Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 until his death in 180, and a Stoic philosopher.¹ He was born in Rome on 26 April 121, and he was the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors.¹ He spent years at war on the empire's northern frontier, and he is remembered today for one small book that was never meant for us: a private notebook, written in Greek, that we call the Meditations.^1,2

Heir to an empire

His father died when he was about three, and he was brought up by his mother and his grandfather.¹ The book opens with what he owed them. «Παρὰ τοῦ πάππου Οὐήρου τὸ καλόηθες καὶ ἀόργητον», “From my grandfather Verus: a good character and a temper free from anger” (our translation).³ In 138 the emperor Hadrian chose Marcus' uncle, Antoninus Pius, as his heir, and Antoninus in turn adopted Marcus and a younger boy, Lucius.¹ Marcus was taught to speak in public by the best orators of the day, in Greek by Herodes Atticus and in Latin by Fronto.¹ But philosophy drew him away from oratory, and of his teachers the Stoic Junius Rusticus had the strongest influence on him.¹

Marcus thanks Rusticus in the book. Rusticus taught him to stay away from rhetoric and poetry, and gave him the chance to read «τοῖς Ἐπικτητείοις ὑπομνήμασιν, ὧν οἴκοθεν μετέδωκεν», “the notes of Epictetus' teaching, which he shared with me from his own house” (our translation).⁴ The Meditations show the influence of Stoicism and above all of Epictetus, a Stoic teacher who had been a slave; Marcus quotes his Discourses a number of times, and Haines called Epictetus his “true spiritual father”.^2,5

Emperor at war

When Antoninus died in 161, Marcus took the throne together with his adoptive brother, who reigned as Lucius Verus. Lucius died in 169, perhaps of the plague, and Marcus ruled alone.^1,2 It was a reign of wars. In the east the Romans fought Parthia; in the north, from about 166 until 180, Marcus fought the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Iazyges along the Danube, in what are called the Marcomannic Wars.^1,6 At the same time a great epidemic, the Antonine Plague, broke out in 165 or 166; the doctor Galen was in Rome when it reached the city in 166.¹ From 177 Marcus shared the throne with his son Commodus.¹

Debated among scholars He died on 17 March 180, at the age of fifty-eight, in his military quarters, either at Vindobona (Vienna) or near Sirmium (in modern Serbia): the ancient sources disagree.¹ The historian Herodian, writing in the next century, tells how the old emperor, worn out by age, toil and care, fell gravely ill among the Pannonians, called his friends to his bedside and commended his young son to them; then «νυκτός τε καὶ ἡμέρας ἐπιβιώσας μιᾶς ἀνεπαύσατο», “he lived on one night and one day, and was at rest” (our translation).⁷

A notebook “to himself”

The book has no title of its own making. The Greek title it carries now, Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, “the things to himself”, comes from a manuscript now lost and may have been added later; it is first recorded about 900.^2,8 It was very probably never meant to be published.⁸ C. R. Haines, who edited it for the Loeb series in 1916, called it “this small but priceless book of private devotional memoranda”.⁵ Marcus may even name it himself, when he scolds himself: «οὔτε γὰρ τὰ ὑπομνημάτιά σου μέλλεις ἀναγινώσκειν», “you are not going to read your little notes” (our translation); Haines thought he might mean this very book.^5,9

It runs to twelve books of short entries, from a single line to a page or two.⁸ Most are loose jottings, in no clear order; Book 1, a list of what he owed to his family, his teachers and the gods, is different: it was probably written as a whole, and perhaps separately from the rest.^2,5 Professor Schenkl even thought it was written last, as an introduction to the rest.⁵

Debated among scholars Two short notes tie the notebook to the war. At the end of Book 1 stands «Τὰ ἐν Κουάδοις πρὸς τῷ Γρανούᾳ», “Among the Quadi, on the Granua” (our translation), a river now called the Hron, in Slovakia.^8,10 At the end of Book 2 stands «Τὰ ἐν Καρνούντῳ», “At Carnuntum”, the place near Vienna where Marcus had his headquarters in the war.^5,11 Scholars date the writing differently: Wikipedia says between 170 and 180, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy about 171 to 175.^1,2 C. R. Haines noted that Marcus' headquarters were at Carnuntum from 171 to 173.⁵

