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. He was born in Rome on 26 April 121, into a family of Spanish provincial origin already established in the senatorial aristocracy. His path to the throne was a matter of dynastic engineering. In 138 the emperor Hadrian, near death and without an heir of his body, settled the succession by adopting Antoninus Pius on the condition that Antoninus in turn adopt both the young Marcus and Lucius Verus — fixing two generations of succession in a single act. Marcus was thus raised inside the imperial house as its designated future, married to Antoninus’ daughter Faustina, and groomed for power across a long apprenticeship while Antoninus reigned for more than two decades.

He was schooled in rhetoric by Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the leading Latin orator of the age, whose correspondence with his pupil survives and shows an affection that outlasted their formal lessons. But Marcus turned in early adulthood toward philosophy, which he treated as the more serious calling, and the turn was decisive enough that Fronto’s letters register something like a teacher’s regret at losing him to it. The first book of the Meditations is a long catalog of debts — to his mother, his grandfather, his adoptive father, and a roll of teachers — and it is from that book that the line of his philosophical formation can be reconstructed: a discipline of conduct learned from Diognetus, plainness from Apollonius of Chalcedon, and, above all, the gift recorded under the name of Quintus Junius Rusticus.

Rusticus, his Stoic teacher and a man he twice raised to the consulship, is credited in that opening book with curing him of rhetorical vanity and putting into his hands the lectures of Epictetus — the freed slave whose oral teaching had been transcribed by his pupil Arrian as the Discourses. The debt is plain on nearly every page of what Marcus later wrote, which reads at points like a pupil rehearsing a master. This is the channel that matters most for understanding him: his Stoicism is not the system-building of the early school but the practical, ethical, hortatory Stoicism of the Roman imperial age, received at one remove through a teacher who had received it from a slave-born philosopher in Asia Minor. (For the school’s history and doctrine, see Stoicism; for the philosopher whose teaching reached him through Rusticus, the library holds Epictetus in P. E. Matheson’s translation.)

He came to the throne in 161 on the death of Antoninus Pius and at once departed from precedent by raising his adoptive brother to full partnership: Marcus and Lucius Verus ruled jointly as co-emperors, the first such arrangement in the principate’s history. Verus took the field against Parthia in the east, and the victorious legions returned in 166 carrying a pestilence — the Antonine Plague, most likely smallpox, which recurred for years and emptied cities and ranks alike. Verus died in 169, and from then Marcus ruled alone, spending much of his remaining life on the northern frontier prosecuting the Marcomannic Wars against the Germanic and Sarmatian peoples pressing across the Danube. It was on those campaigns, in the field, that he wrote the notebook. He died at the front, near the Danube, on 17 March 180, and was succeeded not by an adopted man of proven merit but by his own son, Commodus — whose disastrous reign would make Marcus, in the retrospective judgment of the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, the last of the “five good emperors,” and the hinge after which the Roman Empire’s long decline was traditionally dated to begin. He was the only one of those five whose inner life can still be read at first hand.

The notebook

What survives is not a treatise. The Meditations is a private working document, written in Greek (the language of philosophy, though Marcus’ first tongue was Latin), addressed to no reader, organized by no argument. It comes down in twelve books, of which the first stands apart as the catalog of debts; the rest are loose successions of entries — some a single line, some a short paragraph — returning compulsively to the same handful of themes. There is no evidence that Marcus intended any of it for other eyes, and the Greek title under which it travels, Ta eis heauton, registers exactly what it is: things addressed to himself. The repetition is the point. A man is reminding himself, in the few hours a campaign left him, of convictions he held but could not keep without rehearsal.

The doctrine those entries presuppose is Stoic and is taken as settled rather than argued for. The cosmos is a single ordered whole, governed throughout by a rational principle the Stoics called the logos — an immanent reason that is also the world’s nature and, in their physics, a kind of divine fire pervading all things. This was the inheritance the Stoics drew from Heraclitus, the Ephesian who first set the logos at the center of his account of the world and whom they claimed as a founder; in Marcus the term has been turned wholly toward conduct. From the rational order follows the rest. The only genuine good is virtue — wisdom, justice, courage, self-command — and the only genuine evil is its opposite; everything else (health, wealth, reputation, the body’s comfort, life itself) is, in the school’s hard vocabulary, “indifferent,” outside the self’s true good and so not worth disturbing the mind. Peace is reached by drawing, again and again, the line between what lies within one’s power and what does not, and withdrawing the will from everything on the far side of it. The discipline of the present moment runs through the book: the past is gone and the future not yet, so the only thing a person ever actually has to manage is the instant in hand. And because all rational beings share in the one logos, all are fellow citizens of a single cosmic city — the cosmopolitan strain that lets an emperor write, without irony, that he is a member of the human community before he is a Roman.

Two cross-currents recur and are never fully resolved, which is itself characteristic of the man’s honesty. One is the question the Stoics framed as “providence or atoms” — whether the world is the ordered work of reason or a chance concourse of particles. Marcus returns to it repeatedly and, more often than not, declines to settle it, observing that the discipline of life holds either way: if reason governs, submit to it; if atoms, govern yourself. The other is death, to which the notebook comes back with a frequency that has struck many readers as the recurring pressure beneath the whole. He rehearses it as a natural dissolution, the change of all things into all things, neither to be sought nor feared — and the very insistence of the rehearsal betrays how much the lesson cost him.

