4 Marcus Aurelius And His Times
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
tellectual sermons to youth. The writer of these "reflections" is an emperor, a general, a man who has known the great world and seen through it, who has had power and felt the obligations and the futilities that come with it. The meditations are the writings of a conscientious public man who would have preferred, it is clear, the life of philosopher in his study or a hermit in the desert to that of the purple and the scepter. They are the reflections of a hard-working ruler in a crumbling world, persuading himself that all is for the best and that one must do one's duty as fate has ordained it, play one's part, be it that of an emperor or that of a slave.
For the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, there is every reason to believe, were meditations, written by the emperor to comfort himself while he was a general conducting an ultimately victorious but difficult campaign in a long discouraging war.
It is a book we overhear rather than read.
It is the voice of an eminently placed, lonely man talking to himself to keep up his courage, trying to persuade himself that if all goes wrong, it cannot be too disastrous to a free spirit, nor if all goes well, can success be distracting to an independent mind. Part of the suasion of this book over the centuries, one suspects, is the sense that readers in later ages have had of almost eavesdropping on the solitary reflections of an honest and dedicated spirit fighting its way—and warfare is also one of Marcus' favorite metaphors—to an inward security and peace. The Meditations have been the bedside reading of other great administrators and men of affairs, cardinals and premiers and kings, of those who in the midst of great commitments and great events have felt it necessary to make a treaty of understanding with themselves and with the universe. Matthew Arnold read them when he was a harassed school official.
The reader needs to bear in mind who was the author of these reflections designed to guard one's integrity and inner peace in both prosperity and misfortune, in what sort of
Introduction to Marcus Aurelius
world he was writing. Why the tone of resolution rather than content, of resignation rather than joyous acceptance?
Marcus Aurelius was born and bred to the purple.
He was born in Rome in 1 2 1 a.d. His uncle and adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, was a good emperor, and Marcus Aurelius had the careful education of one intended to be a future good emperor also. One of the touching things in the early part of the Meditations is the obviously sincere gratitude with which this high-bred Stoic thanks Providence for his good grandfather, good parents, good sister, associates, relatives and friends, and his sense of the shining example of his emperor uncle. He had good teachers, too, and in rhetoric an especially talented one, Cornelius Fronto. At the age of eleven, he dedicated himself to religion, for philosophy all his life was with him a kind of religion, the true inward religion that lay behind the rites and ceremonies of the imperial religion which he was careful and content to observe. He studied law and he studied arms. He had the education of an imperial Roman gentleman, but of a gentleman who felt something missing in the outward show and in the outer world, and felt ultimately that peace, if not happiness (which was impossible) lay in oneself. He was doubtless confirmed in this by his teacher of philosophy, later his advisor, Q. Junius Rusticus. About 146 he married his cousin,
Faustina, the daughter of the emperor, and in 147 he had a daughter by her.
If scandalmongering historians are to be believed, his wife did not give him great cause to believe in goodness in women, but he apparently would not know or did not know of infidelities in her that were notorious to others.
Marcus ruled as a partner emperor with the other adopted son of his uncle, one commonly known as Verus. Verus was by no means the conscientious ruler that Marcus was; he was an Epicurean by nature and no philosopher at all. There were wars and pestilences during the reign, first, a Parthian
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
revolt in the East, then a pestilence. Then the Germans came across the Alps into Italy and a good part of the remainder of his life Marcus was engaged in directing or leading resistance to the invaders. From 169, after Verus' sudden death,
Marcus ruled alone.
In 179, during a campaign against the still invading barbarians, Marcus died. The emperor was deified and became a kind of saint. There is no evidence that Marcus was a great ruler, or a great, though he was a dogged, general. There is some evidence that he assented to, if he did not approve, the persecution of the Christians, of whose doctrines he does not seem to have known very much. The distinction of Marcus lies chiefly in his book and personality. It is a small book, but heroic in character and a classic of a certain recurrent human mood and philosophic temper.
It is also, like most classics, however universal its appeal across the centuries, expressive in its accent of the special lineaments and issues of its own era.
