Legacy & Destiny
November 30, 2023
My daughter Meg recently told me that a meme doing the rounds claimed that the average bloke thinks about the Roman Empire twice a day, and she asked if I thought it were true. I just picked up my copy of Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius nearly two thousand years ago, off my bedside table and showed it to her. She sent a photo of it to her friends and they were in stitches. The proof was complete.
I don’t think that Marcus Aurelius ever dreamed that the thoughts he wrote down in Meditations would be read by others and I’m sure he would have been astounded to learn that they would be widely published and read millennia later. I think he likely just regarded his writings as a kind of journal, jotting down thoughts and everyday struggles he faced in order to define them and bring them into full consciousness. Meditations is full of practical and sometimes mundane thoughts, like a dialogue that he has with himself about whether to stay in a warm bed or to get up and attend to the duties of the day. I gave my copy to my son Sam a few days ago because I thought he might benefit from some of its insights (hint, hint). Besides, it’s kind of cool to get a glimpse inside the mind of one of the greatest Roman leaders. At least for me.
Marcus Aurelius is probably the best known of the Roman stoics. Like all stoics of the time, he regarded stoicism as a life philosophy – defining in essence, how to live, behave, and view the world and one’s role in it. Adherents to its contemporary philosophies such as scepticism and hedonism, each with their own sets of followers, had completely different beliefs and codes of behaviour. Most of the figures that I admire from the Greek and Roman eras were stoics. All concerned themselves with how best to live, and I’m sure all centred their behaviour around the four ancient virtues of fortitude, prudence, justice, and temperance.
I don’t think many people nowadays tend to think of themselves as following a particular life philosophy, even though we of course do through our thoughts and actions. I’d guess most relatively affluent people today follow a kind of involuntary moderated hedonism, living often mundane day-to-day lives between episodes of indulgence. While I believe in the good in people and I do think most of us go about our day to day activities trying to do the right thing, I wonder how many people hold themselves to account at a higher, longer-term level, especially as we get older. Sometimes I get the feeling that when it comes to matters like careers, relationships, and long term goals and endeavours, many of us behave almost by default and as though we don’t really have a choice.
The reality, of course, is that we do. Our lives and our destinies are, by large measure, of our own choosing. As I get older I’m increasingly concerned about the prospect of one day looking back and regretting the choices that I didn’t make. That if I’m not to become embittered, I need to ensure that I live boldly and that I don’t just coast from day to day without questioning the larger patterns of my life. There’s good reason of course that we often avoid challenging or changing these patterns – it’s at this level that change is most difficult. But it’s also at this level that change provides the greatest opportunities for personal growth and fulfilment.
It can be hard to find a balance between apparently conflicting ethical concerns when it comes to life choices that impact others, especially those we love. Do we stay in dead-end careers for fear of sacrificing financial security? Or remain in relationships longer than we should for fear of hurting those we love? These are some of life’s hard questions that we should not shy from, even if only to make peace with our acceptance of the compromises we make.
Of the four ancient virtues, fortitude is often cited as courage, but this opens the door to its misinterpretation as courage in the narrow sense of bravery. Fortitude is the broader strength of will to confront what we must, and deal with it in the face of adversity. To do what needs to be done. It includes courage in all its forms, but also includes the capacity to endure difficulty and see things through. But prudence, another virtue often cited as wisdom, will more often than not need to work hand in hand with fortitude lest the consequences of our actions be rash. The same applies to temperance and justice – it’s seldom that these four virtues work in isolation from one another and getting the balance right is not always easy. It’s here that I think we need to let our inner light be the guide and I feel St. Paul was right in citing Love as the greatest of all the virtues. I’ve long thought of Love as the source of all virtue and the one thing without which even the concept of virtue would lose all meaning.
I’m not sure if it’s just part of getting older, but I sometimes look back over my years so far and get the feeling that it’s almost as if it’s all been scripted by some hidden hand. So many opportunities to make mistakes were missed almost as if by accident; I could easily have been so much less fortunate. What a privilege life is and what a time to be alive. Yet, despite all the incredible progress in human endeavour in my lifetime, I find myself now yearning for simplicity and freedom. To somehow escape from the darker aspects of our time like industrialised agriculture and the shallowness of social media and the mob, and to try to ensure real connections with others, with nature, and with what I consume. To rebel against the artificialness of AI and engage instead in the true crafts of old, working with wood and stone and iron and clay. We have a small farm in the Karoo with lots of stone artefacts from a bygone era, two hundred years ago, when the people that lived there had nothing but time; the complete opposite to the world of today. Even though I never knew those people, I know something of them by what they left behind, I know they loved and pursued beauty, and I love the idea of honouring them by restoring what remains and leaving something for those that follow me. But time is running out.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is one of my favourite movies, not least for Richard Harris’ portrayal of Marcus Aurelius. Like in so many stories that resonate with us, the protagonist Maximus undertakes the typical Hero’s Journey, so deeply engrained in our mythology, with all its difficulties, agony, and ultimately triumphant, if tragic return. But Harris portrays the emperor as an old man in Gladiator, while in reality Marcus Aurelius died relatively young at 58. Today, it’s become so normal for people to live beyond 90 that we’ve almost come to see anything less as a premature ending. It hasn’t always been so, as the echo of my grandmother’s “three score years and ten” reminds me. Perhaps we need to look on the additional years conferred on us by our ancestors as a gift that they would have cherished, and as an opportunity to reflect on our own lives and how we live them. To endeavour to live, as the ancient Greeks believed, as though all of our ancestors are living again through us. Like a mighty river. After all, as Maximus reminds us, what we do in life, echoes in eternity. Do we dare?