How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

The Most Powerful Person in the World Practicing Philosophy

Between 161 and 180 CE, Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor — the most powerful single human being on Earth, responsible for governing an empire that stretched from Scotland to Mesopotamia. He spent a portion of every day writing private philosophical notes to himself, wrestling with the same questions about anger, desire, mortality, and right action that he had been wrestling with since he was a teenager studying under Stoic teachers.

Those notes survive as the Meditations, one of the most remarkable documents in Western philosophy. Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioral therapist who has spent decades studying Stoicism, uses Marcus’s biography — his childhood, his years under Hadrian’s court, his reign, and his recurring failures to live up to his own philosophy — as the frame for the most practically grounded introduction to Stoic thought available.

Stoicism and CBT

Robertson’s most distinctive contribution is the explicit connection between Stoic practice and cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT, which is the most empirically supported form of psychotherapy currently available, was heavily influenced by Stoic philosophy — Albert Ellis, who developed rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s, explicitly cited Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca as intellectual predecessors.

This is not a superficial connection. Both traditions share the central insight that it is not events themselves that disturb us but our judgments about events — and therefore that changing our judgments changes our experience. Robertson shows how specific Stoic exercises map onto specific CBT techniques: the evening review, the Socratic questioning of initial reactions, the deliberate practice of examining the worst case and discovering it is bearable.

The Practical Exercises

Where Robertson excels is in the specificity of the practices he describes. The Stoics were not just philosophers — they were practitioners of a rigorous mental training program, and Robertson is careful to distinguish between the philosophical principles and the training techniques derived from them.

Negative visualization — briefly contemplating the loss of what you value — is one such technique. The Stoics practiced it not to become pessimistic but to cultivate genuine appreciation and to prepare emotionally for the inevitable losses that life delivers. Morning meditation, evening review, the view from above (imagining your situation from cosmic perspective) — each is explained in its philosophical context and translated into a practical exercise a contemporary reader can use.

Marcus as Case Study

The biographical framing serves the philosophy well. Marcus Aurelius was not a Stoic saint — he struggled with anger, with the temptations of luxury, with bitterness about his situation, and with the despair of presiding over a plague that killed millions of his subjects. The Meditations show a man practicing imperfectly toward an ideal he takes seriously. Robertson is careful not to sanitize this: Marcus’s failures make the philosophy more credible, not less.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The best practical introduction to Stoicism available, made distinctive by Robertson’s dual expertise in ancient philosophy and modern psychology, and grounded throughout in the human reality of Marcus Aurelius’s life.