It was an age that without forcing parallels may be compared to our own. The old pattern of Roman civilization was showing signs of disintegration, the empire itself had its internal corruptions, especially in the reigns preceding those of Marcus' guardians. The empire, moreover, was besieged by external enemies, as was shown by the constant wars threatening it at its frontiers. The old state religion, to which Marcuc showed scrupulous respect, was threatened, too, by mere lip service on the part of the educated, and by the rise, so seriously and severely frowned upon by officialdom, of the new strangely epidemic Christian faith. To the educated man who no longer believed in the official religion, there was another recourse, philosophy, but here there were many winds of doctrine. The educated Romans turned to the Greek tradition, but the moral and political philosophy both of Plato and Aristotle were a tradition arising out of a pattern of a Greek city state long dead. The Epicureans
Introduction to Marcus Aurelius
offered nothing but a sense of the moderate and even then precarious pleasures to be derived in a world where all was the chance collocations of atoms.
It was a philosophy that might appeal to a few aesthetes; it could not persuade those burdened with a sense of responsibility and a feeling for empire. Nor could the older Greek Stoics suffice. Their concept of the absolute wise man, and his unbending conception of detachment from affairs could not appeal to men who were above all men of affairs, men of public affairs. Nor could the older Stoic concern with the fine distinctions of logic and physics offer a solace for men troubled by the entanglements and commitments of a vast, complex, uneasy empire.
It was the later Stoics to whom many educated Romans turned, Stoics of the description of Marcus Aurelius' teachers, of Epictetus and Rusticus. In the light of the Stoic conception of the ultimate and primary reasonableness of the universe, they could face the disorder about them. In the light of a philosophy that held that all ultimately made sense, that all added up to a rational good, they could play their part and overcome what would otherwise be the sense of futility that must come from the mere observable surface, or the mere surface pleasures of life—with all their insecurity and evanescence. Life was retrieved by a sense of the duty commanded by the voice of reason in each man, which was the voice of the universal reason speaking in the reason of each man. In the light of this felt obligation, Juvenal could castigate the corruptions and follies of his time. And even Christians like St. Paul could feel in the sense of the divine reason present in each man, of which the Stoics spoke, something akin to the divinity present in each man, which Paul meant when he spoke of Christ.
Marcus was speaking what was in the air, in Stoic doctrines, like those of his master Epictetus and of Epictetus' master, Usonius, and in Christian thought and feeling, of which he knew little, and in the Greek mysteries, to which
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
he became an initiate. He was writing for himself, not for his contemporaries. He was writing a private journal, but the public of his day would have understood him. He was speaking in a period of failure of nerve, as Gilbert Murraywell describes the temper of the Graeco-Roman world at this time. He was talking of the divinity that shapes our ends, and is the substance of all things. He was saying, he says it almost ad nauseam, that "there is no evil, nothing can hurt anything," for in the long run everything is an expression of universal good, and of omnipresent reason. Marcus tells us that in each of us is a spark of reason, in living in accordance with which, we live in accordance with the rationale of all things. Each man's reason is the spark of the universal fire of reason in the universe. The logic of oneself is a microcosm of the logos of the cosmos. When we live in accordance with our own nature, fulfilling our own characteristic function, we live also in accordance with the nature of the universe. So to live is what the Stoics nearly all called living with "good will." That will to live in accordance with our own nature and in accordance with the nature of things cannot be taken from us. While one is still alive one can live according to reason; one can do one's duty. Even death cannot destroy the reasonable man's sense of obligation—while he is still alive.
Marcus therefore counsels at once detachment and social participation in active duties. The detachment is from distraction, from the illusions and becloudings of pleasure, from the pains and evils that are largely a consequence of our failure to understand the triviality of and purely apparent character of evil, our provincialism in not seeing that what looks like an evil is good in the context of universal good. There is, Marcus holds, a Providence, a Fate, a divine necessity in which nothing happens that is not part of providential reason.
In such a perspective, he believes, the illusions of pleasure to which men cling are clearly seen to be shadows. Fame is a breath; the pleasures of the senses are precarious and decep-
Introduction to Marcus Aurelius
tive; wealth and friends are transient and are not in our control. In the same way, the little and the larger burdens of life are transient, too, and likewise are not of our making or within our competence. For both reasons we should learn indifference to the vulgar general inventory of miseries and joys. We should learn to live in the citadel of ourselves.
