Marcus Aurelius - Meditations: The Annotated Edition

The famous Aurelian Column, a hundred feet high and still standing in Rome, was erected not long after the death of Marcus Aurelius to commemorate his military victories on the Danube in the early 170s. A frieze of relief sculptures spirals up its outer face, divisible into 116 scenes that reflect the chronological order of the so-called Marcomannic Wars the Romans fought against a number of Germanic peoples, including the Marcomanni. Marcus can be seen in about half of the scenes. Two sections depict famous miracles. On one occasion, a heavy downpour of rain confounded the enemy, while a battalion of surrounded Roman soldiers was refreshed and able to escape; on another, a Roman fortress was under siege, but the soldiers were saved when lightning destroyed one of the enemys siege engines.

Many sections of the frieze are taken up with gruesome scenes, not just of murderous battles but of actions that would today be classified as war crimes: prisoners being decapitated,

Yet the Marcus of Meditations is regarded as a man of peace, a thoughtful philosopher offering sage advice for daily living and self-improvement. The moral to be drawn from this contrast is the one Marcus frequently stresses in his writing: everyone, even or especially an emperor, has to play the hand he has been dealt. As his friend and teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto warned him early in his reign: Even if you succeed in attaining the wisdom of Cleanthes or Zeno, yet against your will you must put on the purple cloak, not the philosophers tunic of coarse wool. And the emperors purple cloak often had to be exchanged for armor. Marcus might have preferred to be a private individual with time for reading and making progress on the Stoic path rather than an emperor, but as a Stoic, he had to accept and make the best use of the lot that fate had handed him.

Marcus is famous for the conjunction of imperial power and philosophy and has even been called a philosopher-king, the kind of enlightened ruler that Plato famously held out as He was by far the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world, but self-discipline and philosophy kept him from abusing his position.

Meditations reveals a man who longed to do good and to love all humanity, while the Aurelian Column shows how his status as emperor impeded his attainment of these goals. Hence, at the beginning of entry 10.9 Marcus seems to acknowledge that war was an impediment to the realization of his less worldly hopes. By the same token, the tone of Meditations is that of an aspirant, someone who urgently wants to do better and to live as a philosopher, but who is constantly thwarted by events and by his own weakness. But this is why Meditations is still so widely read, because no one is perfect and we recognize ourselves in Marcuss flaws and aspirations.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, emperor of Rome from March 7, 161, until his death on March 17, 180, was born Marcus Annius Verus in Rome on April 26, 121, during the reign of the emperor Hadrian.philosophy. Some of the correspondence between him and one of his teachers of rhetoric, Fronto, has survived, and the letters show Marcus to have been an intense, open-hearted, bookish young man. Rhetoric was an inevitable topic of study for someone destined for public life, but philosophy was his personal choice, and he was attracted to it from an early age (1.6).