Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | About
1. Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (26 April 121 – 17 March 180) was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher.
He was the last of the rulers known as the 5 Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolo Machiavelli), and the 2nd to last emperor of the Pax Romana, (27 BC to AD 180), preceding his son Commodus in an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire.
He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
Marcus was born during the reign of Hadrian to the emperor's nephew, the praetor Marcus Annius Verus, and the heiress Domitia Calvilla.
His father died when he was 3, and his mother and grandfather raised him.
After Hadrian's adoptive son, Aelius Caesar, died in 138, the emperor adopted Marcus's uncle Antoninus Pius as his new heir.
In turn, Antoninus adopted Marcus and Lucius, the son of Aelius.
Hadrian died that year, and Antoninus became Emperor. Now heir to the throne, Marcus studied Greek and Latin under tutors such as Herodes Atticus and Marcus Cornelius Fronto. He married Antoninus's daughter Faustina in 145.
After Antoninus died in 161, Marcus acceded to the throne alongside his adoptive brother, who reigned under the name Lucius Verus.
Under Marcus's rule, the Roman Empire witnessed heavy military conflict:
In the East, the Romans fought successfully with a revitalized Parthian Empire and the rebel Kingdom of Armenia.
He modified the silver purity of the Roman currency, the denarius.
The persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire appears to have increased during Marcus's reign, but his involvement in this is unknown.
The Antonine Plague broke out in 165 or 166 and devastated the population of the Roman Empire, causing the deaths of 5 to 10 million people. Lucius Verus may have died from the plague in 169.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Marcus chose not to adopt an heir.
His children included Lucilla, who married Lucius, and Commodus, whose succession after Marcus has been a subject of debate among both contemporary and modern historians.
The Column and Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius still stand in Rome, where they were erected in celebration of his military victories.
Meditations, the writings of the philosopher
– as contemporary biographers called Marcus – are a significant source of the modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy.
They have been praised by fellow writers, philosophers, monarchs, and politicians centuries after his death.
2. Meditations
Meditations (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, lit. 'things to one's self') is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from AD 161-180, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy.
Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement.
It is possible that large portions of the work were written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170-180.
Some of it was written while he was positioned at Aquincum , in modern Hungary, on campaign in Pannonia,
because internal notes tell us that the 1st book was written when he was campaigning against the Quadi on the river Granova (modern-day Hron) and the 2nd book was written at Carnuntum.
It is unlikely that Marcus Aurelius ever intended the writings to be published.
The work has no official title, so Meditations
is one of several titles commonly assigned to the collection.
These writings take the form of quotations varying in length from one sentence to long paragraphs.
3. Structure and themes
The Meditations is divided into 12 books that chronicle different periods of Aurelius' life. Each book is not in chronological order and it was written for no one but himself.
The style of writing that permeates the text is one that is simplified, straightforward, and perhaps reflecting Aurelius' Stoic perspective on the text.
A central theme to Meditations is the importance of analysing one's judgment of self and others and developing a cosmic perspective:
You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment,
and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time,
to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.
Marcus Aurelius
Aurelius advocates finding one's place in the universe and sees that everything came from nature, and so everything shall return to it in due time.
Another strong theme is of maintaining focus and to be without distraction all the while maintaining strong ethical principles such as Being a good man.
His Stoic ideas often involve avoiding indulgence in sensory affections, a skill which will free a man from the pains and pleasures of the material world.
He claims that the only way a man can be harmed by others is to allow his reaction to overpower him.
An order or logos permeates existence. Rationality and clear-mindedness allow one to live in harmony with the logos:
This allows one to rise above faulty perceptions of good
and bad
—things out of your control like fame and health are (unlike things in your control) irrelevant and neither good nor bad.
4. History of text
There is no certain mention of the Meditations until the early 10th century.
The historian Herodian, writing in the mid-3rd century, makes mention of Marcus' literary legacy, saying:
He was concerned with all aspects of excellence, and in his love of ancient literature he was second to no man, Roman or Greek; this is evident from all his sayings and writings which have come down to us,
Herodian
- a passage which may refer to the Meditations.