What it is like to read

The Greek is plain and abrupt; Haines found that words sometimes have to be supplied to complete the sense.^5,8 Marcus wrote ordinary educated Greek, not the polished old Attic of the orators, because he was not writing for anyone else.⁸ Much of it is advice to himself, often in the form of a command. Book 2 opens with a morning exercise: «Ἕωθεν προλέγειν ἑαυτῷ· συντεύξομαι περιέργῳ, ἀχαρίστῳ, ὑβριστῇ, δολερῷ, βασκάνῳ, ἀκοινωνήτῳ», “Say to yourself at dawn: I shall meet the meddling, the ungrateful, the insolent, the treacherous, the envious, the unsociable” (our translation). None of them can harm him, he goes on, «γεγόναμεν γὰρ πρὸς συνεργίαν ὡς πόδες, ὡς χεῖρες», “for we were born to work together, like feet, like hands” (our translation).¹²

Some mornings were harder: «ἐπὶ ἀνθρώπου ἔργον ἐγείρομαι», “I am getting up to do the work of a human being”, he tells himself when he would rather stay under the blankets (our translation).¹³ He uses the Stoics' technical words. Whatever I am, he says, I am a little flesh, a little breath, and «τὸ ἡγεμονικόν», the “ruling part”; and he adds, «γέρων εἶ», “you are an old man” (our translation).¹⁴ The dictionary of Liddell, Scott and Jones explains the Stoic sense of the word: “the authoritative part of the soul (reason)”.¹⁵

People look for retreats in the country, by the sea, in the mountains, he writes, when at any hour you like you can «εἰς ἑαυτὸν ἀναχωρεῖν», “withdraw into yourself”; and he gives himself two thoughts to carry there, ending «ὁ κόσμος ἀλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις», “The universe is change; life is opinion” (our translation).¹⁶ Life itself is «πόλεμος καὶ ξένου ἐπιδημία», “a war and a stranger's stay abroad” (our translation).¹¹

He knew the danger of his own position. «Ὅρα μὴ ἀποκαισαρωθῇς, μὴ βαφῇς», “See that you are not turned into a Caesar, that you are not dyed with it” (our translation).¹⁷ The dictionary knows the verb from this line alone, and βάπτω, the root of the second, means to dip or to dye.¹⁵ A few lines later comes «βραχὺς ὁ βίος», “life is short”.¹⁷ The last entry of the book pictures death as a comic actor dismissed from the stage after three acts instead of five, and closes: «ἄπιθι οὖν ἵλεως· καὶ γὰρ ὁ ἀπολύων ἵλεως», “So go, and go kindly: for the one who releases you is kind” (our translation).¹⁸

Debated among scholars Is it philosophy? Marcus never calls himself a Stoic in the book, and he is open to ideas from other schools.² John Sellars, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, grants that “from a modern perspective” Marcus is “certainly not in the first rank of ancient philosophers”. But he reads the book, as some other scholars do, as a series of written exercises meant to train the writer's own mind in the Stoic way of life; Pierre Hadot found a key to it in Epictetus' three areas of training.²

Why he matters

The ancient world already remembered him as the philosopher on the throne. Herodian says that «μόνος τε βασιλέων φιλοσοφίαν οὐ λόγοις οὐδὲ δογμάτων γνώσεσι, σεμνῷ δ’ ἤθει καὶ σώφρονι βίῳ ἐπιστώσατο», “alone among emperors he proved his philosophy not by words or by knowing doctrines, but by a serious character and a temperate life” (our translation).⁷ His bronze statue on horseback, made about 175 and now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, is almost the only Roman equestrian bronze to have survived; it was spared because people took it for Constantine, the Christian emperor.^1,25 And his notebook found readers he could never have imagined: Frederick the Great, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Goethe loved it, and in 2019 it sold 100,000 copies.¹