Inside the Final Years of Marcus Aurelius

By the final years of his life, Marcus Aurelius had lost nearly everyone he loved, endured years of war, and watched the Antonine Plague devastate the empire. In today’s episode, Professor William O. Stephens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3h-VhQPvY joins Ryan to examine how Marcus faced the end of his life, why Meditations https://store.dailystoic.com/collections/leather/products/meditations-marcus-aurelius-premium-leather-edition-gregory-hays-translationmay have been his swan song, the loneliness of being emperor, and what kept him getting out of bed when he had every reason to give up. 👉 WATCH ON YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3h-VhQPvY | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3h-VhQPvY William O. Stephens is a philosopher specializing in Stoicism, ethics, and ancient philosophy. He earned his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania and spent over 30 years teaching at Creighton University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. His work spans topics like friendship, ecology, and human nature, with a focus on Stoic thought. His latest book is Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King (2025), and he is also the author of Marcus Aurelius: A Guide for the Perplexed, Epictetus’s Encheiridion: A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics, and Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom. Check out more of William Stephens’ work at https://WilliamOStephens.com/ https://williamostephens.com/ 📚 Grab a copy of Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King by William Stephens https://us.amazon.com/Marcus-Aurelius-Philosopher-King-Great-Ancient-ebook/dp/B0FCS6PRG6/ref=sr_1_1?_encoding=UTF8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. ReHsbjtr2Q3jO1k0Cc_kjkx1hpHTgcaC6iEsMQs3ocoAaK_zaDXWIoXu2dXs2USEFIcu0FluRLdw0KUIrl46bcAd-YeswoCMxRWY3tRdW_4.ehAz6Sppwh3vW5AY9EIj1xYxd8nVAghwOPyQmDbvRnE&dib_tag=se&keywords=B001IZV80W&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1788381239&s=digital-text&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&sr=1-1 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan 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.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, Marx really spent most of his life thinking about death. And I don't just mean in some abstract philosophical way. I mean, he lived with it. His father died when he was young. Several of his children died when he was young. His brother, his co-emperor Lucius Verus died. His wife died. He lived through plague. He lived through war. He lived through an amount of death that most of us can't even imagine. I was just in Rome and you could see Hadrian's tomb, right? He sees where he's going to be put when his time is through. Hadrian is buried there.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's an enormous mausoleum. Antoninus is buried there, too. And so, death is not this abstraction for Marcus. It's where he's going next. And that's actually what I'm going to talk about in today's episode with today's guest. Professor William O. Stevens is a professor. He's actually a professor emeritus of philosophy at Creighton University and is the author of this great new biography, Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher King. I've been raving about it. I've had him on. We've done a number of short episodes. We dived into a handful of topics with him. And in this episode, we talked about not the beginning, not the middle of Marcus's life, but the end. We talked about some of his health problems.

• 1:45Ryan Holiday?