The Historia Augusta's biography of Avidius Cassius, thought to have been written in the 4th century, records that before Marcus set out on the Marcomannic Wars, he was asked to publish his Precepts of Philosophy in case something should befall him, but he instead for 3 days discussed the books of his Exhortations one after the other
.
A doubtful mention is made by the orator Themistius in about AD 364. In an address to the emperor Flavius Valens, On Brotherly Love, he says:
You do not need the Exhortations of Marcus.
The 1st direct mention of the work comes from Arethas of Caesarea (c. 860–935), a bishop who was a great collector of manuscripts:
At some date before 907 he sent a volume of the Meditations to Demetrius, Archbishop of Heraclea, with a letter saying:
I have had for some time an old copy of the Emperor Marcus' most profitable book, so old indeed that it is altogether falling to pieces.…
This I have had copied and am able to hand down to posterity in its new dress.
Arethas of Caesarea
Arethas also mentions the work in marginal notes (scholia) to books by Lucian and Dio Chrysostom where he refers to passages in the Treatise to Himself
,
and it was this title which the book bore in the manuscript from which the 1st printed edition was made in the 16th century.
Arethas' own copy has now vanished, but it is thought to be the likely ancestor of the surviving manuscripts.
The next mention of the Meditations is in the Suda lexicon published in the late 10th century:
The Suda calls the work a directing of his own life by Marcus the Emperor in 12 books,
which is the first mention of a division of the work into 12 books.
The Suda makes use of some 30 quotations taken from books I, III, IV, V, IX, and XI.
Around 1150, John Tzetzes, a grammarian of Constantinople, quotes passages from Books IV and V attributing them to Marcus.
About 200 years later Nicephorus Callistus (c. 1295–1360) in his Ecclesiastical History writes that:
Marcus Antoninus composed a book for the education of his son Marcus i.e. Commodus, full of all worldly experience and instruction.
Nicephorus Callistus
The Meditations is thereafter quoted in many Greek compilations from the 14th to 16th centuries.
Wilhelm Xylander first translated the Meditations into Latin in 1558.
5. Reception
Marcus Aurelius has been lauded for his capacity to write down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of listeners or any striving after effect.
Gilbert Murray compares the work to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and St. Augustine's Confessions.
Though Murray criticizes Marcus for the harshness and plainness of his literary style
,
he finds in his Meditations as much intensity of feeling...as in most of the nobler modern books of religion, only with a sterner power controlling it.
People fail to understand Marcus,
he writes, not because of his lack of self-expression, but because it is hard for most men to breathe at that intense height of spiritual life, or, at least, to breathe soberly.
Rees (1992) calls the Meditations unendingly moving and inspiring,
but does not offer them up as works of original philosophy.
Bertrand Russell found them contradictory and inconsistent, evidence of a tired age
where even real goods lose their savour.
Using Marcus as an example of greater Stoic philosophy, he found the Stoic ethical philosophy to contain an element of sour grapes.
We can't be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn't matter being unhappy.
Bertrand Russell
Both Russell and Rees find an element of Marcus' Stoic philosophy in the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant.
German philosopher Georg Hegel offers a critique of Stoicism that follows similar lines, albeit covering different trajectories:
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel attacks the preoccupation with the inner self as a severing, fatalistic barrier to consciousness:
A philosophy that reduces all states of harm or injustice to emotional states could only appear on the scene in a time of universal fear and bondage.
The Stoic refusal to meet the world is anathema to Life, a central value in Hegel's philosophical work:
Whether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, it aims to be free, and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence.
Hegel
M. L. Clarke concurs in his historical work on philosophical ideas, The Roman Mind, where he states:
Political liberty could hardly flourish after so many years of despotism and the indifference to public affairs which it bred. And philosophy fostered the same spirit.
M. L. Clarke, /The Roman Mind/
Michael Grant called Marcus Aurelius the noblest of all the men who, by sheer intelligence and force of character, have prized and achieved goodness for its own sake and not for any reward.
Beatrice Webb, the labour movement leader who coined the term collective bargaining referred to Meditations as her manual of devotion.
United States President Bill Clinton said that Meditations is his favourite book,
and former United States Secretary of Defence James Mattis carried his own personal copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius throughout his deployments as a Marine Corps officer in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wen Jiabao, the former Prime Minister of China, has read Meditations over 100 times.