Marcus Aurelius

Introduction

Marcus Aurelius is the Roman emperor (161–180 CE) whose private philosophical notebooks, conventionally titled the Meditations, are the most-read single text in the practical Stoic tradition. He was the last of what Edward Gibbon famously called the Five Good Emperors and the only one among the major Roman intellectual figures to have actually exercised supreme political power. The Meditations were not written for publication; they are reflective notebooks Marcus kept for himself during the later years of his reign, much of which he spent on military campaign on the Danube frontier. Their survival is partly accidental and entirely consequential.

The Meditations are unusual among philosophical texts in that they show philosophy being used rather than taught. Marcus is not constructing arguments for an audience; he is reminding himself of doctrines he has accepted, applying them to the actual problems of his day (anger at incompetent subordinates, grief at the deaths of children, anxiety about his own mortality, the temptation to vanity in office), and using the writing itself as a form of practice.

Life

Marcus Annius Verus was born in 121 CE in Rome to an established aristocratic family of Spanish origin. His father died when he was a young child; he was raised by his grandfather and later by his mother Domitia Lucilla, whom he praises warmly in the Meditations. The emperor Hadrian, recognizing Marcus's seriousness in adolescence, arranged for him to be adopted by his successor Antoninus Pius, who in turn adopted Marcus as his heir. The succession plan kept Marcus close to the imperial center for the entire later part of his upbringing.

His education was unusually thorough, including extensive Greek philosophical training under the Stoic Junius Rusticus (who, the Meditations records, introduced Marcus to the discourses of Epictetus). On Antoninus's death in 161 CE, Marcus inherited the throne, insisting that his adoptive brother Lucius Verus rule as co-emperor — the first joint imperial arrangement in Roman history. Verus died in 169; Marcus reigned alone thereafter until his own death in 180.

The reign was difficult. The Antonine Plague (probably smallpox), brought back by armies returning from the eastern campaign, devastated the empire for over a decade. The Marcomannic Wars on the Danube frontier kept Marcus in the field for most of his last twelve years. He composed much of the Meditations during these campaigns; the surviving text marks several entries as written from the front. He died at the military camp of Vindobona (modern Vienna) in 180 CE, succeeded by his son Commodus, whose disastrous reign would end the long sequence of effective Antonine government.

The problem he worked on

The Meditations are not a treatise; they are a working notebook, and the problems they address are the problems of a particular life. The recurring themes:

How does one preserve the right relation to one's own mind under the conditions of supreme political power, with all its temptations to vanity, anger, sycophancy, and self-deception? How does one act well in office without coming to believe one is morally exceptional because of office? How does one prepare for one's own death without either denying it or being paralyzed by it? How does one work with subordinates who are venal, lazy, or stupid without becoming embittered? How does one maintain the practice of philosophy across decades of practical work?

These are the questions of a working executive, applied to a working executive. The Meditations are valuable not because Marcus produced new philosophical doctrine — he did not; his Stoicism is straightforwardly that of Epictetus and the Roman Stoic tradition — but because he shows the tradition in actual use against real conditions over many years.

Contributions

The cosmic perspective

A recurring move in the Meditations is what Pierre Hadot has called the view from above: deliberately considering one's circumstances from a perspective that includes the whole of nature, the whole of human history, the whole of the cosmic process. Cities seen from this height are anthills; the achievements of empires are the work of mice; the recent dead and the long-dead are alike gone, and so soon. The point is not nihilism but proportion: many of the things that disturb us look smaller when set against a horizon that includes everything.

Memento mori as practical discipline

The Meditations return constantly to the fact of Marcus's coming death. Far from morbid, the practice serves a specific ethical function: the awareness of finitude is what makes the present moment matter, and what dissolves the false urgency of vanity and ambition. You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think is the closing line of Meditations II.11. The discipline anticipates the modern existentialist treatment of being-toward-death by nearly two millennia.

Acceptance of what is

Amor fati — the love of fate — is the Stoic doctrine that what is, is the working of cosmic logos, and resentment of it is resentment of the rational structure of reality. Marcus applies this systematically: the people he must work with, the circumstances of his reign, the deaths of friends and children, his own decline — each of these is what is, and the discipline is to receive it without complaint and to act well within it. This is the conceptual ground for the Meditations' famous lack of self-pity despite the genuinely difficult circumstances of Marcus's life.

