Marcus Aurelius

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180 CE) was Roman emperor from 161 until his death and a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, known chiefly for a set of private notes he kept for himself and never meant to publish. The reign was consequential — wars on the Danube, plague carried home by the armies, the burden of an empire at its furthest extent — but his lasting fame rests almost entirely on that notebook, which survives under the Greek title Ta eis heauton, “to himself,” and circulates in English as the Meditations.

The historical figure is unusually well documented for the period. Adopted into the ruling family under Hadrian’s arrangements, he was schooled in rhetoric by Marcus Cornelius Fronto, whose letters to him survive, and turned in early adulthood toward philosophy, which he treated as the more serious calling. He ruled at first jointly with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus and was succeeded by his son Commodus. He was the last of the emperors that a later age would group admiringly as the “five good emperors,” and the only one whose inner life can still be read at first hand.

His Stoicism came down through a particular line. The teacher Quintus Junius Rusticus is credited with putting into his hands the lectures of Epictetus, the freed slave whose Discourses the library holds in Matheson’s translation; the debt is plain on nearly every page of the Meditations, which reads at points like a pupil rehearsing a master. Stoicism held that the cosmos is ordered by a rational principle, the logos, that the only genuine good is virtue, and that peace is reached by distinguishing what lies within one’s power from what does not. The Meditations takes those doctrines as settled and applies them inward, again and again, to the writer’s own irritation, vanity, and fear of death.

That is what gives the book its strange standing. It is not a treatise arguing for Stoicism but a record of someone trying to live it — fragmentary, repetitive, addressed to no one, returning compulsively to the brevity of life and the discipline of the present moment. Readers have taken it in opposite ways: as the model of philosophy carried into practice at the summit of worldly power, and as the diary of a tired man talking himself through each day. Both readings find support in the text, and the tension between them is much of why it is still read.

His place in later esoteric and contemplative reception is more by affinity than by lineage. The Meditations belongs to the same broad current — Greek philosophy turned toward the conduct of the soul — that fed the Platonism of the following century, and its exercises of attention and self-examination have struck many later readers as close kin to contemplative practice. He was not a mystic and claimed no revelation. What he left is plainer and, in its way, harder to dismiss: the working notes of a man holding himself to a standard he did not expect to meet.

→ In the library: Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (Matheson, 1916)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Ancient Roman Religion · Logos