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The Wars of Marcus Aurelius and Donald Trump

As Donald Trump announced his whimsy war in Iran, I was reading about another imperial campaign, long ago, against an Iranian people.

In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.

In Ukraine this February, I was learning about an archaeological find which reveals the interactions of the Romans and the Iazyges, which included alliance as well as enmity. The Roman war against the Iazyges allies was commanded personally by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who spent the years between 171 and 180 AD at the front. During that time he kept a philosophical diary, probably written at night in his tent. Discovered after his death, that text, known as the Meditations, is a great work of Stoic philosophy.

I turned to the Meditations to see if I could learn anything that would help me to understand the work of Ukrainian archaeologists about the interactions between Romans and Iazyges. I found something else: perspective on the wars of today, and a sense of why, beyond his obvious incompetence in military matters, Trump had to lose his.

It was shaming to read the bombast of Trump: (”no president was willing to do what I have done tonight”) alongside the reflections of Marcus (“when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.”) Trump broadcast his arrogance to millions of people; Marcus wrote for himself.

Despite the fact he was commanding an army at the front, Marcus never mentioned the war in his Meditations. War was simply something he had to do; he had no difficulty seeing the other side as people, or understanding their motivations. He mentions the Iazyges only once in the text: to make a broader point about hubris, to suggest that it was wrong for Romans to take pride in taking a prisoner of war.

Although Marcus did not broach the subject of my interest, I could not stop reading his Meditations. The contrast with Trump’s utterances was astounding, and vertiginous. The one could spend nine years in command and write a philosophical diary in which he did not even mention the war; the other immediately leapt to praise himself for a war he would lose in weeks.

Trump had felt pleasure after the intervention in Venezuela; he wanted more of that feeling. The Americans were bound to lose because there was no human thought involved; Trump regarded technology as magic and a first strike by missiles as definitive. People were killed, including schoolchildren, but there was no front as such, since the war was conducted from a distance. Trump’s frivolity made it easy for his chosen enemy.

Rather than remaining in post until their deaths, as did Marcus Aurelius, the Americans never took up a post in any meaningful sense. Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was, if possible, even more boastful than the president: “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We are playing for keeps. Our war fighters have maximum authority granted personally by the president and yours truly. This was never intended to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Such words were uttered by men who began a war in February and, despite a missile here and a drone there, essentially capitulated before summer.

Their elation had nothing to do with any real prospect of victory, but rather with the palpable pleasure they took in killing. Hegseth quite wrongly equates the high he feels when others die with the political phenomenon of victory in war. The embrace of what he calls “lethality” is a flight from something which we all share, which is mortality. By killing others he is displacing the acceptance of one’s own death, which Marcus regarded as the first step towards thinking: “in a short while, you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that and all who are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed so that in succession different things can come to be.”

Trump enjoyed the killing from day to day, but never had any idea what victory would require. Hegseth reveled in “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” He claimed that the war had been won, even as it was clear that the US had failed to achieve any meaningful objective: “never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and effectively neutralized.” As the weeks passed, both he and Trump fell back onto a purely internal, psychological notion of victory: what mattered was not the actual war in the actual world, but their ability to continue to say words in front of microphones that made them feel good inside. Even that feeling, grounded in nothing, faded quickly after February.

Stoicism is a manner of making connections with the world that help us to avoid elementary mistakes. Writing in his tent, Marcus Aurelius reflected on hubris and history: Each life, says Marcus, must be seen in the perspective of the entire cosmos: “What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us, and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you keep.” We might be deluded to believe in our own grandeur, but the truth is elsewhere. Pride is an error from which the boastful person himself suffers: “Why then this stress, why not be content with an orderly passage through the brief span you have.”

What we as mortals can know is very limited: “In man’s life, his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirlygig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear.” Starting from such cosmic humility, we can build up our own ethical steadfastness. Everything is in flux, but we can project calm outwards into our small corner of the world: “Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.” From this idea of self-creation comes confidence about one’s own purposes: “Dig inside yourself,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “inside there is a spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging.”

