Massimo Pigliucci

Two frontier wars.

There was an attack on the frontiers of the empire in the east by the Parthians, and from the north, from a number of German tribes, chiefly the Marcomanni.

It had to deal with an internal rebellion by one of his lieutenants, who declared himself emperor.

Rome was hit by a devastating flood of the Tiber River that destroyed half of the city.

A huge earthquake demolished the city of Smyrna in modern Western Turkey, and the emperor also had to deal with that.

So he had his hands full.

And what he did throughout was to do his best in order to apply his Stoic philosophy to the situation.

So here's a case where we literally have an emperor philosopher or a philosopher king, as Plato would put it.

We have somebody who is not only interested in philosophy for its own sake, but he actually is determined to use philosophy as a way of life and therefore as a framework to make decisions both personal and political.

And that really did make a difference.

Arguably, that's one of the things that made him a great emperor.

You can think of the entire meditations as a series of evening meditations, but the exercise is also described briefly in Epictetus and more length in Seneca.

Basically, it consists in this.

Before you go to bed, you take a little bit of time, not a lot, five, ten minutes maybe.

You get into a quiet corner of both your house and your mind, and then you go and reflect on salient events that happened during the day, asking yourself how you reacted, how you handled those things.

Seneca specifically, for instance, says, you know, you should go over and say, what have I learned today?

How am I improved myself?

In what way am I better?

Epictetus is even more specific.

It says that we need to ask ourselves three questions.