In A.D. 175, a courier presented the emperor Marcus Aurelius with a letter from the Roman Senate. The news was not good: Marcus had been betrayed by the military commander Avidius Cassius, who had been hailed as emperor by the Egyptian legion in Alexandria. Marcus had recently been in poor health, and there were rumors—possibly spread by Cassius—that he was dead or dying. Now the frail and aging emperor had to prepare for war. As Donald Robertson writes, Marcus found himself “confronting one of the most serious crises of his reign.”
Though the story of Cassius' betrayal is known mostly to Roman-history buffs, the figure of Marcus Aurelius will be familiar to a great many. Emperor from 161 to 180, Marcus is remembered not merely for his long reign but for his practice of Stoicism—a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium around 300 B.C. Stoicism counsels its adherents not to place too much importance on things outside their control. Rather than fret about the frustrations of our daily lives, the Stoics advise, it is better to bring one's will in accord with nature and approach the present moment with composure.
It's a mind-set that comes in handy when a rebel army threatens your throne. Marcus' “Meditations,” essentially his personal journals, were largely written while he was on campaign amid various military engagements, and are today considered Stoic scripture. In “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” Mr. Robertson, a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, shows how Marcus' example can be of use to the rest of us. Marcus' worldview was not an idle intellectual exercise, he argues, but a form of wisdom forged by real-world experiences of friendship, loss and crisis.
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