Massimo Pigliucci

The fact that now you feel bad because you've lost control, you are anxious, and so on and so forth.

So you need to focus on what actually you can do, which is empowering children.

Because the idea is not that you can't do anything about anything.

You can do quite a bit.

It's just that you need to be very clear on the limits and what exactly it is that you can and cannot do.

And once you are clear on that, your interventions become much more efficacious and therefore you feel better.

And broadly speaking, you get better outcomes.

Yeah, Marcus's reign was made very difficult by a number of issues.

One of them is the Antonine Plague, which was the worst plague to hit antiquity.

It killed close to 5 million people, and it was probably caused by measles brought back by the legions that were fighting on the east side of the empire.

Mm-hmm.

He also had to deal with natural disasters, a major flood of the Tiber that devastated Rome, a major earthquake that raised Smyrna in modern Western Turkey.

So he had a lot of issues to deal with.

Every time he says to himself, okay, what here is up to me and what is not up to me?

For instance...

In the case of the plague, the resources of the empire were already depleted by the war against the Parthians.

So even though the Roman Empire was rich, there is a limit, obviously.

And so what Marcus thought, one of the things that was up to him was to actually sell a lot of the imperial treasury and jewels.

So he essentially did auctions where he sold out

A bunch of stuff that he thought, I don't need this.