Today's Wisdom - Marcus Aurelius, Stardom and New Zealand

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The most widely read book of practical philosophy ever written was never meant to be read by anyone. Around 170 CE, in a cold military camp on the Danube frontier, the most powerful man on Earth sat down at the end of grueling days and wrote private notes to himself. Reminders on how to stay patient, just, and unafraid of death. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors, titled them simply Tà eis heautón, meaning “to himself.” He wrote in Greek rather than his native Latin, and he never gave them a public title or showed them to a soul. We know two of the books were written on campaign because they open with their location, one “among the Quadi” by the river Gran, another at Carnuntum, both in modern Austria. Eighteen centuries later, the world knows this private diary as the Meditations.

His life was anything but the serene retreat the philosophy might suggest. Marcus had been groomed for power since boyhood, when the emperor Hadrian, struck by the child’s honesty, nicknamed him Verissimus, “the most truthful.” Yet his reign was a near-relentless catalogue of disaster. The Antonine Plague, probably smallpox, swept the empire and killed an estimated five to ten million people. Germanic tribes battered the northern frontier, forcing him to spend roughly fourteen of his nineteen years as emperor at war. A trusted general declared himself emperor in a failed revolt. Through all of it, Marcus practiced what the Stoics preached: that we can’t control events, only our judgments about them, and that a person’s character is the one thing fortune can never touch. He governed with notable restraint, sharing power with a co-emperor and reminding himself in writing never to become “Caesarified,” corrupted into a tyrant by absolute power.

For all his wisdom, Marcus broke the very tradition that had produced the Five Good Emperors. Each of his predecessors had adopted a capable heir on merit rather than blood. Marcus instead handed the empire to his own son, Commodus, who proved vain, brutal, and obsessed with fighting as a gladiator, and whose disastrous reign is often marked as the moment Rome’s long decline began. The philosopher who counseled himself so carefully about duty seems to have been blinded by a father’s hope. What survives is the small book he wrote for an audience of one. Its enduring lesson is that the same mind capable of ruling the known world found its hardest and most important work in the daily struggle to rule itself.

The honest answer depends on how you count, but by the most rigorous modern measure, the title belongs to four young men from Liverpool. The analytics site ChartMasters, which audits every format an artist has ever sold and converts them into a single standardized figure called Equivalent Album Sales, places The Beatles at the top with over 520 million, more than 175 million ahead of anyone else. They achieved this in a recording career that lasted barely eight years, from their first single in 1962 to their breakup in 1970. What makes the feat stranger still is that the catalog keeps growing. In 2025 a track called Now and Then, completed decades later using technology to lift John Lennon’s voice from an old demo, earned a Grammy nomination.

You may have heard that The Beatles and Elvis Presley each sold over a billion records, a claim repeated for decades and even printed by Guinness. It is a myth, born of an outdated accounting trick. In the early 1980s, sales were tallied in singles equivalents, where every album counted as six units, a method that inflated the totals roughly sixfold. Strip the accounting back to real album-equivalent sales and the giants come back to Earth, though their dominance remains extraordinary. Behind The Beatles sit Michael Jackson at around 346 million and Elvis at 325 million, the two greatest solo sellers ever to live. Jackson’s Thriller, certified 34 times platinum in the United States alone, is still the best-selling single album in history at roughly 66 million copies.

The deeper truth is that “most successful” fractures the moment you examine it. Taylor Swift is the best-selling female artist of all time and the great modern force, while Bing Crosby still leads on physical singles and Rihanna on digital ones. The arrival of streaming has scrambled the picture further, since the industry now counts 1,500 streams as the equivalent of one album sale, a rule that quietly lets a TikTok hit rack up “sales” a 1960s band could never match. This is why legacy artists and streaming stars can never be cleanly compared. The Beatles hold the crown because their music kept selling across vinyl, cassette, CD, download, and stream, through every format the industry ever invented. Lasting success, it turns out, is about being the act that every new generation chooses to discover for itself.

New Zealand holds a remarkable distinction: it was one of the last large, habitable landmasses on the planet to be settled by humans. While Egypt was building pyramids and Rome was rising and falling, these two long islands in the South Pacific, more than 1,000 miles from Australia, sat entirely empty of people. The first humans did not arrive until somewhere between 1250 and 1350 CE, when East Polynesian voyagers crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in great double-hulled canoes, navigating by the stars, the swell of the waves, and the flight paths of birds. They became the Māori, and in their isolation they developed a distinct culture with its own language. The historian Michael King described them as the last major human community on Earth untouched by the wider world.

That isolation shattered in December 1642, when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight the islands. The encounter went badly. A confrontation with Māori in what is now Golden Bay left four of his crew dead, and Tasman sailed away naming the spot Murderers’ Bay. Dutch cartographers later named the country Nieuw Zeeland after a maritime province back home, and there it sat as a ragged line on the map. It would be another 127 years before the next recorded European arrival, when the British navigator James Cook reached the islands in 1769 and meticulously charted their entire coastline. Cook succeeded partly thanks to Tupaia, a Tahitian priest and master navigator aboard his ship, whose Polynesian language was close enough to Māori to allow the first real communication between the two worlds.

The modern nation was born on 6 February 1840, with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and around 540 Māori chiefs. It remains New Zealand’s founding document, and also its deepest source of controversy, because it exists in two versions that do not say the same thing. The English text has the chiefs ceding full sovereignty to Queen Victoria. The Māori text uses the word kāwanatanga, meaning something closer to governance, while assuring the chiefs of tino rangatiratanga, their full authority over their lands and treasures. Māori believed they were sharing power and gaining a protector. The Crown believed it had bought a country. That single mistranslation has echoed through nearly two centuries of land confiscation, war, protest, and reconciliation. New Zealand was the last place humans found, and the meaning of the promise made at its founding is still being argued over today.

Curious as to why New Zealand is so dominant at rugby? We broke it all down in this past edition below!

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The A Little Wiser Team