The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Monday, May 4, 2020

Musonius Rufus, Lectures 9.11


The reflections that I employ for my own benefit so as not to be irked by exile, I should like to repeat to you.

It seems to me that exile does not strip a man entirely, not even of the things which the average man calls goods, as I have just shown. But if he is deprived of some or all of them, he is still not deprived of the things which are truly goods.

Certainly the exile is not prevented from possessing courage and justice simply because he is banished, nor self-control, nor understanding, nor any of the other virtues which when present serve to bring honor and benefit to a man and show him to be praiseworthy and of good repute, but when absent, serve to cause him harm and dishonor and show him to be wicked and of ill-repute.

Since this is true, if you are that good man and have his virtues, exile will not harm or degrade you, because the virtues are present in you which are most able to help and to sustain you. But if you are bad, it is the evil that harms you and not exile; and the misery you feel in exile is the product of evil, not of exile. It is from this you must hasten to secure release rather than from exile.

On my bad days, I am tempted to feel a resentment toward those who are so proud to offer empty advice. Sometimes they insist that they can provide the rules of success and happiness, even as they speak nothing about Nature, and offer no measure of right and wrong. At other times they tell me all about how the world really works, though they are quite oblivious to the immediate circumstances that most people must face.

But why grow angry at them for what they don’t know? I recall that whenever I am terribly mistaken, no amount of condemnation has ever helped me. Encouragement has helped me, compassion has helped me, being taught by example has helped me.

I am accordingly grateful for the advice of Musonius, so different from most any of the advice I have heard before. I obviously never met the man, but from what he tells me, I suspect that I can trust him.

He shows me that he has a moral compass, that he views the worth or our lives through the characteristics that define us as human, the powers of reason and choice. He also shows me that he is grounded in the real world, that he is acutely aware of the struggles of everyday living. His theory and his practice fit together, and he points straight to the simple essence of human happiness.

So concerned that my contentment must rely upon the things that happen to me, I will worry that any sort of hardship, like poverty, or disease, or the exile discussed in this lecture, will make it impossible for me to live a good life. It may seem so obvious, but I will still neglect to address the critical questions: what really is good for me, and what place do my circumstances play in that good?

Musonius first reminds me that some changes in my situation might be drastic, but this does not mean that they will necessarily reduce my fortune. I may lose some worldly possessions, but I may also gain others, and my own resourcefulness and self-reliance will make the biggest difference. Events are never good and bad in themselves, but become good or bad by how I learn to use them as an opportunity.

Yet given that so many of my conditions are ultimately beyond my power, what am I to do when they stubbornly refuse to conform to my preferences? Here is where Musonius offers his second, and more fundamental, point: it will hardly matter if I lose what I prefer, because that is not what will make or break me.

Nothing can stop me from practicing the virtues, from being understanding, brave, temperate, and just, and so nothing can infringe on what defines my very humanity. Whether the externals come or go, their value depends entirely on the content of my character. Wealth will not make a wicked man good, just as poverty will not make a good man wicked.

What is lower becomes worthy through its conformity to the higher, and so my circumstances do not make something of me, but I make something of my circumstances.

I have a vivid memory from childhood of seeing a painting of Napoleon, on board a ship taking him into final exile on St. Helena. I was only a pup, but I gazed at it for quite some time, and I wondered what that man was thinking, and whether the British officers behind him were being curious or contemptuous.

How must it have felt for Napoleon to lose everything he had worked for? You may think of him as a hero or as a villain, or as someone in between, but the entire scene just screams of loss.

I have faced my own losses as the years passed by, and while I have never been sent to a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, I have seen people I love turn away, and things I desire kept from me. There were many times I thought I could no longer bear it. And then some basic insights about life started to turn it all around for me.

Losing persons, places, or things wasn’t the issue at all, since they were not mine to lose. Losing myself was the issue, and that was entirely up to me.

How would Napoleon have taken to such advice? Could he still have learned to revere the beauty of his own soul, instead of the glory of an empire? 

Written in 12/2016 

IMAGE: William Orchardson, Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon (1880)

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