Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ The Low Road Will Always Dog You | Why Marcus Aurelius Didn’t Become Nero About this episode Whenever someone does something to us—minor or major—we always have this choice.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Maria Semple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Sa0BpdHf8 onApple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-5-step-stoic-routine-for-clear-thinking-maria-semple/id1430315931?i=1000761761546,Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2IZH3QT6jXDP17nvSp4B2i, or watch it onYouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Sa0BpdHf8
📚 Books Mentioned:
Go Gentle by Maria Semple https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/go-gentle?_pos=1&_sid=162aa43b9&_ss=r | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/go-gentle?_pos=1&_sid=162aa43b9&_ss=r
Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King by William Stephens https://www.amazon.com/Marcus-Aurelius-Philosopher-King-Great-Ancient/dp/1836391161
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Listen to the full episode with Maria Semple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Sa0BpdHf8 onApple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-5-step-stoic-routine-for-clear-thinking-maria-semple/id1430315931?i=1000761761546,Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2IZH3QT6jXDP17nvSp4B2i, or watch it onYouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Sa0BpdHf8
Check out more of William Stephens’ work at https://WilliamOStephens.com/ https://williamostephens.com/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
0:15 Ryan Holiday? The low road will always dog you. That passage from Marcus Aurelius about how the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. Do you know what he was actually talking about specifically? It wasn't overcoming an injury, or a layoff, or financial collapse. It wasn't about a reversal on the battlefield. It was talking about difficult people. He was saying that frustrating, infuriating, thoughtless people, they are opportunities. When someone is a jerk to you, it's an opportunity to practice virtue and how you respond, and not being a jerk back, by forgiving them, by standing up for yourself, by empathizing with what they're going through. Of course, when someone is being difficult,
0:59 Ryan Holiday? you're tempted to give it right back. You're tempted to go, oh, this is how we're behaving these days. This is what passes for acceptable behavior. But you shouldn't. On a recent episode of the podcast, we were talking with the novelist Maria Semple, who has this amazing book called Go Gentle, which is about a Stoic philosopher. She's signed a bunch of copies. We have them in the painted porch. It was an Oprah Book Club pick. One of the things she shared was a reminder that she relies on when she's dealing with difficult people. Let me play it for you real fast.
1:33 Speaker 01 A quote that I think I made up, that's one of my favorite quotes, is "the low road will always dog you." Like, that basically, the high road, you can go to sleep feeling good about yourself. The low road, you might, 10 years from now, be like, walking down the street and going, why did I have to be like, cutting to that person in that situation for no reason? And so I think just on a practical level, it makes sense to just be virtuous and be the person you want to be, because then it's like not clogging up your brain with like regret and, okay, who's the person I want to be?
2:05 Ryan Holiday? Marcus realist actually reminds himself of this in meditations. In addition to that famous passage, he says, the best revenge is to not be like that. He was saying that he had no choice about what was done to him, that somebody else took the low road, but he could choose how he responded. He could choose to take the high road. He could choose not to be consumed by anger or a desire. He could choose not to be implicated in their ugliness. That's how he opens that famous passage in book two. He could choose to be the person that he wanted to be. Whenever someone does something to us, minor or major, we always have this choice. We can decide not to be like the people who did us wrong.
2:47 Ryan Holiday? We can choose the high road and we should, because the low road always dogs you.
3:05 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm reading this historical fiction right now about Nero. You know, sort of why did Nero turn out the way that he did? I haven't read enough of it yet that I want to recommend it or not recommend it. So I'll just say it's, it's interesting, like what a cautionary tale Nero is. And, and it's true, like, you know, he doesn't have a father. He has this overpowering mother and he knows that he's sort of exempt from the rules, that he's, you know, different, special, has all these privileges. Like, of course it wasn't going to turn out well. Like, we can say that. We look at Nero's, the facts of Nero's life, even with Seneca's influence. We're like, yeah, it was always going to go this way. That's what makes Marcus realist so remarkable, right?