  We talked about the Antonine Plague. And then the possibility that meditations, or as William prefers to call them, the Memoranda, were written in those final years of Marcus's life. Maybe even the last entry is the last thing that he ever wrote. And so today's conversation is a conversation about death, but ultimately about life as well, about endurance, about perseverance, about a man who had every reason to not keep going, but did anyway and tried to be good in the brief amount of time he was here. You can watch the full interview of this on the Daily Stoic Podcast YouTube channel, which I will link to this in today's show notes. It's a great interview and he was just a delight to talk to. And I think you're going to find him delightful to listen to and watch.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  Tell me about Marcus Aurelius at the end.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  So it does seem like, you know, he, his health was, it was precarious throughout really all of his life. He had digestive issues. He had respiratory issues. Galen was treating him with this weird compound known as theriak that had morphine in it. One scholar thinks that Marcus became addicted to this and he had difficulty sleeping. And so, you know, viper flesh and all sorts of weird ingredients would be mixed in with this morphine to produce this theriak with dozens or even hundreds of ingredients, bizarre stuff.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And Galen would dose this to Marcus to help him sleep. But, you know, then he would doze off during the day sometimes. So, so he had trouble getting the sweet spot with his physician's treatments. And of course, you know, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million died over the course of the Antonine Plague. And Marcus might have died from that himself. It seems that that's likely to be what caused Faustina's death. It seems even more likely that that's what caused the death of Lucius Verus at a young age.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  It maybe was just a matter of time before it caught up with Marcus.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  Especially because he doesn't live in quarantine or isolation as he perhaps could have. He seems to have not run away from the plague.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Right. And the very notion of quarantining was not an accepted widespread practice anyway. So people were ascribing this to a failure of the Pax De Orum, the peace with the gods. The gods are angry. They're afflicting us with plague. We need to introduce foreign practices, religious practices, to try to appease the gods again. Oh yeah, let's, let's persecute these Christians. They're not toeing the line. They're not making the practices of Roman religion. So they're the ones who are angering the gods. The Christians are atheists because they don't believe in the Roman pantheon.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Which is always very welcoming and so forth. So, and I think, you know, scholars agree that it's likely that Marcus started writing his notes, his journal, the last few years of his life, when he was campaigning along the Danube, right? We have textual evidence that he's on the River Grande in Book Two, right? And so I think, you know, this is Marcus's, it can be seen as a kind of swan song, right? He doesn't know how much longer he's going to live, given the health challenges that he's had, the difficulties that he's had. And so one idea that I've been kicking around is, I mean, we don't have evidence that Marcus intended anyone else to read these notes, but we do have them. So why did they survive?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  How did they survive? And if it's the case that he was only writing the notes for himself to read, before he died, he could have destroyed the notes or he could have instructed that those who survived him destroyed the notes. And we have no evidence that he did that.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  That suggests to me that Marcus was okay with the idea of other people reading these notes after he was dead. And then they were copied and they were copied and they were copied over and over and over again. And they survived to be handed down to us. And so I really think that, you know, Marcus expresses at times a real world weariness in the Memoranda. He said, enough with this monkey life, right? I've lived long enough. There, there's some dark moments.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  The last passage does also, we talked about this, but it does feel like a man wrapping things up, coming face to face with the end.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  You know, he's got his affairs in order. He's made Commodus co-emperor. They've celebrated triumphs together, you know, after some successful battles along the Danube. And, you know, he, 59, he makes it almost to age, like a month short of 59, right? And so he's not dying as a young man by the standards of antiquity.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  But with the plague and his health problems, yeah, that was it. And his wife has already died, right? I mean, all those kids died. His wife is gone. Lucius Verus is gone. Avidius Cassius betrays him, tries to usurp the throne. And then there's his son, Commodus, right? I mean, he must have just cherished the guy, right? He just doesn't. That and, that and a few daughters, a couple of daughters. That's all he's got. That's all he's got left.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, death has followed him his whole life. He's never been far from it. And then, yeah, you put in the plague too. I mean, he must have seen just, I think Donald Robertson writes about this very vividly in, in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Like Rome would have smelled of burning bodies.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Well, and he talks about a hand severed from the body, hand severed from the arm, right?

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  From war as well, yes.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  He, he saw that. Surely he saw that on the battlefield. He saw limbs hacked off, right? There's nothing tidy about a battlefield after the battle is won. The carrion, the odor, yeah. And the lack of sanitation. It's astounding that the Romans, who were such fabulous engineers, building the aqueducts, the roads and the sewers, they had a sewer system. It wasn't designed for human waste at all.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  It was designed to handle the flooding of the Tiber and floodwaters.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And, and, and ordinary Romans had no access to the clean water of fountains. These were ornamental for only the wealthiest people who paid their, their water tax. So clean water wasn't something that average Romans had. So yeah, things, things took a bad turn when Marcus died.

• 8:52Ryan Holiday?

  You get the sense, yeah, that, that death was a kind of a relief for him, that he wasn't, you know, sometimes you talk to someone who's, um, who's in their nineties or whatever. And you're like, you know, you're fond of them. So you want them to live forever. And they're just like, I'm ready. I don't, I don't need that, you know? And sometimes that can shock you when you talk to like grandparents and they're, they're just, they don't cling to life the way that we do. And I think you can pick that up in Marcus, both philosophically, but I suspect part of it is just practically, he's just, all his friends are gone, all his loved ones are gone. Life has really kicked the shit out of him. And I mean, he's still standing, he's still standing, but, but you know, he's a, you know,

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  he's a, he's, you said world weariness. I think that's a good, good capsulation of how he probably felt.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was never hale and hearty.

• 9:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  He was never hale and hearty. So yeah, he's still got, and friends. And then, and let's quickly analyze that concept. What is it to have friends as a Roman emperor?

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure. It was lonely. It was a lonely life.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Like, hey, hey, hey, you know, general so and so, come sit next to me. Again, again, kind of like the, the gladiator scene, right?

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  You know, let's sit next to, let's talk as men, you know, pretend that I'm not the emperor. Pretend that you're not my general, that you'll do whatever I command you to do, because that's your job, right? And you can't say no to me. Let's just take off those hats and, and crack open a beer and pretend that we're just shooting the breeze and we can be candid with each other. Marcus, there, there's no such person in Marcus's life. You can't have a friend when you're emperor.

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  Everyone is your son.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  You're gonna kill your entire family. He, his brother is gone, you know, all but one of his sons have died. Who, who, who's gonna be there to, to, to be candid with him and say, this is what you're doing wrong, Marcus? This was a bad decision, you know? Are you really sure about Commodus? Let's rethink this. And who's gonna be in a position who, that he's the emperor?