A book read two ways

That is what gives the work its strange standing. It is not a defense of Stoicism but a record of someone trying to live it — fragmentary, repetitive, returning endlessly to the brevity of life and the discipline of attention. Readers have taken it in opposite directions. To one tradition it is the supreme example of philosophy carried into practice at the very summit of worldly power: a man who held the largest office the ancient world afforded, and used his philosophy not to justify it but to discipline himself within it, sounds in these pages exactly like a man trying to be good at a job that offered every temptation not to be. The twentieth-century historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot read the Meditations in just this key — as a sustained set of spiritual exercises, the written rehearsal of Stoic dogmas by which Marcus worked to keep the soul as what Hadot called an inner citadel, a stronghold of freedom no external blow could breach. To another tradition the same text is the diary of an exhausted man talking himself through each day, weighed by command, ill health, and grief, finding in his philosophy less a triumph than a way to bear what could not be changed. Both readings find support in the text, and the friction between them is much of why it is still read.

The book’s later fortunes turned on a thin manuscript thread. It went largely unmentioned for centuries; what circulates today descends in the main from two witnesses. One is a now-lost manuscript that lay behind the first printed edition, the editio princeps prepared by Wilhelm Xylander and printed at Zurich in 1559 at the prompting of the Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner — the edition that gave the Renaissance its Marcus and that survives only in its print, the manuscript itself having vanished. The other is the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1950, a fourteenth- century copy that is the only complete Greek manuscript to come down whole. Between a lost book printed once and a single surviving copy, the text we read is recovered from a narrow base — which makes its near-completeness, against the total loss of the founders’ works, the more remarkable.

His place among the contemplatives

His standing in later esoteric and contemplative reception is more a matter of affinity than of lineage, and the distinction is worth keeping sharp. The Meditations belongs to the same broad current — Greek philosophy turned toward the conduct and care of the soul — that also fed the Platonism and Neoplatonism of the following centuries; its exercises of attention, self-examination, and the rehearsed disengagement from externals have struck many later readers as kin to contemplative discipline. But the kinship is structural, not genealogical. Marcus was not a Platonist and built no metaphysics of ascent; the Stoic cosmos he inhabits is corporeal and immanent, with no realm of separate Forms above it and no soul climbing out of the world toward the One. The resemblance later readers felt is the resemblance of two philosophies that both treated thought as something one does to oneself, daily, for the sake of how one lives. Within ancient Roman religion he was a conventional and dutiful figure, observing the public cult an emperor was obliged to maintain; the providence his notebook addresses is the impersonal reason of the Stoa, closer to the rational order argued by his Roman predecessor Cicero — who carried Greek philosophy into Latin a century earlier — than to any cult of the gods of the state. A contemporary wonder-worker such as Apollonius of Tyana, to whom later ages assigned miracles and a Pythagorean holiness, moved in a wholly different register; nothing in the Meditations reaches for the marvelous.

He claimed no revelation and worked no signs. What he left is plainer, and in its way harder to dismiss than either the philosopher’s portrait or the mystic’s: the working notes of a man holding himself to a standard he did not expect to meet.

Texts, transmission, and scholarship

The Greek text rests on the two witnesses described above — the lost manuscript behind Xylander’s 1559 Zurich editio princeps and the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1950 — together with later excerpt manuscripts. The standard modern critical editions are those of Heinrich Schenkl, Marci Antonini imperatoris in semet ipsum libri XII (Teubner, Leipzig, 1913), and Jan Hendrik Leopold (Teubner, 1908); the Leopold Greek text is freely readable in the Perseus Digital Library. In English the durable public-domain renderings are Meric Casaubon’s of 1634 — the first into English, a historic curiosity — and, far more influential, George Long’s The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (1862), which remains the most-circulated translation and is hosted in full at Project Gutenberg and, in a corrected edition, at Standard Ebooks. C. R. Haines’s facing-Greek Loeb, The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1916), now in the public domain, is the most useful PD edition for readers who want the original alongside, and is mounted complete at Wikisource. Among current scholarly translations and commentaries the standard reference is Christopher Gill’s Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, Books 1–6 (Oxford, 2013).

The interpretive literature is anchored by Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (French 1992; English trans. Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998), which reads the work as a structured program of Stoic spiritual exercises organized around Epictetus’ three “disciplines” of judgment, desire, and action; and by the work on Epictetus that situates Marcus’ source, above all A. A. Long’s Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2002). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Marcus Aurelius gives a careful philosophical account of how the Meditations stages the difficulty of actually living the doctrine it assumes. For the documentary record of the reign, as against the inner record of the notebook, the principal ancient sources are the history of Cassius Dio and the much less reliable Vita Marci of the late- antique Historia Augusta; the latter is readable in English in the LacusCurtius collection of Roman texts.

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

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Ancient Roman Religion · Logos · Stoicism · Heraclitus · Cicero · Roman Empire · Soul · Plato