3:46 Ryan Holiday? Like, it doesn't go well for Seneca, doesn't go well for Commodus, Marcus realist's son. Why is it different for Marcus? That, to me, is the ultimate question, right? Marcus does not become a Nero, despite being born into privilege, being marked for power at a young age, being surrounded by status and ambition and flattery and all the temptations that, that deform and derange someone, right? That would stain them purple, as Marcus says in meditations. Somehow he gets the power and it doesn't break him. Weirdly, it makes him better. And I wanted to talk to someone who might be able to help us answer what happened there. William O. Stevens is a philosopher, a professor, emeritus of philosophy at Crichton University, and he's one of the leading scholars on Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus
4:30 Ryan Holiday? and Stoic ethics. And he's written this great new biography of Marcus Aurelius. It's called Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher King. And so in today's episode, which is going to be a short one, I asked him about Marcus's boyhood, the death of his father, what Hadrian might have seen in him, you know, how dangerous it can be for a young person to tell them or for them to believe they're destined for greatness, how not to be corrupted by those expectations, and, you know, this remarkable life that's shaped by philosophy. You can grab copies of William's latest book, Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher King, anywhere books are sold, and you can learn more about his work at williamostephens.com. And if you
5:11 Ryan Holiday? want to do a deep dive into meditations, we have a great guide on that as well. I'll link to that in the show notes.
5:19 Ryan Holiday? I thought we could talk about Marcus's boyhood, which I find fascinating, right? Because on paper, and we have so many stories and myths about this. In fact, it's kind of every, it's every parent's nightmare. Like, when you raise a kid amongst privilege and an expectation of power or success or wealth or access, like, more often than not, it goes terribly wrong. Certainly, it goes wrong in, say, Nero's case or Prince Andrew's case. How does it go right in Marcus's case?
5:56 Speaker 02 It's easy to speculate and hard to be confident about how one speculates. So let's contrast Marcus's boyhood with that of, say, Commodus, right? So the thing that jumps out to me about Marcus, of course, is that his biological father died when he was quite young. And that didn't make him an orphan, because, you know, he still had his mother. But in Roman society, just as in all of antiquity, and down through today, although less so today, you're dealing with patriarchy, right? So the death of a father is going to be a huge blow for any Roman boy.
6:37 Speaker 02 And including and perhaps especially so for a privileged young boy as Marcus was, right? Because his family is elite and they're, and they're, they're optimists, right? They're, they're aristocrats. So it's tempting. I mean, I'm tempted to read back Marcus's, let's just be clear and call it obsession with death. Right? I mean, as a Stoic, you know, the memento mori, he lived it.
7:05 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
7:06 Speaker 02 I mean, he faced so much death in his life and it started with his dad. His father died and you know, he might've been six, seven, eight years old. He might've been, you know, 10 or 12 or 14, but, but he wasn't any older than that. Right? So historians aren't exactly sure when, and in the Roman world that he inhabited, you know, death came easy. You know, they did not, they did not have medicine. They, they had plagues. They had plenty of quacks that, you know, practiced anything, but what we would call medicine. And sometimes patients would recover despite it. And they did learn things from the Greek physicians, but it was really Galen who made
7:49 Speaker 02 the major strides. And Marcus was very fortunate to have someone like Galen, who was quite a coward, apparently, when it came to facing the plague, but was a brilliant philosopher and scientist with his anatomical dissections and what he learned about the human body. And so that came later, you know, Galen entered Marcus's life when he was an adult. But I mean, that only takes you so far.
8:14 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
8:15 Speaker 02 I think, you know, a lot of it is just gonna be, is just gonna be luck, you know, or, or genetics or something, right? He, for whatever reason, he was a very serious young boy and he took philosophy. He really was drawn to reflection. He was a meditative sort of guy, right? From an early age. And he was impressed by, by the austere. Model of philosophers and and Stoics in particular.
8:49 Ryan Holiday? Do you think that's what Hadrian saw in him?
