Morning Preparation — Echo of Marcus Aurelius (Part 7/12)

Before dawn breaks over Rome, Marcus Aurelius rehearses every difficult soul he'll face today—the angry delegate, the hostile senator, the grieving widow—not to armor himself against them, but to discover they are occasions for the Stoic virtue he's spent decades learning to practice.

In the cold darkness before the second horn, Marcus lies awake on the hard pallet he's kept since boyhood, mentally walking through the day's trials—an impossible delegation, a senator's calculated provocations, a petitioner whose grief he cannot fix. What emerges is not armor but recognition: these difficult people are not obstacles to virtue but the very occasions that call it forth.

159 AD. Marcus Aurelius is 38. Rome.

Created in human–AI collaboration. Narrated with an AI voice.