The Stoicism Secrets Of Marcus Aurelius - Donald Robertson

The quality of your life is shaped fundamentally by certain opinions that you hold, predominantly your value judgments. The things that you value and the things that you despise are gonna shape your character and therefore the quality of your life. (airplane whooshing)

Are you Marcus Aurelius's number one fan, do you think? Or do you think that you're the most-

Definitely.

... most educated on him, or one of the most educated on him that's alive at the moment?

I, yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like that much of a brag 'cause I've spent so much time having to read his stuff. I'm probab- I must be one of the people in the world that knows the most about Marcus Aurelius now just 'cause I've spent so much time writing stuff about him. And, uh, I kind of thought I learned a lot about him, and then obviously when you write other stuff, like you write, uh, from a different perspective. The graphic novel, I suddenly had to think, "What did this look like and what did that look like?" And so it made me explore his life from a bit of a different perspective. I had to visualize it more. And I thought, "Well, now I know everything I need to know about him." But then when I did the more academic biography, uh, that was to a, a more rigorous standard in a way, and, uh, I thought, "No, I'm now doing research that's even deeper than I did before." So, apparently there's always more to learn.

So-

Uh-

... Marcus Aurelius.

... there can't be that much left.

Emperor of Rome.

Yes.

But followed a Greek-born philosophy. Why?

Yeah. Well, I'll, let, let's get into some obscure stuff then. I th- I've, I can't be 100% sure, but somebody started speculating , Chris, right? I reckon it was to do with his mum, partly. That's one reason. So his mum ... His father passed away when Marcus was, we think, about three or four years old, and so he was brought up to a large extent, although not exclusively, by his mother. Now, his mother was a very wealthy and powerful woman. She was a construction magnate, believe it or not, and we know that 'cause we have hundreds of bricks with her name stamped on them. She owned a, uh, a brick and tile factory and clay fields that were used in construction, so she was very wealthy and powerful woman, not like we might have kind of assumed, you know, in, uh, in Roman times. And she had a kind of ... She seems to have had an intellectual circle that surrounded her, like a salon, um, of intellectuals at their house, and so she was a very well-educated woman. Here's a bit of trivia for you. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, who is Marcus' Latin rhetoric tutor, and was considered the greatest Roman orator since Cicero, which is, you know, quite an accolade. We have a letter from him where he says to Marcus, he's writing to Marcus' mother in Greek, and he says, "Marcus," kinda pathetically, "Could you check my grammar and, like, vocabulary and stuff to make sure that it's okay before your mum reads it?" So Fronto, one of the greatest intellectuals of the era, is kind of intimidated by Marcus' mother.