co. Emperor and successor. But there, I mean, he didn't have a crystal ball. He didn't know how bad Commodus was going to be. And it was the first chance to have a biological succession in several generations, because Hadrian didn't have a son and Antonis Pius did not have even his own biological son. So it had been quite a while before there could be succession from father to son, Emperor to emperor, and Thomas was, you know, his son, or at least his wife's son. What should he do? Depending on what you want to believe about the rumors. So, getting back to your question, he was a good man. He was sanctified for centuries by Christian writers. They embraced him as a proto Christian, even though he was a pagan and a polytheist. And above all, believed in Stoic theology. Right. Zeus as the active principle organizing the cosmos. He didn't know much about the Christians at the time. And the same happened with Epictetus. Right. St. Jerome thought Epictetus was just wonderful. And so they appropriated these pagan philosophers who expressed gratitude for the gods and following God's will, both Epictetus and Marcus. So they lent themselves to that kind of Christian tradition, even though they themselves were. Were pagans. And so he was sanctified and treated as a saint, but Marcus wasn't a saint. He had faults, he had a temper. You know, there were things that we could criticize about how he ruled, but he managed as well as he could through the plague and the wars and being separated from his wife and, you know, whether she was unfaithful or not, we don't know. And then the big blow for him was the revolt. Right. When Cassius tried to usurp the throne. Sure. And that didn't go too well for him. So if you can't even trust your generals. If you can't trust your most competent, successful general as someone you could hand pick to be your successor, who you gonna pick when you got a son right here.

Ryan Holiday (28:21)

That's a really interesting. I didn't think about it that way. Right there would have been a sort of a paranoia. Rightfully so. When, you know, they say it's not paranoia if people really are out to get you. There is a reason that he might have had to try to keep it within the family after something like Avidius Cassius.

William Stevens (28:38)

Exactly, exactly. His most trusted general. And this guy wielded the most military power. He was in charge of the entire Eastern Empire in terms of the military. And so he would have been a natural choice if he didn't decide to, you know, overthrow Marcus, allowing others to egg him on. Maybe through letters from Faustina, you know, Marcus's health is bad and my son is too young, and. And, you know, maybe she was worried that she and the young Commodus boy, Commodus would have been killed if somebody strong didn't, you know, take over from Marcus. And maybe he had a health scare. And so she encouraged Avidius Cassius to make his play. That was common in Roman history too. If you've got the military cojones to go for it, and you got thousands of troops that are going to carry your standards for you, you can declare yourself emperor, and then you duke it out on the battlefield, and whoever wins is in control.

Ryan Holiday (29:39)

It's interesting you were making this distinction between good and great. And I sometimes compare Marcus Aurelius, who I think is actually an underrated president, but someone like Jimmy Carter, where the greatness is the fact that given that the vast majority of the people who hold the job are not good, to be good and find yourself in the job and to remain good while you're in a job that we know absolutely is corruptive. That is a form of greatness.

William Stevens (30:12)

Yes, I agree with that. Absolutely. And Carter's humility, Right. He was a wise man, but he was humane. He recognized, he appreciated people's strengths and weaknesses. And it's Marcus's humanity that I really try to bring out in the book. You do. He knows his own weaknesses. He knows his own frailties, and he sees them in other people, and yet he recognizes his kinship with them. He's not some sort of demigod above them. He didn't believe he was a God. That was more kind of political trapping, I think, for Marcus. But their understanding of the divine in ours is. It's really a Different world, right? This notion of the pax de orum, peace with the gods, and you give these sacrifices to keep them happy. And this sort of thing, this is not acute philosophical metaphysics and theology here. But Marcus was comfortable moving in that kind of popular religious sphere because he recognized that that was meaningful to his subjects. And he's got to, you know, keep people living together. Sure, it's Rome. So it's not like, you know, he's a peace monger. Yes, he's going to defend the empire. He's going to defend it. It is an empire. And so that's his responsibility, too. But, yeah, like you said, he resisted the ubiquitous corrupting forces, all the different sycophants who were trying to poison him into thinking he's a God. He's got all this power. He can make the world any way he wants to. Marcus recognized his limitations because he ran up against them again and again every day he was ruling.

