Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher whose private notebook, known as the Meditations, has become one of the most widely read works of practical ethics in the world. He ruled the empire at a time of plague, war and financial strain, and his reflections on duty, mortality and self-discipline are the record of a ruler trying to live by his principles.

Life and Accession

Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in AD 121 into a distinguished senatorial family of Spanish origin. He attracted the notice of the emperor Hadrian, who called him Verissimus, most true, and arranged for his education by the finest teachers of the day, including the rhetorician Fronto and the Stoic philosopher Rusticus. From Rusticus he learned to value philosophy and to distrust display.

Hadrian's successor Antoninus Pius adopted Marcus in AD 138, and he was prepared for power over more than two decades of apprenticeship. On the death of Antoninus in AD 161, Marcus insisted that his adoptive brother Lucius Verus share the throne, an arrangement without precedent that lasted until Verus's death in 169. The joint rule was uneasy but preserved the stability of the succession.

His reign was almost continuously troubled. A great plague, brought back by the army from the east, swept the empire; wars were fought on the Danube frontier against Germanic and Sarmatian peoples; and in the east a revolt by the governor Avidius Cassius in 175 briefly threatened the throne. Marcus spent the last decade of his life largely in camp, directing the defence of the frontier.

The Meditations

The Meditations, titled To Himself in the manuscripts, are private notes composed in Greek while Marcus was on campaign. They consist of short passages of self-address, reminders of Stoic doctrine, and reflections on particular people and events. They were not intended for publication, and their intimate, unpolished character is part of their power.

The central themes are the transience of life, the vanity of fame, and the duty to act well regardless of the outcome. The emperor reminds himself that he will soon die, that those who praise him will also die, and that the only thing truly his own is his present judgement. Nothing, he writes, is more wretched than a life spent chasing the applause of people who will not remember you.

The work presents the Stoic cosmos as a single rational order in which everything that happens is either part of nature's plan or a consequence of it. To be angry at events, Marcus argues, is to rebel against nature; to accept them and to act justly within them is freedom. These reflections gave the Meditations a consoling power that has kept them in print for nearly two thousand years.

Stoic Philosophy in Practice

Marcus understood Stoicism not as a theory to be expounded but as a discipline to be practised. The four cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance organise his ethical reflections, and he repeatedly examines his own conduct against them. He treats philosophy as medicine for the soul, to be applied daily against the passions of anger, fear and desire.

He was especially concerned with the management of anger and with the difficulty of dealing with difficult people. In one of the most quoted passages he advises himself to begin each day by anticipating encounters with the meddling, the ungrateful and the arrogant, and to remember that they act from ignorance of the good and are, like himself, part of the same rational community.

His conception of duty was civic and universal. He saw himself as a member of a cosmopolis, a world community of rational beings, and held that the good of the whole takes precedence over private advantage. The emperor's own life of unremitting public service, undertaken despite poor health and constant war, gave his words a weight that purely academic philosophy could not.

Rule and the Danubian Wars

Much of Marcus's reign was consumed by warfare on the northern frontier. The Marcomannic and Quadi peoples pressed across the Danube, and the emperor led campaigns against them in person, winning a series of victories and beginning the creation of new provinces beyond the river. His sudden death at Vindobona in 180 cut short the work, and his son Commodus abandoned it.

The burden of rule weighed heavily on him, and the Meditations frequently acknowledge the tension between the demands of office and the desire for contemplation. He accepted the task as a duty imposed by providence and performed it without enthusiasm for power. This combination of high office and personal austerity made him, for later ages, the ideal of the philosopher king.

The plague that raged through the empire during his reign, and the financial and military pressures it created, tested the institutions of the principate severely. Marcus responded with administrative reforms, the sale of imperial treasures to fund the wars, and the enrolment of slaves and gladiators in the army. His reign marks the end of the long peace of the second century.

Death and Enduring Influence

Marcus Aurelius died in 180 at Sirmium or Vindobona, on the Danubian frontier, after a reign of nineteen years. He was succeeded by his son Commodus, whose misrule ended the era of the adoptive emperors and opened the troubles of the third century. The choice to bequeath power to his son rather than to the best candidate has been much criticised.

The Meditations survived by a slender thread, known only to a few readers in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and were first printed in the sixteenth century. Since then they have been translated into dozens of languages and read as a manual of self-discipline by statesmen, soldiers and ordinary people. Their influence on modern Stoic revival and on popular philosophy has been profound.

He is remembered as the last of the Five Good Emperors and as the most personal of the Stoic writers. His reign combined military strain, plague and administrative reform with a private life of remarkable moral seriousness, and his notebook remains the fullest account we have of a ruler trying to govern himself as rigorously as he governed the empire. He is, in the phrase of a later age, the philosopher on the throne.

See also

• Stoicism
• Epictetus
• Antoninus Pius
• Commodus