• 10:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you know, now that you bring this up, I, I'm thinking of a scene in Meditations where he's, he talks about how it doesn't matter how good a life he's lived. I mean, he says, you know, you, but he means himself, you know? He's like, there's gonna be people crowded around your deathbed, like excited that you're dying. You know, like, like

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  And, and that, that must've been at some level, his sense of it, that like, all these people are, you know, you have the people in Commodus's camp and they're ready, now this is their moment. You have the enemies that he's made, you know, just nobody is, um, you, you got no friends? And probably by this point, Fronto is dead and Rusticus is dead and all of his teachers are dead.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. They're all gone. They're all gone. And, and, and what, what does he have to look forward to? More years of warfare.

• 11:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  More battles, more, more treaties that are gonna get broken, right? Maybe there'll be another, another coup. Who's gonna be the next of Avidius Cassius to try to take over the throne? Right? So I mean, yeah, he was very tired. He was, the plague, dealing with the plague exhausted him. Dealing with year after year of warfare and conflict and uprising, that sort of thing. I mean, believe me, the Christians were the least of his problems and they weren't even a problem. They'd go for years at a time before there would be a little, you know, outburst of violence against the persecution of the, of the Christians, right? In some remote province, right?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  He's dealing with all this displacement of tribes coming into the empire and he's trying to keep it safe. Where, where's, where's the peace? He can't, he's not gonna find peace out in the world. The only peace that he can muster is what he gets from reading his Epictetus and rehearsing the arguments for Stellic truths.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's not the, the happiest ending to that story, I guess.

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  That is a little bit of the tragedy of Marcus Aurelius is that, um, he seems to have made the best of a bad situation as opposed to have lived, uh, a, a wonderful and fulfilling life. But again, I guess we have to look at it in, if you, if you run down the list of the things that happened to this guy, starting with, as we started this episode, his father dying when he was a young boy. It was probably about the happiest ending that, that you could have made from that set of story plot points.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Sure. And, and, and we can certainly, I mean, for an upbeat.

• 13:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  We can absolutely celebrate the survival

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  of his notes. Imagine the story that historians would tell about Marcus if the Meditations or the Memorandum had not survived and all we had was the equestrian statue, the military leader.

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  You know, the, the emperor with the terrible rumors about, you know, whether he's even Commodus's father and Faustina and Avidius Cassius and Lucius Verus, the playboy and all this other stuff, right?

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And if all we had was the Historia Augusta and we didn't have the Meditations, man, imagine our picture of Marcus. It would be so different. And so thank goodness, you know, thank Jupiter, right? That, that his notes did survive and that they are so useful to us. I mean, isn't this crazy? He wrote this for himself and yet here we are peeking over his shoulder and we're drawing lessons that help us every day.

• 14:43Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's true.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  For anyone, any walk of life, rich, poor, male, female, right?

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and look, I would add to that, and I thought this is what you were gonna say. I think we should celebrate his survival period, like that this guy got out of bed every morning after the third funeral for one of his beloved children, let alone the ninth. That he did it after, you know, the rumors about his wife, the betrayal of his general, the plague, the famines, the floods, the wars, like this guy, if there was ever a justification for throwing in the towel or giving up, uh, to say nothing of, of, of more extreme options, that the, the sheer fortitude and commitment.

• 15:31Ryan Holiday?

  And, and ultimately, I mean, at some level, he must've found pleasure in, in getting up every day. Like there was some reason that he carried on and, and that is an incredibly powerful thing.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Despite the physical aches and pains, right?

• 15:46Ryan Holiday?

  Didn't even get into that.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Despite the physical ailments. Exactly. He chose not to take the round of Tiberius, retreating to the Isle of Capri, right? Just checking out. I'm going to my beautiful little island and the, and the empire can just take care of itself, right?

• 16:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And so he, there is line in his army cot and he's like, he wants to stay in bed. And he says explicitly, no.

• 16:09Ryan Holiday?

  Gotta get up.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Look at the bees, look at the ants. They're going about putting things in order in the natural world. That's my job as a human being too. I'm gonna do my job and I'm gonna do it the best I can. That's what I'm called upon to do. I'm not gonna check out. I'm not gonna cop out. I'm gonna stop postponing, becoming a good, a good man. I've, it's urgent. You gotta do it now. You only have the now. You don't have the future. You don't have the past. All you have is now. You gotta make the best of it every single day. And, and yeah, that is inspiring. We know what that's like to lie in bed and wanna stay under the covers, right? You gotta get up. You gotta do your job. There's stuff to do.

• 16:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we, we did it. We managed to find an upbeat, a positive way to end this. And I really appreciate the time and I, I thought the book is fantastic. Uh, anyone who wants to learn more about Marcus should absolutely read it. And, uh, thank you very much. It was, it was awesome.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ryan. My pleasure. I really appreciate it.