# How to Think Like a Roman Emperor  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Donald Robertson]] - Full Title:: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor - Category: #books ## Highlights > To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=235)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “Blessed are they who died in the plague.”1 ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=245)) > He carefully observed how they lived in accord with reason and exhibited the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=292)) > Now, as an old man, he faces his death not for the first time but for the last. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=303)) > Severus, ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=314)) > “Why do you weep for me instead of thinking about the plague … and about death as the common lot of us all?” ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=339)) > “If you now grant me leave to go then I will bid you farewell and pass on ahead of you.” ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=341)) > Nevertheless, philosophy has taught him to be grateful for life and yet unafraid of dying—like a ripened olive falling from its branch, thanking both the tree for giving it life and the earth below for receiving its seed as it falls. ([Location 359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=359)) > Never say that anything has been lost, they tell us. Only that it has returned to Nature. - Epictetus ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=364)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > No number of bodyguards, as Marcus once said, is enough to shield a ruler who does not possess the goodwill of his subjects. ([Location 377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=377)) > “Go to the rising sun,” he said, “for I am already setting.”5 ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=400)) > Seneca, who did not claim to be an expert like a physician but saw his role more like that of a patient describing the progress of his treatment to fellow patients in the hospital beds beside him. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=447)) > Today many students of Stoicism adopt a similar attitude: they’re attracted to the Stoic worldview but prefer to “update” it by drawing upon a wider range of arguments from modern science and philosophy. ([Location 482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=482)) > Nero, by contrast, was less tolerant of political dissent from philosophers, and he executed both Thrasea and Seneca. However, Nero’s secretary owned a slave called Epictetus, ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=502)) > For Stoics, that goal is defined as “living in agreement with Nature,” which we’re told was synonymous with living wisely and virtuously. Stoics argued that humans are first and foremost thinking creatures, capable of exercising reason. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=521)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Stoics adopted the Socratic division of cardinal virtues into wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. ([Location 531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=531)) > Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. He exhibits courage and self-control precisely by accepting these feelings, rising above them, and asserting his capacity for reason. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=587)) > Marcus Annius Verus, ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=612)) > It’s said he was known for the slogan “endure and renounce” (or “bear and forbear”). Marcus seems to recall this saying in The Meditations when he tells himself that he must aim to bear with other people’s flaws and forbear from any wrongdoing against them, while calmly accepting things outside of his direct control.7 ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=693)) > Diognetus also taught him to tolerate plain speaking (parrhesia) and to sleep covered with a pelt in a camp bed on the ground, almost certainly references to the Cynic regime. Indeed, the Historia Augusta confirms that around the time Diognetus would have become his tutor, Marcus adopted the dress of a philosopher and began training himself to endure hardship. ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=720)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We’re told that Plato’s saying was always on Marcus’s lips: those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=831)) > Their philosophy contained within itself a moral and psychological therapy (therapeia) for minds troubled by anger, fear, sadness, and unhealthy desires. They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions). ([Location 855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=855)) > Epictetus reputedly told his students that the founders of Stoicism distinguished between two stages of our response to any event, including threatening situations. First come the initial impressions (phantasiai) that are imposed involuntarily on our minds from outside, when we’re initially exposed to an event such as the storm at sea. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=875)) > In the second stage of our response, the Stoics say, we typically add voluntary judgments of “assent” (sunkatatheseis) to these automatic impressions. Here the Stoic wise man’s response differs from that of the majority of people. He does not go along with the initial emotional reactions to a situation that have invaded his mind. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=886)) > Responding calmly and with courage is more important. That’s what you’d praise other people for doing if faced with the same situation. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=903)) > Gellius read about this in the lost Discourse of Epictetus and learned that there is nothing un-Stoic about someone turning pale with anxiety for a while during a perilous situation like the one he’d just survived. It’s natural and inevitable to experience feelings like these, as long as we don’t escalate our distress by going along with the impressions accompanying them and telling ourselves that some awful catastrophe is about to happen. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=916)) > Seneca likewise noted that certain misfortunes strike the wise man without incapacitating him, such as physical pain, illness, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes inflicted by defeat in war.19 They graze him but do not wound him. ([Location 920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=920)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > As the Stoics like to put it, the wise man is not made of stone or iron but of flesh and blood. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=925)) > What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=936)) > Whereas Sophistry is all about creating an appearance, philosophy is about grasping reality. