Marcus Aurelius

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome on the 26th of April 121, in the grand villa on the Caelian Hill that his mother had inherited along with a fortune that included sprawling brickworks on the city's outskirts. He would go on to rule the Roman Empire for nearly two decades. He would also write a private journal in Greek, never meant for anyone else's eyes, that readers would still be buying by the hundreds of thousands almost two millennia later. What made a man who wielded absolute power feel compelled to remind himself, in ink, not to become a Caesar? How did a philosopher king command armies across three continents while quietly grieving the deaths of most of his children? And how did the era he closed, a stretch of relative stability spanning more than two centuries, give way to something his historian Cassius Dio could only describe as a fall from gold to iron and rust?

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• 2. A Boy on the Caelian Hill

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  Marcus's father probably died in 125 or 126, when Marcus was three years old, during his praetorship. Though the boy can hardly have known the man, he would write in his Meditations that he had learned modesty and manliness from memories of his father and the man's posthumous reputation. That is a remarkable claim from someone who lost a parent before forming clear memories. His mother Lucilla did not remarry and, following prevailing aristocratic customs, had limited direct involvement in her son's daily care. Marcus was instead raised by his paternal grandfather, Marcus Annius Verus the Second, who had been made a patrician in 73-74. The grandfather taught him, Marcus later wrote, good character and the avoidance of bad temper. He was less appreciative of the mistress his grandfather took after the death of his wife Rupilia, and he was grateful he did not have to live with her longer than he did. From a young age Marcus displayed enthusiasm for wrestling and boxing. He also joined the Salii, an order of priests dedicated to Mars, responsible for the sacred shields called Ancilia. Then, in April 132, a painting master named Diognetus changed the boy's direction. At Diognetus's behest, Marcus took up the dress and habits of a philosopher: he studied in a rough Greek cloak and slept on the ground until his mother persuaded him to use a bed.

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• 3. The Tutor Who Shaped Him

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  Marcus Cornelius Fronto was thought of, in the self-consciously antiquarian world of Latin letters, as second only to Cicero. He was Marcus's Latin tutor and, in time, something closer to a beloved confidant. A significant body of their correspondence has survived. The pair used intimate language in their letters: 'Farewell my Fronto, wherever you are, my most sweet love and delight. How is it between you and me? I love you and you are not here.' Marcus wrote Fronto a birthday letter claiming to love him as he loved himself. He asked the gods to ensure that every word he learned of literature, he would learn from Fronto's lips. About a quarter of the surviving letters deal with Fronto's illnesses. Marcus asked that Fronto's pain be inflicted on him instead. Fronto, for his part, had warned Marcus against philosophy early on: 'It is better never to have touched the teaching of philosophy,' he wrote, 'than to have tasted it superficially, with the edge of the lips, as the saying is.' Despite that warning, Quintus Junius Rusticus, grandson of a martyr to the tyranny of Domitian, ultimately drew Marcus toward Stoicism in ways that Fronto recognised with regret. Marcus would thank Rusticus in his Meditations for teaching him 'not to be led astray into enthusiasm for rhetoric, for writing on speculative themes, for discoursing on moralising texts.' Even in old age, Marcus kept learning: the philosopher Sextus of Chaeronea received the emperor as a student. When Lucius, Marcus's co-emperor, once asked where Marcus was headed, Marcus replied: 'it is good even for an old man to learn; I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn what I do not yet know.'

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• 4. Adopted Into Power

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  On the 24th of January 138, the emperor Hadrian selected Aurelius Antoninus as his new heir after Lucius Aelius Caesar died of a haemorrhage the night before a scheduled speech to the Senate. As part of Hadrian's terms, Antoninus in turn adopted both Marcus and Lucius Commodus, the son of the late Aelius. Marcus reportedly greeted news that Hadrian had become his adoptive grandfather not with joy but with sadness. Only with reluctance did he move from his mother's house on the Caelian Hill to Hadrian's private home. Antoninus then demanded that Marcus reside in the House of Tiberius, the imperial palace on the Palatine, and take on the habits of his new station. Marcus struggled. He told himself it was manageable: 'Where life is possible, then it is possible to live the right life; life is possible in a palace, so it is possible to live the right life in a palace.' But he would later criticise himself in the Meditations for 'abusing court life' in front of company. He also cautioned himself, in a note that reads as a private warning, not to take his title too seriously: 'See that you do not turn into a Caesar; do not be dipped into the purple dye.' As quaestor, his actual duties were modest: reading imperial letters to the Senate when Antoninus was away, and doing secretarial work. He complained to Fronto of drowning in paperwork: 'I am so out of breath from dictating nearly thirty letters.' On the 1st of January 145, Marcus was made consul a second time. That same April, he married Faustina, Antoninus's daughter, who was legally his sister by adoption, as had been planned since 138.