Goodness is possible, despite everything; or rather by seeing one’s own small place in everything. If you can see your limits, you have a chance of seeing others and the world. If you can accept mortality, you need not take refuge in lethality. If you are seeking the good in yourself, you will not mirror an enemy. Revenge is an error that bespeaks a lack of courageous inquiry about oneself and the world. Indeed, says Marcus Aurelius, “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

During the war, Trump and Hegseth fell back upon the idea of revenge: in a blasphemous tirade which he plagiarized from a movie, Hegseth said: “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.” If you do not know who you are, you model yourself on your enemy, and claim that what is evil when they do it is good when you do it. There is not much difference between Hegseth’s fundamentalism and that of the people he calls “mullahs.” He refers to them as “barbaric savages”; but when he looks at the mirror of the makeup studio he installed for himself in the Pentagon, what does he see?

The American leaders had no idea of who they were or what they wanted, aside from the satisfaction of their emotional needs by the killing of others. They were unable to imagine that people on the other side might have ideas about their own interests and plans for their own behavior. The could not see the world, even in its plainest representation as geography; whereas Marcus exploited a bend in the Danube River to tactical advantage to win a battle; Trump chose to ignore the physical limit the Straits of Hormuz can place on world trade. As soon as the war began, the Iranians did the obvious: they responded to American long-range attacks with the same; and they blocked the Straits.

Because the Americans were operating without a sense of themselves, of the world, or other people, this came as a surprise. Marcus Aurelius offers this mild comment: “How absurd -- and a complete stranger to the world-- is the man surprised at any aspect of his experience in life!”

The Americans, strangers to the world, reacted to their feelings of surprise with fantasies of destruction. The pleasure they took in killing became a vision of annihilation. Rather than confront the errors they made about war, the Americans leapt to visions of violence in which no one would ever have to think again. Trump lost control on Easter Sunday when he tweeted: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He then promised that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong” and said that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” In our modern legal and ethical language, this is of course genocidal language. The American bombast was followed by American surrender.

Marcus Aurelius won his war against the Iazyges. He combined victory and prudence, and for this he was and will be remembered. The defeated Iazyges returned to their previous role as Roman clients, offered thousands of cavalrymen as soldiers of Rome, and opened trade routes to the east. Marcus’s philosophical diary has been read for the better part of two millenia; so long as we are present as a literate civilization, it will be read. Despite Marcus’s certainty that we will all be forgotten, others built a victory column in his honor after his death; it still stands in Rome, more than one thousand eight hundred years later.

Another legacy of Marcus’s victory also touches the center of what we think of as Western culture. As part of the peace accord, he dispatched 5,500 Iazyges cavalrymen, taken into his service, to the north of what is now northern England, to defend the Roman border at Hadrian’s Wall. Their first commander was a man named Arthur, and it is possible that the Iazyges and some of their Iranian-speaking kin incorporated his name into stories of their own -- of a lady in the lake, of a sword in a stone, of a quest for a golden cup -- which, with time, became the legend of Christian chivalry. That is another story, and one worth telling.

But it is also part of the story of Marcus Aurelius, which, despite the fact that he chose not to tell it himself, or rather precisely for that reason, is instructive about our predicament today. Stoicism is a way not to be a stranger to the world; it can protect the powerful from vanity and folly. To fall into a stupor of self-absorption, as Trump has done, is to flee from reality. Few wars are worth fighting; those that are fought can only be won in the world, and not within the tortured confines of estranged minds. Trump hastens now towards our shared horizon of death, seeking honors that only posterity can accord and will not.

The quotations of Marcus Aurelius are drawn from this excellent edition: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond, introd. Diskin Clay, London: Penguin, 2006. The quotations of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are linked to sources in the text.