How should you respond to someone who wrongs you, according to Marcus Aurelius?

Marcus does not ask you to pretend the wrong did not happen, or to tell yourself it does not matter. He asks you to check a hidden demand you are making on reality: that shameless, faithless, wrongdoing people simply should not exist. When someone wrongs you, he writes, ask yourself whether it is possible that shameless men should not be in the world. It is not possible. Do not, then, require what is impossible (Meditations 9.42).

This is a strange kind of comfort at first. It sounds like he is excusing the offender. He is not. He is diagnosing the source of your anger. Part of what makes wrongdoing feel intolerable is the sense that it should not be happening, that the world has gone wrong in some deep way because this person acted badly. Marcus's point is that a world with no dishonest people, no cowards, no cruel people, is not a world you were ever entitled to expect. Wrongdoers of every kind are, as he puts it, of necessity in the world (Meditations 9.42). Once you see that, the offense loses some of its charge. You are no longer fighting reality itself, only responding to one instance of something you already knew would occur somewhere, to someone, eventually.

The common misreading is that this is resignation: shrug it off, nothing can be done, don't get worked up. That misses what Marcus actually recommends doing with the thought. He says that reminding yourself wrongdoers must exist will make you more kindly disposed toward the person in front of you (Meditations 9.42). The aim is not detachment but a change in disposition, from hostility to something closer to patience. He extends this beyond the shameless man to the knave, the faithless man, and every man who does wrong in any way (Meditations 9.42), so the method is general: whatever the fault, first place it in the category of things bound to occur, then let your anger soften.

Marcus adds a second, more active idea. Nature has not left you defenseless against wrongdoing. She has given to man, as an antidote against the stupid man, mildness, and against another kind of man some other power (Meditations 9.42). This matters because it shows Marcus is not asking for passivity. Each vice in another person has a corresponding virtue in you that answers it, and mildness is the specific virtue matched to a certain kind of foolishness or shamelessness. You are not just tolerating the wrong. You are exercising the trait built for exactly this situation.

What changes for someone who takes this seriously is where they locate the problem. The wrong stays wrong. But your task shifts from expecting people to be other than they are, to responding well given what they are. That is a version of the Stoic idea that only your own judgments, impulses and reactions are up to you. The wrongdoer's character is not up to you. Your mildness, or your anger, is.

Elsewhere in the Meditations Marcus applies a related principle to externals more broadly: things like pain, dishonour, or death happen equally to good and bad people, so they cannot themselves be what makes a life good or bad (Meditations 2.11). Someone else's wrongdoing toward you falls into a similar frame. It can happen to anyone, good or bad, and how it lands on your character depends on what you do with it, not on the fact that it occurred.

The practical move Marcus offers is simple to state and harder to do. The next time someone's dishonesty or cruelty catches you off guard, ask yourself the question he asks: could a world with no such people possibly exist. When the honest answer is no, let that lower the temperature, then reach for the specific virtue, mildness or otherwise, that meets this particular fault.