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• 5. War on Every Front

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  Vologases IV of Parthia made his move in late summer or early autumn 161, just months after Marcus and his co-emperor Lucius Verus took power. Vologases entered the Kingdom of Armenia, expelled its king, and installed his own. The Roman governor of Cappadocia, Marcus Sedatius Severianus, convinced by a prophet that he could win glory easily, led a legion into Armenia. He was trapped by the Parthian general Chosrhoes at Elegeia, beyond the Cappadocian frontiers. After unsuccessful efforts to engage the enemy, Severianus committed suicide and his legion was massacred. The whole campaign had lasted only three days. Over the winter of 161-162, it was decided that Lucius should direct the Parthian war in person. Marcus remained in Rome: the city, the argument ran, demanded the presence of an emperor. Critics decried Lucius's lifestyle in the east, saying he had taken to gambling and dining with actors. By 165, Roman forces had crossed deep into Mesopotamia, taking Nisibis, sacking the great city of Seleucia on the Tigris, and burning the royal palace at Ctesiphon. Then Cassius Dio's army contracted plague in Seleucia. The Antonine Plague had started in Mesopotamia in 165 or 166, at the end of Lucius's Parthian campaign. The physician Galen, who was in Rome when it spread to the city in 166, recorded its symptoms: fever, diarrhoea, inflammation of the pharynx, and pustular eruptions of the skin after nine days. Historians believe the disease was smallpox. Five to ten million people died across the Roman Empire. Lucius Verus himself may have died from it in 169, falling ill on the road back from Aquileia. On the northern frontier, the Marcomanni of Bohemia crossed the Danube in 166, joined by the Lombards and other Germanic tribes. The Iranian Iazyges attacked between the Danube and the Theiss rivers. The Costoboci came from the Carpathian area and invaded Moesia, Macedonia, and Greece. After a long struggle Marcus pushed the invaders back. He made his son Commodus one of his heirs on the 12th of October 166.

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• 6. The Meditations

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  Between 170 and 180, while conducting military campaigns on the northern frontier, Marcus wrote his Meditations in Greek. He wrote them as a source of personal guidance, with no evident intention to publish. The original title, if the work had one, is unknown; 'Meditations' was a name adopted later. The oldest surviving complete manuscript copy is in the Vatican library and dates to the 14th century. The first known printed edition appeared in 1558 in Zurich, published by Wilhelm Xylander from a manuscript that was reportedly lost shortly afterwards. The first surviving references to the work in ancient sources come from Arethas of Caesarea in the 10th century. Despite surviving in narrow scholarly channels for centuries, the book eventually found readers across very different worlds. Frederick the Great, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and Goethe each counted it among their favourites. In 2012, the book sold 16,000 copies. In 2019, that number had risen to 100,000 copies. Herodian, a historian writing in antiquity, identified what made Marcus unusual among emperors: 'Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.' That verdict is harder to earn than it sounds, coming from a tradition that produced men like Commodus and Caligula.

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• 7. Legacy in Bronze and Stone

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  Marcus Aurelius died on the 17th of March 180, at the age of 58, of unknown causes, in his military quarters near Vindobona or Sirmium. He was immediately deified and his ashes were returned to Rome, where they rested in Hadrian's mausoleum until the Visigoth sack of the city in 410. The column erected to commemorate his victories over the Sarmatians and Germanic tribes was completed in 193 and still stands. A spiral of carved reliefs winds around it, showing scenes from the campaigns. A statue of Marcus once stood at its top but disappeared during the Middle Ages; Pope Sixtus V replaced it with a statue of Saint Paul in 1589. The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius is the only Roman equestrian statue to have survived into the modern era. Cast around 175 and standing 11.6 feet tall, it is now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The emperor's hand is outstretched in an act of clemency toward a defeated enemy, while his facial expression carries what scholars describe as weariness from nearly constant war. Cassius Dio, who lived through the transition to Commodus, recorded a eulogy to Marcus that ended with grief: 'Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day.' Iain King, writing much later, put the contradiction plainly: Marcus's Stoic philosophy, which is about self-restraint, duty, and respect for others, was abandoned by the very imperial line he chose to anoint at his death.

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