The Cynics, the predecessors of the Stoics, had counseled such a course of retreat also. But Marcus felt that the nature of man which his reason showed him was part of the civic order of nature; he was a member of the society of all reasonable men, united in their participation in reason. Each in that commonwealth, of which the Roman Empire, large as it was, was merely a provincial illustration, had his own fixed station, nature, and duties. If one was an emperor, even over foolish men, it was one's duty to do one's job, to fulfill the function for which Fate had ordained one, not for honor, for honor was an illusion, not for pleasure, for doing one's job was not always agreeable, not even in the hope that one could accomplish what one intended to accomplish for even the best-ruled empires had ended. The important thing was the virtue of exercising one's virtue, of living in accordance with reason, as reason revealed itself in one's own mind, unsuborned by the briberies of transient miseries and illusory goods. All that counted was "the good will," the pertinacious sense of doing one's duty, which is part of the universal obligation which reason sets upon all men.
There is a strain in Marcus of genuine melancholy. He could find nothing secure, permanent, or even reasonable among human affairs. One meets, as he says, bores, stupid men, hypocrites, and liars. But in the midst of corruption and vanity one could act oneself like a reasonable man, and one was fortified by the conviction that, whatever appearances might suggest, all in the universe was reasonable in the end. Things change, persons die, but the universe remains.
Men are corrupt and nations pass away, but the reason in the
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
universe is eternal, and in one's own life reason may remain incorruptible. "Willingly give yourself up to Clotho, [one of the Fates], allowing her to spin your thread into what thing she pleases." (rv, 34.) Marcus' code of conduct is not one of cheer; it is one of whistling in the dark, or rather of one who so whistles because he insists that reason proves there is a clear brightness and order which the darkness veils. Fortitude is necessary, and patience and courtesy and modesty and decorum, and a will, in what may for the moment seem the worst of worlds, to do one's best. For, at least so Marcus tells himself, fundamentally in this universe, properly understood, all is for the best. Like Boethius, a Roman who centuries later, condemned to death unjustly for political reasons, wrote a Consolation of Philosophy, Marcus, too, sought in philosophy a consolation. In his modest resigned way he has provided it for generations of readers, and in our own age of chaos, he cpmes again with his touching faith that despite the unreasonableness of men and events, there is a deeper reason in things, a reason which is good, a reason which is God.
Irwin Edman Editor's Note: The translation of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations which follows is that which was made from the Greek by George Long.
It has been revised and clarified by the Classics Club editors.
THE MEDITATIONS OF
MARCUS AURELIUS
I /. From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.
2. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.
5. From my mother, piety and generosity, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.
4. From my great-grandfather, not to go to the public schools, but to have good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.
5. From my tutor, to be neither of the Green nor of the Blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights; from him too I learned endurance of hardship, and to want
1 little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle 'with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.
6. From Diognetus, not to busy myself about trifling things, and not to give credit to what miracle-workers and jugglers say about incantations and the driving away of demons and such things; and not to breed quails x or to give myself up passionately to such things; and to tolerate free*
1 Quail-fighting was a popular sport of the day.
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
dom of speech; and to become intimate with philosophy; and to be a hearer, first of Bacchius, then of Tandasis and Marcianus; and to write dialogues in my youth; and to like a plank bed and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Grecian discipline.
7. From Rusticus 2 I got the idea that my character needed improvement and discipline; and from him I learned not to be led astray to sophistic vanity, or to write on speculative/ matters, or to deliver little moral harangues, or to show myself off as a man who practices much discipline or does benevolent acts in order to make a display; and to refrain from rhetoric and poetry and fine writing; and not to walk about in the house in my outdoor robe, or to do other things of the kind; and to write my letters with simplicity, like the letter which he wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; and with regard to persons who have offended me by words, or done me wrong, to be easily pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a desire to be reconciled; and to read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book; nor hastily to give my assent to those who talk overmuch; and I am indebted to him for my acquaintance with the discourses of Epictetus, which he gave me out of his own collection.
8. From Apollonius 3 I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look at nothing else, not even for a moment, but reason; and to be always the same, even in sharp pains, in the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly from his living example that the same man can be both most resolute and lenient, and not peevish in giving his instruction. I had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in ex2 Q. Junius Rusticus was a Stoic philosopher whom Aurelius valued highly.
3 Apollonius of Chalcis came to Rome in the time of Pius to be A.urelius' preceptor. He was a rigid Stoic.
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
pounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are considered favors, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass without notice. p. From Sextus,4 good humor and the example of a family governed in a fatherly manner, and the idea of living in accord with nature; and gravity without affectation, and to look carefully after the interests of friends, and to tolerate ignorant persons, and those friends who form opinions without consideration. He had the power of readily adapting himself to all, so that conversation with him was more delightful than any flattery. At the same time he was most highly venerated by those who associated with him; and he had the faculty both of discovering and stating, in an intelligent and methodical way, the principles necessary for living; and he never showed anger or any other passion, but was entirely free from passion, and also most affectionate; and he could express approbation without noisy display, and he possessed great knowledge without ostentation.
