Marcus Aurelius, the snuggly emperor

It's been said that there are three types of people when it comes to politics : hobbits, who are inoffensive but just don't care very much, hooligans, who are wildly passionate but also stupid, and the rare, precious Vulcans, who are more intelligent and passionate than the hobbits and able to rise above the mud-slinging of the hooligans.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161-180 A.D., was a Vulcan.

Yes, yes, I know there are no horses on the planet Vulcan, and he didn't have pointy ears or do the Vulcan death grip or even try and mind meld with anyone. In fact, he'd have probably hated the very idea of having to share someone else's brain, because his Meditations suggest a deeply melancholy soul who was acutely aware that he had the weight of the known world on his shoulders. Marcus, a fierce introvert, would far rather have been left alone, preferably tucked up nice and snug in bed :

At break of day, when you are reluctant to get up, have this thought ready to mind : "I am getting up for a man's work. Do I still then resent it, if I am going out to do what I was born for, the purpose for which I was brought into the world ? Or was I created to wrap myself in blankets and keep warm ?"

The most powerful man in the world and all he really wanted was to be nice and snuggly. Likewise though he usually praises philosophy, meditation and learning above all things, sometimes he has to remind himself that he ought to bloody well go outside and do something :

And give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch, but in true grace and heartfelt gratitude to the gods.

The ruler of the world was a snuggly bookworm. It's a good thing the Romans hadn't discovered cocoa, because Marcus probably would have drank it to extinction if they had. Wine ? Women ? No – snuggles and books for this Imperator.  It's hard to read the Meditations without wanting to give him a great big hug. Unlike so many other emperors – not least of which his own son Commodus – Marcus was no hedonistic pleasure-seeker who cared about no-one but himself. Instead he seems to be constantly reprimanding himself for not being the very best emperor he could possibly be. He continues his conversation with himself :

"But this is more pleasant."Were you then born for pleasure  – all feeling, not action ?"But one needs rest too."One does : I agree. But nature has set limits to this too... The point is you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love both your own nature and her purpose for you... you have less regard for yourself than the smith has for his metal-work, the dancer for his dancing, the money-grubber for his money, the exhibitionist for his little moment of fame. These people, when impassioned, give up food and sleep for the promotion of their pursuits, and you think social action less important, less worthy of effort ?"

That's a sentiment which is found throughout the whole work. Somehow, Marcus manages to blend an awareness of his own supreme importance without falling victim to arrogance - conscious that "the whole Earth is a mere point in space... the whole of present time is a pin-prick of eternity." He might have thought himself better than a blacksmith or a dancer, but he also knew that the limits of his earthly power were truly minuscule.

And sometimes all he wanted to do was stay in bed with a good book. Who can blame him for that ?

Just like a Vulcan, Marcus wasn't devoid of emotions – he only sought to control them. As a Stoic, he believed that we have an internal choice as to how to respond to external crises, that things can only hurt us if we let them. The essence of it is very Buddhist-like and easy enough to understand :

One man prays : "How can I sleep with that woman ?
Your prayer is : "How can I lose the desire to sleep with her ?"

Marcus doesn't seem to have felt the need to remind himself to stop fooling around with all the sexy ladieeez very much. Most of his reminders to himself are about his own mortality, the need to treat people with decency, and that only his own responses are what cause difficulties – not the problems themselves. That he has to keep reminding himself of this is testament to the fact that while he may have succeeded in controlling his responses, he never became an unfeeling automaton. But sometimes it can feel like he takes this to absurd extremes. In the same passage he says something that's not nearly so comfortable :

Another : "How can I save my little child ?"
You : "How can I lean not to fear his loss ?"

While we can probably all accept that we can be driven mad with anger or lust or ennui*, the idea that we shouldn't fear the loss of a child is an altogether more disturbing idea. Marcus wrote his Meditations as private thoughts to himself, so we don't know exactly what he meant by this. He doesn't appear to have been a callous or cruel man; had he gone around not caring who lived and who died he'd be up there with the likes of Nero and Caligula. Perhaps in an era of high child mortality, this quotation would have been viewed more as an unavoidable practical necessity. Or perhaps he only meant that one should not go so mad with grief as to become incapable of taking sensible actions.

* Or Justin Beiber music or the Go Compare guy.

That's the great paradox of Marcus' stoicism : if it's only Marcus' own reactions that mean anything, if he's just an insignificant mote in the infinite cosmos, if his life is basically irrelevant and his soul either immortal or non-existent, why then should he bother doing anything at all ? "A king's lot : to do good and be damned", he says at one point. Or even worse :

Just as you see your bath – all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting – so is every part of life and every object in it.

Yet somehow he clearly managed to drag himself out of his nice warm bed and away from his beloved books, and either "teach or tolerate" those who made the world such a disgusting place to live. But there were some things that really ticked him off, like smelly people and grammar Nazis. Seriously :

Are you angry with the man who smells like a goat, or the one with foul breath ? What will you have him do ? That's the way his mouth is, that's the way his armpits are, so it is inevitable that they should give out odours to match. 

From Alexander the grammarian : not to leap on mistakes, or captiously interrupt when anyone makes an error of vocabulary, syntax, or pronunciation, but neatly to introduce the correct form of that particular expression by way of answer, confirmation, or discussion of the matter itself rather than its phrasing – or by some other such felicitous prompting.

If someone puts to you the question, "How is the name Antoninus spelt ?", will you shout your way through each of the syllables ? What then if they get angry ? Will you lose your temper too ? Will you not rather calmly go through the sequence of letters, telling each one in turn ?"

So there you have it. At one point, all of Europe was ruled by a nerdy bookworm who loved being snuggly and hated smelly grammar Nazis – and he's widely revered as one of the most successful rulers of all time. Nerd power !