In retrospect, so many of the decisions the Stoics made are baffling. Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Seneca and Nero. Their attitude toward women, toward slavery, toward violence, toward what society was supposed to look like. Even more recently, what of Stockdale and the complicated nature of the war in Vietnam.

Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know better?

Sometimes…but not always.

To understand the Stoics, we have to understand something…they weren’t living in history, they were living in what they viewed as the present, what they thought was actually a progressive time. They did not know where things were going, they had only a partial view of the picture, just as today we have only a partial picture of our own moment.

The late David McCullough (his Truman biography is one we have raved about) once said the hardest part about being a biographer is getting the reader to keep in mind “that nothing was ever on track.” He continued,

“Things could have gone any way at any point. As soon as you say ‘was,’ it seems to fix an event in the past. But nobody ever lived in the past, only in the present. The difference is that it was their present. They were just as alive and full of ambition, fear, hope, all the emotions of life. And just like us, they didn’t know how it would all turn out. The challenge is to get the reader beyond thinking that things had to be the way they turned out and to see the range of possibilities of how things could have been otherwise.”

This is not to say that no one should ever be judged for the mistakes and failures of the past. Of course they can and should be. But we have to understand the context in which these things happened and why they happened–because it helps us do better here in the present.

The ancient world was not a thing that existed. It was just the world. Just as it is in our time. Then and now, the world was filled with flawed and emotional people and these flaws and these emotions were responsible for things that did not age well…just as ours will be if we do not properly manage them, if we do not strive to do better, strive to see as much of the picture as we can.

It’s also a reminder, as always, that we must be humble.