Marcus Aurelius Wrote the Meditations in War Camps on the Danube, for No One but Himself

He inherited an empire at the height of its golden age, lost as many as ten million people to a plague he could not stop, fought a war on the Danube through most of his nineteen-year reign, kept a private notebook that became one of the most read books ever written, and broke the adoptive succession that had made Rome great by leaving it all to his son.

The notebook no one was meant to read

Some time in the 170s, in a Roman army camp on the Danube frontier, the most powerful man alive sat down to write a note to himself. He wrote in Greek, the language of the philosophy he loved, not the Latin of his office. He did not give the notebook a title. Later readers would call it Ta eis heauton, "to himself," and still later the Meditations. He did not write it for an audience. He wrote it to remind one man, himself, how to behave when that man happened to be emperor of Rome.

The first page is a list of debts. Marcus Aurelius did not begin his private book with his own accomplishments but with the people who made him, and the qualities he took from each. "From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper," he wrote. "From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character." From his mother, "piety and beneficence, 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." (Meditations, Book I, George Long translation)

He had been a serious child. Born Marcus Annius Verus in Rome on 26 April 121, he lost his father, a praetor, at around three and was raised by his mother and his grandfather on the Caelian Hill. The emperor Hadrian, watching the grave boy, nicknamed him "Verissimus," the most truthful, or as one biographer reads it, the most annoyingly truthful. At eleven, under the influence of a painting teacher named Diognetus, he took up the dress of a philosopher: a rough Greek cloak, and a plank bed, sleeping on the ground until his mother persuaded him to use an actual bed. It was not a phase. Decades later, from a war camp, he would still be writing about how to stay that boy.

The reason it was not a phase was a quiet, older Stoic named Quintus Junius Rusticus, the grandson of a man executed by the tyrant Domitian and heir to a tradition of philosophical opposition to bad emperors. "From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline," Marcus wrote, and it was Rusticus who handed him the Discourses of the freed slave philosopher Epictetus, "which he communicated to me out of his own collection." (Meditations, Book I)

Before Rusticus won him, there had been another teacher, the great Latin orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto, and the letters the two men exchanged survive. They are intimate, almost lovesick. "Farewell my Fronto, wherever you are, my most sweet love and delight," the future emperor wrote. "How is it between you and me? I love you and you are not here." (Wikipedia, citing the surviving Fronto correspondence) Fronto tried to keep his pupil in rhetoric and away from philosophy, warning that it was "better never to have touched the teaching of philosophy than to have tasted it superficially." He lost. Marcus kept his affection for Fronto and his reverence for Rusticus both, and turned toward Stoicism for good.

The notebook he kept on the Danube is the record of a man arguing himself out of the temptations of his own position. The argument is everywhere in it. "Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen," he warned himself. "Keep thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts. Strive to continue to be such as philosophy wished to make thee. Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life." (Meditations, Book VI, George Long translation) The power was the problem, and philosophy was the cure. He put it as a domestic image: "If thou hadst a step-mother and a mother at the same time, thou wouldst be dutiful to thy step-mother, but still thou wouldst constantly return to thy mother. Let the court and philosophy now be to thee stepmother and mother: return to philosophy frequently and repose in her, through whom what thou meetest with in the court appears to thee tolerable, and thou appearest tolerable in the court." (Meditations, Book VI)

He had a special contempt for the hunger to be remembered, which is the hunger that drives most men into politics, and he wrote the thought down as if to inoculate himself: "How strangely men act! They will not praise those who are living at the same time and living with themselves; but to be themselves praised by posterity, by those whom they have never seen or ever will see, this they set much value on. But this is very much the same as if thou shouldst be grieved because those who have lived before thee did not praise thee." (Meditations, Book VI) He could not have known it, but that private complaint would become, by the very posterity he dismissed, the thing he is most praised for.

The golden age that was also a catastrophe

The throne came to Marcus through a piece of institutional engineering that later historians would call the secret of Rome's golden age. The childless emperor Hadrian, dying in 138, adopted a dependable senator named Antoninus Pius on the condition that Antoninus in turn adopt the teenage Marcus and Lucius, the son of an earlier heir who had died. For the better part of a century, emperors without sons had chosen the best available man and adopted him as successor: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus. When Antoninus died on 7 March 161, Marcus became emperor and immediately did something unprecedented, insisting the Senate grant his adoptive brother Lucius Verus equal power. For the first time Rome had two Augusti. (Wikipedia)

The partnership they inherited was the most prosperous the world had yet seen, and it began to come apart almost at once. In the east, a war with Parthia. On the Danube, the Germanic peoples the Romans called the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Iazyges began moving, and for the first time in centuries invaders crossed the Alps into northern Italy. Then, in 165 or 166, the army brought something worse back from the East. The Antonine Plague, most often identified by scholars as smallpox or measles, raged for fifteen years and killed an estimated five to ten million people, roughly a tenth of the empire. The Roman army was "reduced almost to extinction." (Smithsonian Magazine; Wikipedia)

