Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome for nineteen years and left no surviving memoir, no defence of his reign, no account of the wars he fought. What he wrote instead was a private notebook, addressed to nobody but himself.

He took the throne in 161 and shared it with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus. Rome won the eastern war against Parthia, and the returning army carried plague home. Most of his later reign went to the northern frontier, broken by a revolt in 175 that took him east; he died on campaign in 180. Part of the notebook was written in those years.

Meditations is a later name for it; no title of Marcus's own survives. He wrote in Greek, not as a treatise — the same few arguments set down again and again: that the world is governed by providence, that virtue is the only thing wholly in his power, that the people who irritate him are his own kin.

The repetition is the point. These were not doctrines he mastered once and moved beyond, but arguments he kept needing again — reminders, from the ruler of the Roman world to himself, about what kind of man not to become.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Marcus Aurelius: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius/

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Marcus Aurelius: https://iep.utm.edu/marcus-aurelius/

• Britannica — Marcus Aurelius: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcus-Aurelius-Roman-emperor