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=950)) > Shakespeare’s Hamlet exclaims, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1001)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Handbook actually opens with a technique to remind ourselves that some things are “up to us,” or directly under our control, and other things are not. Modern Stoics sometimes call this the “Dichotomy of Control” or the “Stoic Fork.” ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1115)) > By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1136)) > During one infamous tantrum, the emperor had poked out the eye of some poor slave with the point of an iron stylus, presumably to the horror of onlookers. Once he’d come back to his senses, Hadrian apologetically asked the man if there was anything he could do to make it up to him. “All I want is my eye back,” came the reply.1 ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1154)) > Socrates begins by quoting a well-known verse from Hesiod: Wickedness can be had in abundance easily: smooth is the road and very nigh she dwells. But in front of virtue the gods immortal have put sweat: long and steep is the path to her and rough at first; but when you reach the top, then at length the road is easy, hard though it was. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1648)) > Hercules famously chose the heroic path of Arete, or “Virtue,” and was not seduced by Kakia, or “Vice.” ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1666)) > As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”39 ([Location 2587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2587)) > What if they concealed the opportunity to spring a deadly trap, though, that could turn the tide of the war? The obstacle standing in the way becomes the way. ([Location 2688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2688)) > Later, Christians would take to adding D.V. (Deo volente, “God willing”) to the end of their letters, and Muslims likewise say inshallah to this day. There’s a wonderfully clear description of this sentiment in the New Testament: Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”4 ([Location 2757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2757)) > Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2798)) > The duration of a man’s life is merely a small point in time; the substance of it ever flowing away, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to decay. His soul is a restless vortex, good fortune is uncertain and fame is unreliable; in a word, as a rushing stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as vapor, are all those that belong to the soul. Life is warfare and a sojourn in a foreign land. Our reputation after life is nothing but oblivion. What is it then that will guide man? One thing alone: philosophy, the love of wisdom. And philosophy consists in this: for a man to preserve that inner genius or divine spark within him from violence and injuries, and above all from harmful pains or pleasures; never to do anything either without purpose, or falsely, or hypocritically, regardless of the actions or inaction of others; to contentedly embrace all things that happen to him, as coming from the same source from whom he came himself, and above all things, with humility and calm cheerfulness, to anticipate death as being nothing else but the dissolution of those elements of which every living being is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this, their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common to them all, why should it be feared by any man? Is this not according to Nature? But nothing that is according to Nature can be evil.3 ([Location 3736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=3736)) # How to Think Like a Roman Emperor  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Donald Robertson]] - Full Title:: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor - Category: #books ## Highlights > To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=235)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “Blessed are they who died in the plague.”1 ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=245)) > He carefully observed how they lived in accord with reason and exhibited the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=292)) > Now, as an old man, he faces his death not for the first time but for the last. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=303)) > Severus, ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=314)) > “Why do you weep for me instead of thinking about the plague … and about death as the common lot of us all?” ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=339)) > “If you now grant me leave to go then I will bid you farewell and pass on ahead of you.” ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=341)) > Nevertheless, philosophy has taught him to be grateful for life and yet unafraid of dying—like a ripened olive falling from its branch, thanking both the tree for giving it life and the earth below for receiving its seed as it falls. ([Location 359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=359)) > Never say that anything has been lost, they tell us. Only that it has returned to Nature. - Epictetus ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=364)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > No number of bodyguards, as Marcus once said, is enough to shield a ruler who does not possess the goodwill of his subjects. ([Location 377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=377)) > “Go to the rising sun,” he said, “for I am already setting.”5 ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=400)) > Seneca, who did not claim to be an expert like a physician but saw his role more like that of a patient describing the progress of his treatment to fellow patients in the hospital beds beside him. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=447)) > Today many students of Stoicism adopt a similar attitude: they’re attracted to the Stoic worldview but prefer to “update” it by drawing upon a wider range of arguments from modern science and philosophy. ([Location 482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=482)) > Nero, by contrast, was less tolerant of political dissent from philosophers, and he executed both Thrasea and Seneca. However, Nero’s secretary owned a slave called Epictetus, ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=502)) > For Stoics, that goal is defined as “living in agreement with Nature,” which we’re told was synonymous with living wisely and virtuously. Stoics argued that humans are first and foremost thinking creatures, capable of exercising reason. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=521)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Stoics adopted the Socratic division of cardinal virtues into wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. ([Location 531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=531)) > Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. He exhibits courage and self-control precisely by accepting these feelings, rising above them, and asserting his capacity for reason. