Ave, Marcus — A Stoic Emperor on Tinder

10 Oct 2026 . category: Side . Comments
#art #stoicism #social experiment

Between summer 2020 and spring 2021, in collaboration with the artist Antonio Castles, I ran a small social experiment: a 3D-printed effigy of Marcus Aurelius, printed by Antonio from a model in the British Museum collection, got its own Tinder profile and travelled the world with me — and every message it sent was a passage from the Meditations.

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The idea was to put the emperor-philosopher, who also lived through a plague (the Antonine Plague), in conversation with people isolated by Covid-19, offering a little stoic calm in tumultuous times. The one rule: only Marcus speaks. Whatever a match wrote, the reply was a line from his own book. No small talk, no improvising.

The effigy appears in the profile photos on trains, glaciers, a lab bench and in front of the U.S. Capitol, a stoic travelogue.

Afterwards I turned the screenshots of the conversations into a dataset (OCR, speaker attribution, hand review, sentiment analysis). Some numbers:

• 270 conversations and 749 messages analysed
• 40.4% of conversations got a reply to a Meditations quote
• Matches opened the conversation in only 12.6% of cases
• The typical conversation was just two messages long; Marcus wrote paragraphs (43 words on average), people wrote a few words (12)
• One passage opened 116 conversations: “Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.”
• Replies were mostly warm or neutral: 35% positive, 45% neutral, 20% negative

The page contains no match names, replies or photos of any match; only first names were used, only to estimate gender.

The full story, with the profile, the charts and the methods, is below (open it in its own tab).

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