Role ethics applied to the imperial office

Following Epictetus, Marcus repeatedly returns to the question of what his various roles require: the role of a human being, of a Roman, of a citizen, of an emperor, of a friend. The Meditations show role analysis in continuous operation, with frequent reminders that the dignity of office is not a personal possession but a temporary loan, and that the right way to occupy the role is to do its work without becoming inflated by it.

Writing as practice

Perhaps the most underappreciated contribution: Marcus uses the act of writing as a Stoic exercise in the precise technical sense. The Meditations are not a record of completed thoughts; they are the working out of thoughts on the page. The genre that develops from this — the philosophical journal or commonplace book as a form of self-discipline — has had a continuous existence from Marcus through Montaigne's Essays, through Pascal's Pensées, through the journals of contemporary practitioners.

Key works

• Meditations (Greek title: Ta Eis Heauton, To Himself). Twelve books of varying length, composed during the later years of Marcus's reign, probably between 170 and 180 CE. The original title in Greek and the lack of any contemporary references suggest the work was not intended for publication and may have been preserved only through the deliberate effort of someone close to Marcus after his death.
• Personal correspondence with Marcus Cornelius Fronto, his rhetoric teacher and lifelong friend. The letters (rediscovered in the nineteenth century in a palimpsest at the Ambrosian Library in Milan) provide significant biographical context but do not contain substantial philosophical content.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Epictetus (the single most-cited figure in the Meditations); his teachers Junius Rusticus, Apollonius of Chalcedon, Sextus of Chaeronea, Maximus of Tyre, and Diognetus (each named with gratitude in Book I); the broader Stoic tradition through Chrysippus and Zeno; Heraclitus (frequently quoted); Plato (cited on the cosmic-perspective move).

Influenced: a remarkably broad range of later readers. The Meditations were preserved through the Byzantine period and reached the early modern West in the sixteenth century. Renaissance and early modern readers (Erasmus, Montaigne, Pascal) engaged the work seriously. Frederick the Great carried a copy on his military campaigns. Modern readers include Matthew Arnold (whose 1863 essay Marcus Aurelius is a classic Victorian treatment), Hannah Arendt, and a continuing line of contemporary writers from Pierre Hadot to Ryan Holiday.

Reception

The Meditations were unknown in late antiquity beyond a small circle. The earliest substantive reference is in the tenth-century encyclopedia of Arethas of Caesarea, who praised the text and may have been responsible for its initial preservation. The first printed edition (Greek with Latin translation) appeared in 1559, after which the work entered the canon of European moral reading.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a series of major reception moments. Matthew Arnold's 1863 essay placed Marcus alongside the great moralists. Ernest Renan's Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (1882) read the reign as the high point of pagan civilization before its collapse. Hannah Arendt drew on Marcus for her account of the vita activa. Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel (1992; English 1998) reframed the Meditations as a record of spiritual exercises in a tradition Hadot saw running through ancient philosophy generally; the reframing has been influential in contemporary continental philosophy and in the popular Stoic revival.

The popular contemporary reception, organized around Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic (with Stephen Hanselman, 2016) and The Obstacle Is the Way (2014), has made the Meditations one of the best-selling philosophical works in print, with millions of copies sold in the past decade.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel (1998), Christopher Gill's The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (2006) and his Loeb edition of the Meditations (2013), R.B. Rutherford's The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study (1989), and John Sellars's Marcus Aurelius (2020). The standard scholarly translations include Gill's (Loeb), A.S.L. Farquharson's (Oxford), and Gregory Hays's (Modern Library, 2002), the last of which has been particularly influential in the popular revival. The text remains a standard reference in contemporary work on Stoic ethics, ancient autobiography, and the philosophical journal as a literary form.

Further reading

• Stoicism — the tradition
• Epictetus — the teacher he learned from at second hand
• Meditations — the central text
• Logos — the cosmic structure the Meditations repeatedly invoke
• Ataraxia — the inner condition the Meditations aim at
• Virtue — the central ethical concept

The most-read Stoic text in continuous circulation. Philosophy shown in use, not in teaching.