M

CHOOSE VIRTUE

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is

enough.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

arcus Aurelius famously described a number of what he called
“epithets for the self.” Among his were: Upright. Modest.
Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. These were, then, the traits that
served him well as emperor.
There are many other traits that could be added to this list:
Honest. Patient. Caring. Kind. Brave. Calm. Firm. Generous.
Forgiving. Righteous.
There is one word, however, under which all these epithets sit:
virtue.
Virtue, the Stoics believed, was the highest good—the summum
bonum—and should be the principle behind all our actions. Virtue is
not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of
daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls
and is made real through the actions we take.
The East prized virtue as much as the West. The Daodejing, for
instance, actually translates as The Way of Virtue. Confucius, who
advised many of the rulers and princes of his day, would have agreed
with Marcus that a leader was well served by the pursuit of virtue.
His highest compliment would have been to call a ruler a junzi—a
word that translators still have trouble finding equivalents for in