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=587)) > Marcus Annius Verus, ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=612)) > It’s said he was known for the slogan “endure and renounce” (or “bear and forbear”). Marcus seems to recall this saying in The Meditations when he tells himself that he must aim to bear with other people’s flaws and forbear from any wrongdoing against them, while calmly accepting things outside of his direct control.7 ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=693)) > Diognetus also taught him to tolerate plain speaking (parrhesia) and to sleep covered with a pelt in a camp bed on the ground, almost certainly references to the Cynic regime. Indeed, the Historia Augusta confirms that around the time Diognetus would have become his tutor, Marcus adopted the dress of a philosopher and began training himself to endure hardship. ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=720)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We’re told that Plato’s saying was always on Marcus’s lips: those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=831)) > Their philosophy contained within itself a moral and psychological therapy (therapeia) for minds troubled by anger, fear, sadness, and unhealthy desires. They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions). ([Location 855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=855)) > Epictetus reputedly told his students that the founders of Stoicism distinguished between two stages of our response to any event, including threatening situations. First come the initial impressions (phantasiai) that are imposed involuntarily on our minds from outside, when we’re initially exposed to an event such as the storm at sea. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=875)) > In the second stage of our response, the Stoics say, we typically add voluntary judgments of “assent” (sunkatatheseis) to these automatic impressions. Here the Stoic wise man’s response differs from that of the majority of people. He does not go along with the initial emotional reactions to a situation that have invaded his mind. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=886)) > Responding calmly and with courage is more important. That’s what you’d praise other people for doing if faced with the same situation. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=903)) > Gellius read about this in the lost Discourse of Epictetus and learned that there is nothing un-Stoic about someone turning pale with anxiety for a while during a perilous situation like the one he’d just survived. It’s natural and inevitable to experience feelings like these, as long as we don’t escalate our distress by going along with the impressions accompanying them and telling ourselves that some awful catastrophe is about to happen. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=916)) > Seneca likewise noted that certain misfortunes strike the wise man without incapacitating him, such as physical pain, illness, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes inflicted by defeat in war.19 They graze him but do not wound him. ([Location 920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=920)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > As the Stoics like to put it, the wise man is not made of stone or iron but of flesh and blood. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=925)) > What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=936)) > Whereas Sophistry is all about creating an appearance, philosophy is about grasping reality. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=950)) > Shakespeare’s Hamlet exclaims, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1001)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Handbook actually opens with a technique to remind ourselves that some things are “up to us,” or directly under our control, and other things are not. Modern Stoics sometimes call this the “Dichotomy of Control” or the “Stoic Fork.” ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1115)) > By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1136)) > During one infamous tantrum, the emperor had poked out the eye of some poor slave with the point of an iron stylus, presumably to the horror of onlookers. Once he’d come back to his senses, Hadrian apologetically asked the man if there was anything he could do to make it up to him. “All I want is my eye back,” came the reply.1 ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1154)) > Socrates begins by quoting a well-known verse from Hesiod: Wickedness can be had in abundance easily: smooth is the road and very nigh she dwells. But in front of virtue the gods immortal have put sweat: long and steep is the path to her and rough at first; but when you reach the top, then at length the road is easy, hard though it was. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1648)) > Hercules famously chose the heroic path of Arete, or “Virtue,” and was not seduced by Kakia, or “Vice.” ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=1666)) > As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”39 ([Location 2587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2587)) > What if they concealed the opportunity to spring a deadly trap, though, that could turn the tide of the war? The obstacle standing in the way becomes the way. ([Location 2688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2688)) > Later, Christians would take to adding D.V. (Deo volente, “God willing”) to the end of their letters, and Muslims likewise say inshallah to this day. There’s a wonderfully clear description of this sentiment in the New Testament: Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”4 ([Location 2757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2757)) > Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=2798)) > The duration of a man’s life is merely a small point in time; the substance of it ever flowing away, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to decay. His soul is a restless vortex, good fortune is uncertain and fame is unreliable; in a word, as a rushing stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as vapor, are all those that belong to the soul. Life is warfare and a sojourn in a foreign land. Our reputation after life is nothing but oblivion. What is it then that will guide man? One thing alone: philosophy, the love of wisdom. And philosophy consists in this: for a man to preserve that inner genius or divine spark within him from violence and injuries, and above all from harmful pains or pleasures; never to do anything either without purpose, or falsely, or hypocritically, regardless of the actions or inaction of others; to contentedly embrace all things that happen to him, as coming from the same source from whom he came himself, and above all things, with humility and calm cheerfulness, to anticipate death as being nothing else but the dissolution of those elements of which every living being is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this, their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common to them all, why should it be feared by any man? Is this not according to Nature? But nothing that is according to Nature can be evil.3 ([Location 3736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D2C5NNV&location=3736))