Rome Emperor: Marcus Aurelius

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

•Aurelius is perhaps most interesting as the Roman emperor who tried to live and rule according to philosophical principles

•We in fact can see the inner workings of his mind because we have what amounts to his philosophical diary: a series of notebooks, somewhat randomly organized, that appear to be his notes to himself while on campaign and elsewhere

•These notebooks are now called The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 

•Written in Greek, the preferred language of philosophy even for a Roman emperor!

•Like Hadrian and Antoninus before him, Aurelius was deeply educated in the humanities as well in government

•He was particularly attached to the principles of Stoic philosophy, namely that the only thing that truly matters is virtue – all else is either secondary or out of our control

•The modern sense of “stoic” is of an emotional toughness: e.g., “he bore the death of his mother stoically”

•The Stoics deserve this legacy, as long as you understand the rationale

•You shouldn’t weep for your dead mother, in this example, because that does not affect your virtue; she cannot make you better, only you can do that

•Stoics have an almost scary philosophical rigor

•Hence the Stoics are into emotional denial, but only because emotions can cloud your virtue and you must control them if you are always to do the virtuous thing

•Remarkable to me that a Roman emperor, literally the most powerful man in the Mediterranean World, would keep a notebook urging himself to be virtuous

•As close as we might ever get to Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king, for Aurelius seems entirely sincere

•He seems to have had an ambition to embody an ideal combination of mind and action that could bring harmony and peace to the world

•Yet much of what he writes is practical advice to himself about daily habits and basic attitudes

•Ironic, then, that such a philosophical man spent most of his rule fighting tough wars on the frontiers, far away from the peaceful civilization of the capital.

[Reference: from Professor Rex Stem's Lectures in Classic-3]