Ryan Holiday (31:56)

Although it also might be worth considering, or sometimes I think, like, you know, Carter was a good man and perhaps that goodness hampered him a little bit as a president. You could argue, you know, with Truman, maybe with Grant also, where the decency, the loyalty, assuming the best about the people around you sometimes that as a personality style, isn't always well suited to the ruthlessness or the binary nature of being a head of state. Like, obviously, at some level, Marcus Aurelius needed to cut ties with Commodus, or perhaps sharing power with his loser stepbrother, while a magnificent gesture, wasn't necessarily the best move. So there is something interesting, I think, about this idea of the test case of the Philosopher King. Maybe philosophers aren't always so well suited to power.

William Stevens (32:58)

It's a question of whether the cynicism helps or hurts. Yeah, right. I mean, the Marcus passage, of course, is, you know, when he's wrestling and his opponent jabs him in the eye. Right. That's against the rules. And so Marcus says, okay, now how am I going to respond? He says, distance. You don't get angry, you don't hate the guy for in the heat of the moment, in the competition, jabbing you in the eye or pulling your hair. But if he bites you, well, come on, then. You want to keep your distance from people like that. So how does a humane president deal with ruthless people? Yes, that's a tough question. Because you don't want to become like your enemy. And another Marcus passage. Right, sure. Don't become like your enemy. Why is he your enemy? Because you and he have different values. You have different judgments about what's good. Right. And if ruthlessness is bad and mercy is good, then don't let yourself become ruthless. That doesn't mean being naive. It doesn't mean being a patsy. Right. How do you remain strong and open to diplomacy? Yeah.

Ryan Holiday (34:11)

I think it's interesting that the first thing that Athenodorus and Arius Didymus, the two Stoic teachers of Octavian, tell him to do is to murder Caesarion. Your use of the word ruthlessness. There is. Is. Is interesting because. Yeah, there is a certain. A certain amount of that perhaps required or, you know, certainly required in a ruthless world like Rome. And, you know, maybe the Stoics just weren't cut out for that and that that itself was a virtue. I mean, you know, Cato was a pretty mediocre politician himself.

William Stevens (34:44)

Yes. But think about, again, with Marcus's biography. Think about how he treated his fallen enemies. He would not have executed Avidius Cassius if he captured him. He would have just exiled it. He exiled his political enemies. He did not execute them when he could have. Right. They showed him, according to the report from the story Augusta. Right. They showed Marcus the severed head of Avidius Cassius. He said, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that. Right. The guy's already lost. He made a bad decision. Because remember the Stoic doctrine, people do bad things believing that it's good and right for them to do it at the time. It's the Socratic Platonic dictum. To know the good is, you know, to seek it. Everyone seeks the apparent good. So all moral failing is a result of ignorance. It's a kind of moral blindness. You don't punish a blind person for being blind. Right, Right. And so when you defeat an enemy, you can still treat them with dignity, strength, not ruthlessness.

Ryan Holiday (35:57)

Yes.

William Stevens (35:58)

Justice, but fairness, too. Right. You don't have to go for the. The most hurtful punishment. Right. Prison. Okay. Instead of execution. And Rome was a brutal place, and corporal punishment was par for the course. Absolutely. But Marcus, he had them put buttons on the swords so that the gladiators would not always suffer the most grievous mortal wounds. Right. Because they didn't have the National Football League and they didn't have soccer and college football. They didn't have, you know, the kind of more benign, less violent sports that we enjoy today.

Ryan Holiday (36:41)

I feel like we. We are just getting started. Would you. Would you be open to doing a round two on this? I. I feel like I got a million more questions about this book.

William Stevens (36:50)

Yeah, yeah.

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