Who Was Marcus Aurelius?
Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180, through a plague that emptied cities and a war that kept him on the Danube for years. The book we call Meditations is the private notebook he kept during it, written in Greek, with no reader in mind. Knowing the circumstances changes what the entries sound like.
The short version
Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 CE into a well-connected Roman family, was marked out early by the emperor Hadrian, and was adopted into the succession as a teenager. He became emperor in 161 and ruled until his death in 180. For most of that time he was dealing with two emergencies at once: a pandemic brought back by returning soldiers, and a long war on the northern frontier. The notebook was written in the middle of that.
A reluctant job
He was trained for it from childhood. Hadrian arranged the adoptions that put him in line, and he spent over twenty years as heir to Antoninus Pius before taking the throne. That apprenticeship shows: when he finally became emperor he immediately made his adoptive brother Lucius Verus co-emperor, which had no real precedent, and ruled jointly until Verus died in 169.
His tutor in rhetoric was Fronto, and their letters survive. They are worth knowing about because they show a side the notebook does not: an affectionate young man writing about a sore throat, a holiday, grapes he picked. The austere voice of the Meditations is a deliberate register, chosen for a particular task, rather than the whole of the person.
The plague and the frontier
From 165 the Antonine Plague swept the empire, carried along the army's supply lines, and it ran for years. Ancient accounts describe the dead being carried out of Rome in carts. Modern estimates of the death toll vary widely and are uncertain, but the scale was large enough to strain the army's manpower and the treasury at the same time.
Then the Marcomannic Wars. Germanic peoples crossed the Danube and pushed into Roman territory, and Marcus spent a great part of his remaining years in camps on that frontier, directing a long and inconclusive campaign. One of the surviving headings in the notebook places the writing of the second book among the Quadi, on the river Gran, which is to say in the field, during a war, in the evenings.
He sold palace treasures to avoid raising taxes for the campaign. He faced a revolt by one of his own generals in 175. He lost several children. By the standards of the advice he was giving himself, he had material to work with.
What kind of book he was writing
He did not call it anything. The Greek title that comes down to us means something like to himself, and the content fits that exactly: the same few ideas, returned to over and over, in the tone of a person who keeps failing at something and keeps restarting.
Remember that you will die. Remember that the insult only injures you if you consent to be injured. Remember that the man who irritated you this morning acted out of his own confusion. Nothing in it is presented as a discovery for an audience. It reads as maintenance.
That origin is why it survives as a practical book while more systematic Stoic writing sits in university libraries. Epictetus and Seneca are teaching. Marcus is practising, badly and repeatedly, in his own handwriting, and a reader two thousand years later recognises the activity before they recognise the philosophy.
Where the Stoicism came from
Book One is a list of thanks, teacher by teacher, and it names the route. Junius Rusticus gave him a copy of the Discourses of Epictetus, and Epictetus is the voice underneath most of what follows: the insistence that our judgements, and not events, are what disturb us, and the division of the world into what is up to us and what is not.
What Marcus adds is scale. Epictetus was a freed slave teaching students. Marcus was applying the same material while holding more power than anyone alive, which makes the entries about the pointlessness of fame and the brevity of reputation read differently. Our piece on the dichotomy of control covers the central idea in a working context.
The part usually left out
Two things get skipped in the popular version. He authorised persecutions of Christians during his reign, or at least permitted them to continue under his authority, which sits uncomfortably beside the gentleness of the notebook. And he broke the adoptive succession by leaving the empire to his son Commodus, whose rule was a disaster and ended in assassination.
Both belong in the picture. The book is better read as the private effort of a man who found the standard difficult than as the record of someone who met it.
Reading him now
Start at Book Two rather than Book One, because the opening list of thanks means nothing before you know the author. Read a few entries at a time, which is how they were written. And the translation matters more here than with most ancient texts, because the compression of private shorthand gives translators room: our comparison of the main Meditations translations sets out which version suits which reader.
For the single practice most associated with him, memento mori is the entry point, and our introduction to Stoicism covers the school he was drawing on.
Common questions
Who was Marcus Aurelius?
He was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 CE and the last of the rulers later called the Five Good Emperors. He is remembered less for his reign than for a private notebook, written in Greek during his military campaigns, that survives as the book we call Meditations.
Did Marcus Aurelius write Meditations for publication?
No. He gave it no title, addressed it to nobody, and repeats himself constantly in the way people do when writing only for themselves. The Greek heading that survives means roughly to himself. How the manuscript survived at all is unclear, and the first printed edition did not appear until 1559.
Was Marcus Aurelius a good emperor?
Ancient and modern assessments are largely favourable on his conduct in office, and he governed through an exceptionally difficult period of plague and sustained warfare. The sharpest criticism concerns his succession: he left the empire to his son Commodus, whose reign went badly, breaking with the adoptive succession that had preceded him.
Which Stoics influenced Marcus Aurelius?
Epictetus above all, through the Discourses, which his teacher Junius Rusticus gave him. The debt is explicit in Book One, where Marcus thanks his teachers one by one, and the influence runs through the rest in the repeated distinction between what is up to us and what is not.