Video chat: Don Robertson on Marcus Aurelius
Episode 8 of "Meet the Greco-Romans"
Welcome to the eighth of an occasional series of video chats with authors and translators who have written about the philosophy, culture, and history of the Greco-Roman tradition.
In this episode I talk to Don Robertson, one of the most popular and thoughtful contemporary writers about Stoicism. Don is a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist and trainer. He is one of the founding members of the Modern Stoicism nonprofit, and the founder and president of the Plato’s Academy Centre nonprofit in Athens, Greece. Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is an expert on the relationship between modern evidence-based psychotherapy and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. His work is highly interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, history, and psychology.
Among his books are: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius; Stoicism and the Art of Happiness; The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy; and Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. In this video Don and I chat about his latest, Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor.
Enjoy our conversation!
On this liberty and slavery point: could it be the case that many Romans thought, just as most of the US founding fathers, that liberty for themselves and slavery for other people were consistent goals?
Not sure whether Massimo's point that slavery's abolished only recently is relevant. After the fall of the western Roman empire, slavery practically disappears in this part of the world. It reappeared in the West only under very specific circumstances and mostly in the American south and the Caribbean islands and coast and with of misgivings (at least initially: Jefferson has doubts, in the 1850s some people thought of slavery as just & good). This is not to downplay slavery or to say that there were no inequities after the fall of the western Roman empire.