Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 CE and the most famous Stoic philosopher of antiquity. His reign, the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors, was dominated by war on the frontiers and by a devastating epidemic, and he spent much of it on campaign along the Danube. In the evenings of those years he wrote private notes in Greek, known today as the Meditations, which have become one of the most widely read works of ancient philosophy.

He was born Marcus Annius Verus in Rome on 26 April 121, into a wealthy and well-connected family of Spanish origin. His father died when he was about three, and he was brought up by his mother, Domitia Lucilla, and his grandfather. The emperor Hadrian noticed the serious boy early and, punning on his family name, called him Verissimus, "most truthful".

In 138 Hadrian, childless and ill, chose Antoninus as his heir on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt two young men: Marcus, then sixteen, and Lucius Ceionius Commodus, later known as Lucius Verus. When Hadrian died a few months later, Antoninus, soon called Pius, became emperor, and Marcus was groomed for the succession. He held his first consulship in 140, married Antoninus's daughter Faustina the Younger in 145, and was granted the powers of a co-ruler in 147. The couple had at least thirteen children, many of whom died young.

Marcus was taught by the best teachers of the day. The rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto trained him in Latin oratory, and their affectionate correspondence survives in part; the Athenian millionaire Herodes Atticus taught him Greek rhetoric. In his mid-twenties, however, he turned increasingly to philosophy. His Stoic teacher Junius Rusticus lent him the lectures of Epictetus, which shaped his thinking more than any other book. In the first book of the Meditations Marcus lists, one by one, what he learned from his family and teachers, a rare personal record from an ancient ruler.

Antoninus Pius died on 7 March 161. Marcus succeeded him and immediately insisted that his adoptive brother Lucius Verus be made co-emperor with equal titles, the first time the Roman Empire was formally ruled by two emperors at once. Marcus, however, remained the senior partner.

Trouble came almost at once. Vologases IV of the Parthian Empire invaded Armenia and defeated a Roman army. Lucius was sent east, and Roman forces under the general Avidius Cassius pushed deep into Mesopotamia, sacking the Parthian capital Ctesiphon and the city of Seleucia in 165. The war ended in Roman victory, but the returning army brought with it an epidemic, the Antonine Plague, probably smallpox, which spread across the empire from 165 or 166 and returned in waves for years. Modern estimates of the death toll vary widely, from a few million to perhaps a tenth of the population or more.

While the empire was weakened, Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the Danube, led by the Marcomanni and Quadi, crossed the frontier. Around 170 they broke into northern Italy, besieged Aquileia and destroyed the town of Opitergium, the first invasion of Italy by a foreign enemy in more than two centuries. Lucius Verus died in 169, leaving Marcus as sole emperor. To pay for the war he auctioned treasures from the imperial palace rather than raise new taxes, and recruited slaves and gladiators into the army.

For most of the 170s Marcus lived in military camps on the Danube, at Carnuntum near modern Bratislava and at Sirmium in today's Serbia. The fighting was hard and repetitive. The column he later set up in Rome, still standing in the Piazza Colonna, shows scenes from these campaigns, including a rainstorm said to have saved a Roman army from thirst.

In 175 Avidius Cassius, now governor of the eastern provinces, proclaimed himself emperor after a false report of Marcus's death, possibly encouraged by Faustina. The revolt collapsed within three months when Cassius was killed by his own officers. Marcus toured the eastern provinces afterwards, and Faustina died on the journey. In 176 he visited Athens, was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and funded professorships for the four main schools of philosophy there: Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean.

Marcus was not a persecutor by policy, but local persecutions of Christians took place during his reign. The apologist Justin Martyr was executed in Rome around 165, and in 177 a group of Christians was killed in the arena at Lugdunum, modern Lyon. In the Meditations he mentions Christians only once, briefly and with disapproval.

In 177 he made his son Commodus co-emperor. Marcus returned to the Danube for a second round of war, and died on 17 March 180, either at Vindobona, today's Vienna, or near Sirmium. Commodus, then eighteen, made peace with the northern peoples and returned to Rome, where his erratic and violent reign ended in assassination in 192. Ancient and modern historians have criticised Marcus for choosing a son over an able adopted heir, as his predecessors since Trajan had done, although he had a surviving son and few realistic alternatives.

The Meditations, whose Greek title means something like "To Himself", consist of twelve books of notes, some only a sentence long, written over many years and probably never meant for publication. They are exercises in self-persuasion: Marcus reminds himself, again and again, of the Stoic principles taught by Zeno of Citium and Epictetus.

Several themes recur. The universe is a single, rational whole governed by providence, and everything that happens belongs to its order. Human beings share in this reason, which makes all people kin and obliges us to work for the common good, even when others behave badly. Only virtue is truly good; fame, pleasure and power are passing and worthless, and the emperor reminds himself not to be turned into a Caesar, dyed purple by his office. Life is brief and death natural, a return of our elements to the whole. We cannot control events, but we can control our judgements about them, and disturbance comes from those judgements rather than from things themselves.

The work is not an original philosophical system, and Marcus did not claim it was. Its power lies in its honesty: a man with almost unlimited power, tired, often ill and constantly at war, trying each day to be just, patient and calm.

Ancient historians remembered Marcus as a model ruler, and the historian Cassius Dio wrote that with his death the empire passed from an age of gold to one of iron and rust. Edward Gibbon later treated the period ending with his death as the happiest in human history, and began his account of the decline of Rome with the reign of Commodus. His bronze equestrian statue survived the Middle Ages because it was thought to show the Christian emperor Constantine, and its original now stands in the Capitoline Museums.

The Meditations were little known in the Middle Ages and first printed in 1559. Since then they have been read by statesmen, soldiers and general readers, and they are central to the modern revival of Stoicism. Marcus stands at the meeting point of Roman power and Hellenistic and Roman philosophy.