Who Was Marcus Aurelius? The Emperor Who Wrote to Himself

Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD. He was the last of what has been called the Five Good Emperors, the period of the empire’s greatest extent and stability. He ruled an empire of perhaps fifty to seventy million people, from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Sahara. He was simultaneously the most powerful man in the world and, by any account we have of him, deeply reluctant to be so.

The book we call The Meditations was written during the last decade of his reign, much of it on military campaigns along the Danube frontier, fighting the Marcomanni and Quadi tribes in a series of exhausting wars he had inherited and could not end. It was written in Greek, which was the language of philosophy and education in the Roman world, and was set down in private notebooks never intended for publication. He titled it nothing. It was addressed to nobody. As Derren Brown observes in his Rebind commentary on the book, “the whole strength of this book is you’re dealing with someone trying to make sense of their own insecurities and difficulties and the challenges of this extraordinary life.”

The Emperor Who Didn’t Want the Job

Marcus was adopted by the emperor Antoninus Pius at the instruction of the emperor before him, Hadrian, who had identified him as the most capable man available. He was seventeen. He didn’t seek the position and, by the evidence of The Meditations, spent much of his reign reminding himself why the trappings of power were not what they appeared.

His court was full of flatterers and the self-serving language of imperial praise was simply part of the atmosphere. That Marcus refused to participate in it, even in private, is what makes the book so unusual. “Not only is he the most powerful man in the world,” Brown says, “but the language — the self-flattering, self-serving language historically of these emperors — was just absolutely par for the course. So it’s really unusual that he isn’t entertaining all of that, even in these private notes to himself.” He lived simply, dressed like a citizen, and tried to avoid the ceremonial pomp of his role. It made him, Brown notes, uniquely loved among the emperors.

The World He Was Ruling

The reign of Marcus Aurelius was not the tranquil philosophical idyll his reputation sometimes suggests. He came to power sharing the throne with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus (the first co-emperors in Roman history) and within a year they were at war with Parthia in the east. The returning soldiers brought back a plague that swept through the empire for the next fifteen years, killing perhaps five million people. The Antonine Plague, as it is now known, was likely smallpox.

While the plague was running, the northern frontier collapsed. The Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes crossed the Danube in force, something that had not happened in living memory, and Marcus spent the last twelve years of his life on campaign, dying on the Danube frontier in 180 AD, never having finished the wars he had inherited.

This is the context in which The Meditations was written: not in a philosopher’s study but in a military tent, by a man dealing with plague, war, and the daily administration of the largest empire the Western world had seen. The passages about equanimity and acceptance were written by someone who had genuine reason to need them.

The Education of an Emperor

Marcus was educated by the finest teachers Rome could provide. His tutor in rhetoric was Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the most celebrated orator of the age, whose correspondence with Marcus survives and gives a picture of a warm, slightly pedantic teacher and an exceptionally conscientious student. His philosophical education came through several teachers, but the decisive influence was Quintus Junius Rusticus, who gave him a copy of the Discourses of Epictetus (the freed slave who became the most influential Stoic teacher of the first century) and who is credited in Book One of The Meditations as the person who made Marcus realize his life needed change and improvement.

Epictetus is the key figure behind The Meditations. Marcus quotes him, paraphrases him, and returns to his central ideas again and again. The dichotomy between what is within our control and what isn’t was Epictetus’s formulation. Brown, in his Rebind commentary, describes the chain of influence with characteristic precision: Montaigne led him to the Stoics, the Stoics led him to Epictetus, Epictetus leads back to Marcus, and The Meditations is what you get when a man who has thoroughly absorbed that tradition sits down alone at night and tries to remind himself of what he already knows.

The Book That Survived

We do not know how The Meditations survived. It was a private document, never circulated in Marcus’s lifetime. The earliest surviving manuscript dates from the tenth or eleventh century, more than eight hundred years after Marcus’s death. At some point, someone in the imperial household or its archives decided to preserve it, or simply failed to destroy it when they might have.

The title is not Marcus’s. The original Greek title, where it appears in manuscript traditions, is something like “To Himself” which is the most accurate. The Meditations is what it has been called in English since at least the seventeenth century, and the name has stuck.

What survived is, as Brown puts it, a much more colorful version of what all of us are going through in much smaller ways. The wars and plagues are outside most of our experience. The difficulty of being the person we want to be, in the face of all the things that keep getting in the way: that is not.