8:52 Speaker 02 Or? Yeah.
8:54 Ryan Holiday? It does seem remarkable, though, perhaps in the way that a really good scout can see potential in an extremely young athlete. But but to be able to spot, because their relationship begins, you know, right around that time, to be able to spot that effectively 40 years in the future, this guy would be a good emperor is a pretty remarkable bit of talent scouting.
9:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Hadrian was savvy in that regard. And, you know, lining up the succession with Antoninus Pius adopting Marcus and Lucius Ferris. Yeah. And so, I mean, it just seems like it's fairly safe to suppose that Marcus did stand out to Hadrian in that respect. And that other boys Marcus's age just weren't as serious, just weren't quite as studious, weren't really quite as serious about taking their duties, even as children, really very seriously. And Marcus did. He was he was precocious. He was bookish. And he recognized his responsibilities and took them very seriously from an early age.
10:03 Speaker 02 And and Hadrian saw that, and that's what distinguished him. And fortunately for us, you know, that worked out. And fortunately for the Romans under Marcus, that that worked out his subjects, that worked out pretty well.
10:17 Ryan Holiday? It's sort of like the the law of thermodynamics or whatever, where it's when you try to measure it, it screws up what you're trying to measure it. I'm probably butchering this this analogy here, but it does strike me, though, that the second you identify the potential in someone like that, and then you anoint them or you begin the process by which you're being groomed for power, it could very well swamp all that potential. Like, the second you tell a 15 year old or a 20 year old or quite frankly, a 50 year old who's who's been preparing for this moment their whole life. That they're about to become head of state or that they are they are a shoo-in to be head of state. We know what this does to to a person. I think it really does.
11:02 Ryan Holiday? Give you a sense of of what kind of character that you're dealing with that that he could have been put on this path so young. And it doesn't. It doesn't seem to have corrupted or messed with his compass. If anything, it confirmed it.
11:17 Speaker 02 Right. And this is the point I made last time when we spoke. And the conceit of the book, Marcus was drawn to philosophy. That's what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a philosopher. He was called upon to be an emperor. He did not seek political power. He didn't want it. He understood Plato better than we do in the Republic when Socrates says. Philosophers don't rule because they want to. They rule because they need to. Because you need a wise ruler who's dedicated to justice. Not wealth, not power. And Marcus is growing up in a world that's all about power.
12:00 Speaker 02 And and yes, there's philosophy, but you know, that's for the nerds. Right. That's that's for, you know, the bookish types. That's for the long beards, right? Roman movers and shakers, you know, with their military training and the curses on Norm, right? All the different offices. I mean, they learn how to administrate and they learn how to command men. And they learn how to project power and gravitas, right? And for Marcus, you know, he saw through that to the extent that what he was drawn to. As a philosopher in a literal sense is wisdom. He was a lover of wisdom. But he recognized his responsibilities. He was tapped.
12:45 Speaker 02 He was called, right? That was his calling.
12:48 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
12:49 Speaker 02 Or rather, he was called upon, rather, right? He was called upon by Hadrian. But his own, you know, vocation, his own personal spiritual calling, was to do philosophy and read literature. And he was an intellectual, but that wasn't in the cards for him. That wasn't what was fated for him. And he recognized that. And so, you know, he didn't celebrate being an emperor. He tried to be the best one that he could. And he recognized, and he knew his history too, his immediate Roman history.
13:20 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
13:21 Speaker 02 He wanted to be a benevolent despot, not, not a maniac.
13:25 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
13:26 Speaker 02 Not a megalomaniac, not a bloodthirsty monster. He didn't want to be a Caligula or Nero, right?
13:32 Ryan Holiday? And we do sort of have to grade him on a curve in that respect, right? Like, you can't, you can't judge him against FDR, Abraham Lincoln, or Theodore Roosevelt. You have to judge him against Caligula or Nero, or, or basically anyone that's ever had effectively unlimited power. I mean, there are almost no examples, not just of those people being good people. But I mean, you see this right now in, in authoritarian countries. It's not just that-
14:00 Speaker 02 Like ours, you mean?