10. From Alexander, the grammarian,5 to refrain from faultfinding, and not in a reproachful way to chide those who uttered any barbarous or incorrect or strange-sounding expression; but tactfully to introduce the very expression which they ought to have used, in the course of an answer or assent or inquiry about the thing, not about the word; or by some other suitable suggestion. u. From Fronto 6 I learned to observe what envy and duplicity and hypocrisy are in a tyrant; and that generally those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient in paternal affection.
4 Sextus of Chaeronea was probably a grandson of Plutarch.
5 Alexander, a native of Phrygia, wrote a commentary on Homer.
6 Cornelius Fronto was a rhetorician, and a teacher of Aurelius' children. He is presented as a character in Pater's Marius the Epicurean,
See p. 157 ff. of this volume.
MARCUS AURELIUS AND HIS TIMES
?2. From Alexander the Platonist, not frequently nor without necessity to say to anyone, or to write in a letter,
"I have no time"; nor continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by our relation to those we live with, by alleging urgent business.
13. From Catullus,7 not to be deaf when a friend finds fault, even if he should find fault without reason, but to try to restore him to his usual humor; and always to speak well of my teachers, as Domitius and Athenodotus are said to have done; and to love my children truly.
14. From my brother 8 Severus, to love my kin, and to love truth, and to love justice; and through him I learned to know
Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; 9 and from him I received the idea of a state in which there is the same law for all, a state administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.
I learned from him also consistency and undeviating steadiness in my regard for philosophy, and a disposition to do good, and to give to others readily, and to cherish good hopes, and to believe that I am loved by my friends; and ±a him I observed no concealment of his opinion of those whom he condemned, and that his friends had no need to conjecture what he wished or did not wish, but it was quite plain.
1$. From Maximus 10 1 learned self-government, and not to be led aside by anything; and cheerfulness in all circumstances, as well as in illness; and a just admixture in the moral char7 Cinna Catullus, a Stoic philosopher.
8 Aurelius had no brother.
It has been supposed that he may mean some cousin.
9 We know, from Tacitus (Annal, xm, xvi, 21; and other passages), who Thrasea and Helvidius were. Plutarch nas written the lives of the two Catos, and of Dion and Brutus. Aurelius probably alludes to Cato of Utica, who was a Stoic.
10 Claudius Maximus was a Stoic philosopher, who was highly esteemed also by Antoninus Pius, Aurelius' predecessor. The character of Maximus is that of a perfect man. (See viii, 25.)
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
acter of sweetness and dignity, and to do what was set before me without complaining. I observed that everybody believed that he thought as he spoke, and that in all that he did he never had any bad intention; and he never showed amazement and surprise, and was never in a hurry, and never put off doing a thing; nor was he perplexed nor dejected, nor did he ever laugh to disguise his vexation, nor, on the other hand, was he ever passionate or suspicious. He was accustomed to do acts of kindness and was ready to forgive, and was free from all falsehood; and he presented the appearance of a man who I could not be diverted from right rather than of a man who had been improved. I observed, too, that no man could ever think that he was despised by Maximus, or ever venture to think himself a better man. He had also the art of being humorous in an agreeable way.
16. In my father n I observed mildness of temper, and unchangeable resolution in the things which he had determined on after due deliberation; and no vainglory in those things which men call honors; and a love of labor and perseverance; and a readiness to listen to whoever had anything to propose for the common weal; and undeviating firmness in giving to every man his deserts; and a knowledge derived from experience of the right times for vigorous action and for relaxation.
And I observed that he had overcome any passion for boys; and he considered himself no more than any other citizen; and he released his friends from all obligation to dine with him or compulsion to attend him when he went abroad, and those who had failed to accompany him, by reason of any urgent circumstance, always found him the same.
I observed too his habit of careful inquiry into all matters of deliberation, and his persistency; and that he never stopped an investigation as though satisfied with first appearances; and that his disposition was to keep his friends, and not to be soon
II He means his adoptive father, his predecessor, the Emperor An* toninus Pius.