Picture a Roman emperor, somewhere along the Danube frontier, writing to himself at night. Not a speech, not something for posterity. Just a reminder of how to behave in the morning. That is the setting for the line above, which sits in Book VIII, section 59 of a private notebook we now call the Meditations.

In George Long’s translation it reads: “Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”

Marcus Aurelius wrote those twelve short books, according to Daily Stoic, roughly between AD 170 and 180, mostly while running military campaigns. The work had no title from him. The Greek heading often used for it translates as something close to “to himself.” That detail matters. This was never advice aimed at us. It was a man talking himself into a better mood.

The line in its own setting

“Men exist for the sake of one another” is not a throwaway kindness. It rests on a serious Stoic idea: that human beings are built to cooperate, the way parts of a body work together. Marcus puts it most vividly at the start of Book II, where he writes, in Gregory Hays’s translation, “We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural.”

The Stoics saw getting in each other’s way as against nature, not just rude. If people are made for one another, then the rude colleague and the difficult relative are not aliens sent to ruin your day. They are, awkwardly, part of the same body you belong to. That is the idea the line hangs on, and it is worth keeping in mind before reaching the harder half of the sentence.

Teach them, or bear with them

What strikes us here is how few options Marcus allows. Faced with someone behaving badly, he gives himself two moves. Correct them if you can. Put up with them if you cannot. Resentment is not on the list. Neither is stewing, or filing the grievance away to revisit later.

The choice is almost plain to the point of being dull. Can this person be taught? Then teach. Can they not, at least not by you, not now? Then bear it. The A. S. L. Farquharson translation puts the same fork slightly differently: “Either instruct them then or bear with them.”

Our read is that Marcus was trying to take the heat out of a practical problem. Anger at other people’s failings does nothing about the failings. It just adds a second problem, the state of your own mind, on top of the first.

Where the modern reading gets it wrong

It is easy to hear “bear with them” as an instruction to tolerate anything, to become a doormat and swallow every slight. We think that misses the point.

The key sits earlier, in that famous morning passage from Book II, where Marcus tells himself, in Hays’s version, “The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”

That is not resignation. It is a forecast. He is talking himself out of being surprised, so that when people do behave badly, it does not knock him off balance. “Bear with them” is easier when you were never expecting better.

The line is less about lowering your standards and more about steadying your reaction. You can still correct someone. You can still walk away. What you are asked to drop is the outrage that they turned out to be human.

What we take from it now

Strip away the Greek heritage and the imperial setting, and what is left is oddly useful for anyone dealing with a frustrating coworker, a relative who never changes, or a stranger being unpleasant online. The two questions still apply. Is there anything useful you can say or do here? If yes, do it plainly, without the heat. If no, the alternative is not revenge, it is letting it go.

The French philosopher Pierre Hadot argued that the Meditations should be read as a set of practical exercises for changing how one lives, not as abstract theory. That fits this line well. It reads as a note to self, jotted by a man who knew how easily he could be provoked, and who was trying to give his own temper somewhere sensible to go.

The emperor with more power than almost anyone alive was not writing this to fix other people. He was writing it to manage himself, because that was the only piece he could actually control. Nearly two thousand years on, that split still looks about right.