14:01 Ryan Holiday? Yes, exactly. I mean, it's not just that it can draw the worst out of you. It can make you really bad at the job. Like, what's interesting is, there's a famous story. I mean, Hadrian's a-
14:15 Speaker 02 A cautionary tale in this regard.
14:17 Ryan Holiday? He's arguing with, with one of his philosophers about some issue. And I'm forgetting the philosopher's name. But at some point, the philosopher concedes the issue. And the friends go to him and say, you know, why did you do that? You were right, Hadrian was wrong. And he said, I think you forget the man who controls 50 legions is always correct. Right? And-
14:37 Speaker 02 Right.
14:38 Ryan Holiday? There's something about not just having absolute power when you're the head of state, but even being marked for power, like being the kid going places. I imagine that Marcus wasn't always, as a young man, from this moment forward, getting accurate in- Information, constructive feedback, real time information that he could use was increasingly rare. And so, so for him to not just be a good person as, as an emperor is, I think, something you have to give him credit for. Even for being a good writer, you have to give him some credit because I'm sure everyone told Nero, he was a incredibly talented poet,
15:19 Ryan Holiday? right? Like, like you're not getting real feedback. So, so to be even a half competent, benevolent, despot is something you have to acknowledge there as, as an incredible feat, and certainly the exception that proves the rule.
15:33 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly. And Marcus was clearly very observant. I mean, he, he learned from his tutors and teachers, but he also learned from his other male role models. He learned from Antoninus Pius and, and just delivers this extended glowing and comium about how, you know, aptly named Pius in Latin, the core meaning there isn't piety, it's dutifulness. So, I mean, Antoninus, the dutiful, right? That, that's what Antoninus Pius means, right?
16:10 Speaker 02 And so, so the impression that, that Antoninus made on Marcus was you have millions of people who you're responsible for and to. And, and it's not like our democratic scheme, as you were saying before, it's not like that at all. And yet, there is this kind of pater familias, you know, the grandfather is responsible for all generations after him. And so, to be king is to be a father to everyone. And they don't get to vote. Your word is law. And then this is also wrapped up, of course, with Roman religion, because the emperors are considered
16:55 Speaker 02 to be gods.
16:57 Ryan Holiday? I mean, he has the same title as the modern day pope, right? Like he, he had the pontifex maximus, like he, he is also the pope.
17:07 Speaker 02 Well, exactly. And so when it comes to orthopraxy, when it comes to the rituals and the ceremonial practices in the religious festivals that the Romans practiced, they would sacrifice to the emperor, right? They were deaves. They were divinities. So it's even more exalted than that of our pope today.
17:28 Ryan Holiday? Right.
17:29 Speaker 02 Right? So yes, he's the head of the church. Yes. But in addition to that, he's got this aura. He's got this divine glow and people sacrifice to him as a god. And so, I mean, as you're saying, I mean, I think it's exactly right. Everyone around you as a sycophant, they're not going to tell you tough love things that might offend you because they've seen what happens when you become, you know, the most powerful person in the empire. And it's just all too easy to be merciless and violent and punitive against people and ruin their lives or punish them corporately or kill them and execute them.
18:13 Speaker 02 And so for Marcus to avoid all of that, as we read the Memoranda, which I will still call it, you know, clearly, there's a lot of humility there. There's remarkable modesty. There's self-knowledge. He's aware of his own weaknesses and shortcomings and he writes them down, right? He's got a temper and he knows that that's a big problem. For anyone in a position of power to have a short temper, that's an inch away from disaster and a bloodbath, right? And so he recognizes he's got to work hard at trying to be a good person because he's not going to be a good emperor unless he's a good person.
