The eminent old philosopher Will Durant, in the volume named “Caesar and Christ” in his History of Civilization series, calls the five emperors spanning the era that Gibbon admired, “the philosopher kings.” All were stoics or had strong Stoic sympathies: Nerva pardoned exiled Stoics of the Domitian reign. Trajan had a Stoic tutor in his quarters. Hadrian was Epictetus’s close friend. Antonius Pius, a “product of the Stoic school,” insisted that in Roman law courts, Stoic legal principles be followed, i.e. that (1) in all cases of doubt, judgments be resolved in favor of the accused, and (2) a man should be held innocent until proven guilty. And the last of the philosopher kings, Marcus Aurelius, probably the finest of all Roman Emperors, secretly wrote his Stoic Meditations by candlelight in his tent perched on one or another of the mountainsides of Germany, where for the last 12 years of his life he was in the field as Commanding General of the Roman armies, continually engaged in defending the northern frontiers of the Empire against tribal attacks.

The Roman Stoic was more a man of action than contemplation, but listen to the paragraph of old soldier Aurelius on how to die: “Pass this little space of time-your lifetime-comfortably, with nature, and end thy journey in the contentment, like the ripe olive that falls, praising the earth that gave birth to it, and thanking the tree that made it grow.”

On the question of afterlife, Marcus Aurelius took up and emphasized the teaching of Epictetus. They alone, among Stoics, were very careful in what they said about death. There was no proof of afterlife, and rather than possibly mislead people, they refrained from the more ample language of their predecessors. Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as “perhaps, the most beautiful figure in history.”

The five Stoic philosopher kings were the sort of men you would want to have as Marine Corps Commandants. A few notes from my history books: The second of the five, Trajan, was Commanding General of the Roman army in Cologne when he was notified that Emperor Galba had died, and that his number was up. He was Emperor for 19 years, and throughout, habitually wore his army uniform. Tall and robust, he was wont to march on foot with his troops and ford, with full kit, the hundreds of rivers they crossed.

Let me tell you about that five-year trip his successor, Emperor/General Hadrian, took after meeting Arrian in Athens. Accompanied by experts, architects, builders, and engineers, he had left Rome in 121 A.D. to inspect defenses in Germany. He lived the life of his soldiers, eating their fare, never using a vehicle, walking with full military equipment 20 miles at a time. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign. He traveled the Rhine to its mouth, sailed to Britain, ordered the building of a wall from Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne “to divide the barbarians [Scots] from the Romans [in England]”-“Hadrian’s Wall.” Back to Gaul, then to Spain, then down into Northwest Africa where he led some garrisoned Roman Legions against Moors who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. That finished, he boarded one of his Mediterranean warships and went to Ephesus, went up and inspected the ports of the Black Sea, back down to Rhodes, and still curious at 50, stopped in Sicily and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above his Mediterranean Sea.


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The time interval between my finishing graduate school and becoming a prisoner of war was almost exactly three years, September 1962 to September 1965. That was a very eventful period in my life. I started a war (led the first-ever American bombing raid on North Vietnam), led good men in about 150 aerial combat missions in flak, and throughout three 7-month cruises to Vietnam I had not only the Enchiridion, but the Discourses on my bedside table on each of the three aircraft carriers I flew from. And I read them.

On the 9th of September 1965, I flew right into a flak trap, at tree-top level, 500 knots, in a little A-4 airplane-cockpit walls not even three feet apart-which I couldn’t steer after it was on fire, control system shot out.
After ejection I had about 30 seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed on the main street of that little village right ahead. And so help me, I whispered to myself: “Five years down there at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

I want to step off the chronology escalator for just a minute and explain what memories of the Enchiridion and the Discourses I did have “ready at hand” when I ejected from that plane. What I had in hand was the understanding that the Stoic, particularly the disciple of Epictetus who developed this accounting, always keeps separate files in his mind for: (a) those things which are “up to him” and (b) those things which are “not up to him;” or another way of saying it, (a) those things which are “within his power” and (b) those things which are “beyond his power;” or still another way of saying it: (a) those things which are within the grasp of “his will, his free will,” and (b) those things which are beyond it. Among the relatively few things that are “up to me, within my power,” within my will, are my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my moral purpose or will, my attitude toward what is going on, my own good, and my own evil. Please note: All these things, as are all things of real importance to the Stoic, are matters that apply principally to your “inner self,” where you live.