Who was Marcus Aurelius?

The serious boy Hadrian picked

Marcus was born in Rome on April 26, AD 121, into a wealthy senatorial family. The emperor Hadrian took to the grave, honest boy and nicknamed him Verissimus, “most truthful,” a play on his family name, Verus. At twelve, says his ancient biographer, he put on the rough cloak of a Greek philosopher and slept on the ground, until his mother talked him onto a couch spread with skins. When Hadrian chose a successor in 138, he set a condition: the new heir, Antoninus, had to adopt Marcus. Antoninus later gave him his daughter Faustina as a wife.

A Stoic on the throne

His teachers made him a Stoic. Stoics held that virtue is the only real good, that we control our own judgments but not events, and that every human being is a fellow citizen of one world. In the first book of the Meditations he thanks his teacher Junius Rusticus for lending him, from his own library, the discourses of Epictetus, the former slave whose ideas run all through the book. When Antoninus died in 161, Marcus, about forty, became emperor and at once made his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus, his co-emperor. Rome had never had two emperors at once. Verus died in 169.

War, plague and notes to himself

It was not the quiet reign a philosopher would choose. Troops returning from war in the East in 165 brought a plague, probably smallpox, that came back again and again for years. Germanic peoples broke across the Danube, some as far as Italy. Marcus spent much of the 170s in army camps on the river, in what is now Austria and Slovakia. There, at night, he wrote in Greek, for no one but himself. In the manuscripts the book is called simply To Himself. One book ends “Among the Quadi at the Granua,” and another is marked “This in Carnuntum,” a legionary base near today’s Vienna.

Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen. 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. … Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life.

The dye is imperial purple. He was warning himself not to let power soak in.

Death and memory

He died in camp in March 180, aged fifty-eight, after giving the guard a last watchword: “Go to the rising sun; I am already setting.” He left the throne to his son Commodus, breaking a run of emperors chosen by adoption. Whether Commodus killed him, as a famous film shows, is its own question.

Not everyone remembers his reign as golden. Christians were put to death under him: around 165 the philosopher Justin was beheaded in Rome on the order of the city prefect, Marcus’s own teacher Rusticus, and in 177 believers were killed at Lyon, in Gaul. His bronze statue on horseback survived the Middle Ages only because people thought it showed Constantine, the first Christian emperor; the original stands in Rome’s Capitoline Museums. His column, carved with his Danube wars, still rises in Piazza Colonna. And the Meditations, never meant for readers, has found millions.