18:56 Ryan Holiday? There's a famous statue, I don't know if you've seen it, of Seneca and Nero. It's by a French sculptor. The body language, I just find endlessly fascinating, you know, sort of Seneca is there teaching, he has his scroll laid out and Nero sort of hunched over like a petulant teenager, just sort of not interested in this at all.
19:15 Speaker 02 Cringey, yes. Yes.
19:17 Ryan Holiday? Obviously, we don't have a corresponding Marcus Aurelius statue, but you do get the sense, both in practice and in the acknowledgements in Meditations or Memoranda, that he had a very different relationship with those teachers at that same age. And in fact, all the way through to the end of his life, he remained an eager student.
19:38 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. And that's why Book One of the Memoranda is so special.
19:43 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
19:44 Speaker 02 Because it's a dedication to all of those people who modeled a wide range of virtues to him. And he identifies them. He's taking inventory on all the positive character traits, all the strengths, all the virtues, all the excellences that his tutors and teachers and friends and relatives and parents modeled for him. And he's thanking them and the gods for putting him in this position to absorb all that like a sponge, because he needs it. And Rome needs him to be the best that he can be.
20:24 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
20:24 Speaker 02 Right? You mentioned the statue, and so we don't have a kind of pensive pose statue of Marcus. What we have is the equestrian statue and other busts, right? Well, you know, one when he's a child that I have in my earlier book on Marcus Aurelius, The Guide for the Perplexed, which is really fascinating to look at closely and analyze. But the big one, of course, is the equestrian statue. And in Marcus's time, he wasn't thought of primarily as a philosopher at all.
20:56 Ryan Holiday? Right.
20:56 Speaker 02 He was a warrior. He was a general. He was leading campaigns for years and years and years. And he was in the saddle. And that's the equestrian. So that's what we see in the equestrian statue. And that's what most Romans saw when they saw Marcus, right? Because they didn't see Meditations. They didn't know that it existed. His reputation as a philosopher would have been perhaps because they saw him with his books in the Colosseum.
21:26 Ryan Holiday? Or something, or because there's a handful of little anecdotes here or there about him being a studious person. But yeah, they wouldn't have had any access.
21:35 Speaker 02 They'd see him on the coinage.
21:35 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
21:35 Speaker 02 They'd see him on the coins. That's the Marcus they knew. They'd see him in the busts. They'd see the busts, right?
21:41 Ryan Holiday? Right.
21:42 Speaker 02 That would be made every few years as he aged. We can track that, right?
21:46 Ryan Holiday? Right.
21:47 Speaker 02 I mean, he was a closet philosopher, right? It was. It was a secret. And he was doing it privately, even in the letters he'd exchanged with Cornelius Frato. You know, they're talking about their illnesses and their aches and their pains endlessly, over and over and again in their correspondence. But Frato was a rhetorician. He wasn't a philosopher. You know, we don't have like Seneca's letters, right? We don't have Seneca writing, you know, to Lucilius. In Marcus's case, we don't have any of those texts. We just have the Frato correspondence. But yeah, during his lifetime, he didn't have time to write philosophical tracts. Seneca was in a much better position
22:32 Speaker 02 than he was. And Epictetus, like Socrates, wasn't writing philosophy at all, so far as we can tell, right? It's Arian who took down Epictetus's discourses. So Marcus didn't have time to write treatises.
22:44 Ryan Holiday? Well, it is interesting with Marcus, we so often go to that idea from Plato about being the philosopher king. But when I think of Marcus, and I thought about this when I was reading your book, there's the line from Musonius Rufus, who said that, you know, every king should be a philosopher, but every philosopher should be a kingly person. And I think that that's the interesting idea there, that it sort of works in two directions, that it's about having the ideas, and then it's about having the character. And also, as you said, the presence, the gravitas, the seriousness, the ability to lead and the authority to lead, that we seem to think like, oh, we just like our leaders to be a bit more philosophical. But we'd also, I think, be better off if our philosophers
23:29 Ryan Holiday? had a bit more of that sort of practical seriousness and sense of duty and responsibility.
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