How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: Honest Review

Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (2019, St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages) has an unusual thesis: that Marcus Aurelius was, in practice, doing something close to cognitive behavioural therapy seventeen centuries before Aaron Beck named it. Robertson is a cognitive therapist and a Stoic scholar, which puts him in a rare position to make that argument. He mostly earns it.

This is not a philosophy textbook and not a self-help book — it sits uncomfortably between them, and that discomfort is mostly productive.

What the book actually is

Each chapter takes a phase of Marcus’s life (his education under Fronto, his campaigns on the Danube, his final years) and pairs it with a psychological technique the Stoics used — negative visualisation, the view from above, the discipline of action. Robertson then shows how those techniques map onto CBT exercises.

The biographical spine is the best decision in the book. Rather than quoting Meditations and saying “see, timeless wisdom,” Robertson reconstructs the context: Marcus writing those notes to himself at a military camp, dealing with a plague, managing a colleague he didn’t fully trust. It makes the philosophy feel earned rather than decorative.

The CBT mapping is handled more carefully than you might expect. Robertson doesn’t claim the Stoics invented therapy. He argues the conceptual overlap is real — both traditions hold that emotions follow from judgements, not events, and that those judgements can be examined and changed. Albert Ellis, who created REBT, acknowledged Epictetus directly. The lineage exists.

Where it works

The chapter on anger is the best in the book. Robertson takes Marcus’s own techniques for managing irritation — pausing before reacting, imagining the annoyance from the outside, considering the offender’s intentions — and shows the exact CBT parallel. He’s specific without being reductive.

The writing is cleaner than most books in this space. Robertson doesn’t write like a therapist trying to sound wise. He writes like someone who has read the texts carefully and thought about them for years.

For readers coming from the philosophy side, the therapy framing adds practical texture without dumbing the ideas down. For readers coming from self-help, the historical grounding gives the exercises more weight than a standard workbook.

Where it doesn’t

The book is front-loaded. The first two chapters are the most rigorous. By the middle section, the biographical narrative thins and the chapter structure becomes predictable: here is a Stoic idea, here is a modern version, here is an exercise.

The exercises themselves are the weakest part. They’re fine — journalling prompts, visualisation scripts — but they read like the appendix the publisher asked for. Anyone who has spent time with the Meditations itself will find them more useful as a reference than a practice.

Robertson is also careful, sometimes too careful, to position Stoicism as not a cold philosophy. The “Stoics weren’t really unemotional” correction is accurate but he makes it several times when once would do.

How it compares to just reading Marcus

Robertson’s book is not a substitute for Meditations, and it doesn’t pretend to be. What it offers is a frame. If you’ve tried Meditations and bounced off Book 1, Robertson’s biographical scaffolding might be what you need to go back.

If you haven’t read Marcus yet, the question is whether you want context first or immersion first. Robertson is context. He will make the original clearer. But he won’t give you the strange experience of reading a private notebook written by someone who didn’t expect you to read it — and that experience is worth having without a guide.

On which translation of Meditations to buy, Robertson doesn’t offer much guidance. He quotes selectively from one translation throughout. It’s serviceable. But the translation question matters more than this book acknowledges.

Who should read it

Readers who already know the basics of Stoicism and want to understand why it works psychologically. People who have read Ryan Holiday and felt like something was missing. Therapists curious about the intellectual history of their own field.

Not a good fit for anyone expecting rigorous philosophy — try Epictetus’s Discourses for that — or anyone who finds the therapy framing reductive. Some readers will find the CBT scaffolding clarifying; others will find it a flattening. Both reactions are reasonable.

Robertson’s thesis — that Marcus was running cognitive exercises on himself, not writing aphorisms for posterity — is the most historically honest reading of Meditations I’ve come across. The book is worth reading for that argument alone, even if the exercises in the back feel like a different book crammed into the same spine.