What are Marcus Aurelius's nine or ten rules for dealing with someone who offends you?

Marcus does not give a script for confrontation. He gives himself a sequence of thoughts to run through before reacting, a kind of internal checklist for the moment someone has wronged him. Nine considerations, laid out in order, each one chipping away at the anger before it can take hold.

The first is a reminder of kinship: we are made for one another, he tells himself, part of a single rational order in which lesser things exist for the sake of higher things and those for each other (Meditations 11.18). The second asks you to look closely at the offender as a whole person, someone shaped by habits and compulsions of opinion you may not see. The third makes the sharpest philosophical claim of the set: if the person acted rightly, you have no grounds for complaint, and if they acted wrongly, they did so involuntarily, in ignorance, since no one willingly gives up the truth. This is the old Socratic idea that no one does wrong knowingly, and Marcus takes it seriously rather than treating it as a debating point.

The fourth consideration turns the mirror on you. You too do many things wrong, and where you don't, it may be cowardice or concern for reputation holding you back rather than real virtue. The fifth admits your own ignorance: you rarely know enough about circumstances to judge another person's act correctly. The sixth is a memento mori move in miniature: remember how brief a human life is, and how soon both of you will be laid out dead. That thought alone tends to shrink the size of the grievance.

The seventh states the core Stoic claim about emotion: it is not other people's acts that disturb you, but your own judgment about those acts (Meditations 11.18). Take away the judgment that the act was something terrible, and the anger goes with it. This is easy to misread as a trick for staying calm, a kind of mental sleight of hand. It isn't. Marcus is making a claim about where value actually lives: nothing external, including another person's wrongdoing, can make you worse, so it cannot be a real harm to your character, which is the only thing that is truly yours. The eighth consideration follows from this: the anger and vexation you feel over an offense usually costs you more than the offense itself did.

The ninth, and by far the longest, is the constructive one. A good disposition, if genuine and not a performance, is invincible. Marcus imagines meeting hostility with steady kindness, correcting the other person gently even as they try to harm him, and saying to him: Not so, my child: we are constituted by nature for something else: I shall certainly not be injured, but you are injuring yourself my child (Meditations 11.18). Some editions number this as a tenth point, since the final line about invincible kindness reads as a separate thought from the instruction to admonish gently, but the substance is the same: character that stays kind under provocation cannot be broken by anything the other person does.

The common misreading is to take all this as advice for staying calm so you can function better, a technique for not letting people get to you. That is not what Marcus is after. He is working out, point by point, why the offense cannot touch what actually matters, which is his own faculty of choice. The anger was never really about the other person's act. It was about a judgment he was free to withhold.

The practical use of this passage is not to memorize nine steps and run through them like a checklist in the heat of the moment. It is to notice which one you skip. Most people jump straight to anger without ever asking whether the other person acted in ignorance, or whether their own irritation is doing more damage than the offense itself. Pick one consideration, the one you find hardest to grant, and practice it the next time someone wrongs you in something small.