Marcus answered the manpower crisis by recruiting gladiators, slaves, and bandits into the legions, and he answered the money crisis by auctioning off the imperial family's own treasure, golden vases and jeweled goblets and his wife's silken gowns, in the Forum of Trajan for two months running rather than raise taxes on the provinces; after a victory he refunded any buyer who wanted to return what they had bought. (Epitome de Caesaribus, 16) He spent the last years of his life on the Danube, in the camps where the notebook was written. An older account, by the orator Philostratus, has him still studying in middle age under the philosopher Sextus of Chaeronea, and when a friend asked the emperor where he was going, he answered, "it is good even for an old man to learn; I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn what I do not yet know." (Wikipedia, citing Philostratus)

The man who emerges from the ancient sources is not a philosopher dabbling in statecraft but an invalid dragging himself through catastrophe. "As a result of his close application and study he was extremely frail in body," Cassius Dio wrote, "though in the beginning he had been so vigorous that he used to fight in armour, and on the chase would strike down wild boars while on horseback... However, he did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire." (Cassius Dio, Roman History, epitome of Book 72) A later compiler put it more dramatically: "if he had not been born to those times, surely, as if with one fall, all of the Roman state would have collapsed." (Epitome de Caesaribus, 16)

What the notebook shows is how he survived it. He wrote to himself the way a man writes a rope to climb out of a hole. "Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years," he told himself. "Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good." (Meditations, Book IV, George Long translation) When the scale of the empire and its wars threatened to overwhelm him, he shrank them down to nothing: "Asia, Europe, are corners of the universe; all the sea a drop in the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe: all the present time is a point in eternity. All things are little, changeable, perishable." (Meditations, Book VI) The Stoic discipline was not an escape from power. It was the only way he could keep exercising it.

The son who turned gold to iron and rust

For all his discipline, Marcus made one decision that undid the system that had put him on the throne, and it is the decision he is most argued about for. The adoptive succession, the brilliant trick by which Rome picked its best man, depended on emperors having no surviving sons. Marcus had sons. His wife Faustina bore him at least thirteen children, and most of them died. By the time his boy Commodus stood alone as the only surviving male heir, the calculation had changed. Commodus was born in 161, the first emperor "born in the purple," born to a reigning emperor in the whole history of the office. Marcus named him Caesar at five, after his twin brother died, and made him co-emperor at sixteen, in 177. (Wikipedia; Dogans Coins)

The doubts were not his alone. In 175 a capable general, Avidius Cassius, governor of Syria, declared himself emperor. Cassius Dio said the revolt was the fault of Faustina, who, seeing her husband ill and fearing he would die, had secretly encouraged Cassius to seize power so that the throne would not fall to her "simple-minded" son. Cassius jumped on a false rumor that Marcus was already dead and then, having started, could not stop; he was killed by one of his own officers before Marcus reached him. Marcus asked only to spare the rebel's family. Faustina died that same year, at a camp on the road. (Cassius Dio, Roman History, epitome of Book 72) Whether Faustina really conspired, and whether the lurid stories about her that survive in the unreliable biographies are true, no one can now say. What is certain is that the question of Commodus had already become the question of the empire.

Marcus died on 17 March 180, at fifty-eight, in a military camp on the Danube, at Vindobona, near where Vienna stands now (some sources say Sirmium). The story the ancient biographer Dio tells has the dying emperor commending his son to the soldiers and, when a tribune came for the day's watchword, answering, "Go to the rising sun; I am already setting." (Cassius Dio, Roman History, epitome of Book 72) Dio also passes on a rumor, which he says he was "plainly told," that the physicians hastened the death to do Commodus a favor. Modern historians do not credit it. The boy took the throne at eighteen, abandoned his father's war, and went home to Rome to be Hercules.

Dio's judgment on what followed is one of the most quoted lines in ancient history. Marcus, he wrote, had one sorrow, "that after rearing and educating his son in the best possible way he was vastly disappointed in him. This matter must be our next topic; for our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day." (Cassius Dio, Roman History, epitome of Book 72) Commodus, in Dio's blunt estimate, was "not naturally wicked, but his great simplicity and cowardice made him the slave of his companions," and he "ended up more troublesome to the Romans than all the diseases and criminals together." He renamed Rome after himself and renamed the months of the year after himself, and within a dozen years he was strangled in his bath, and the century of good emperors was over. (Dogans Coins, citing Dio 73.1; Ancient Medicine, citing Dio 72.14-15)

The defense of Marcus is that he had no real choice. A living son was a standing threat to any adopted heir; to pass Commodus over would have been to invite the very civil war the adoptive system was designed to prevent, and the previous emperors adopted capable men only because they had no sons of their own. The charge against him is that the philosopher who wrote so piercingly about the emptiness of fame and the duty of reason sacrificed the happiness of the empire to a father's partiality for an unworthy boy. Both are true, which is what makes the failure interesting. The Stoic could command everything except his own affection.

Then there is the last irony. The private notebook that was never meant to be read survives by accident. It is not heard of in any source for seven hundred years, until a Byzantine bishop named Arethas of Caesarea mentions it around the year 900; the first printed edition did not appear until 1559, in Zurich. (readaurelius.org) The man who believed that a man who craved the praise of people he would never meet was as foolish as a man who wished the dead had praised him became, by the praise of people he would never meet, the most read Stoic who ever lived. He wanted only to govern himself. He ended up governing that too, across eighteen centuries, in the one place he never expected an audience: the margin where he had written, to himself, that no one should.

Read the full life: Marcus Aurelius: A Biography, by Anthony R. Birley (Routledge, revised edition), the standard scholarly life of the emperor.