Marcus Aurelius: The Philosopher Who Never Wanted the Job
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations for himself. This is not an inference — it is evident from the text, which is addressed in the second person to himself, organized not as an argument for public consumption but as a series of private reminders, admonitions, and attempts to hold himself to standards he found difficult to maintain. The work was not intended for publication, and if it had been published by its author rather than preserved by accident, it would probably have been a different book. As it survives, it is the most intimate document of a Roman emperor’s inner life that exists, and one of the most honest accounts of what it is like to try to live according to a moral philosophy while holding enormous power over other people.
He was born in 121 AD and became emperor in 161 AD following the death of Antoninus Pius, who had himself succeeded Hadrian. The succession was part of the remarkable chain of adoptive inheritance that produced the five good emperors — Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus — each selecting the most capable available person rather than a biological heir, with the result that the empire was governed by a sequence of capable, relatively restrained men for nearly a century. Marcus was Hadrian’s ultimate intended successor, adopted first by Antoninus on Hadrian’s instruction and given a thorough training in philosophy and administration before ascending to power at the age of forty. He had been prepared for the role his entire adult life and expressed throughout his reign and in his private writing a consistent ambivalence about holding it.
The Meditations reveal a man at war with himself in ways that make him recognizable across two millennia. He struggled with anger — he notes in multiple places his tendency to be irritated by the people around him and his need to remind himself that they were doing their best according to their understanding, that expectations of perfection were unreasonable, that his own faults were no less real than theirs. He struggled with the desire for recognition — he repeatedly instructs himself that praise is worthless, that reputation is transient, that the opinion of others should not affect his actions, in a way that suggests these truths were easier to state than to internalize. He struggled with mortality — the Meditations return again and again to death, not with morbid anxiety but with the Stoic effort to hold the fact of death clearly in view as a tool for prioritizing what matters. Look at how many emperors and great men have come and gone, he writes to himself. They are all dust.
His reign was not the peaceful philosophical retirement he might have preferred. The Antonine Plague — probably smallpox, possibly measles, imported along the eastern trade routes — killed an estimated five to ten million people across the empire during his reign, disrupting agriculture, draining the treasury, and requiring him to sell palace furniture to fund the military operations that the disease had complicated. The Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier exploited the weakened frontier defenses to raid deeply into Roman territory in ways that had not occurred for generations; Marcus spent most of his reign on campaign along the Danube, managing a war he had not wanted and that his predecessors’ peaceful reigns had not prepared him for. He died at Vindobona — modern Vienna — in 180 AD, on campaign, as close to the front line as a sitting emperor could reasonably be.
His greatest political failure was his son Commodus, whom he elevated to the co-emperorship in 177 AD and who succeeded him on his death. The decision to prefer biological succession over adoption was criticized by later ancient commentators and has puzzled historians ever since, since Commodus’s incapacity was evident during his father’s lifetime. The Meditations offer no explanation — they do not mention Commodus at all, which is either discretion or suppression — but the most charitable reading is that Marcus understood the political instability that would follow a non-biological succession in a way that overcame his better judgment about his son’s capabilities. Whatever the reasoning, the result was the end of the adoptive succession that had produced the previous century’s governance, and the beginning of the dynasty’s rapid collapse.
What survives of Marcus Aurelius beyond the emperorship is the Meditations, and what the Meditations have meant to subsequent readers is worth noting. They were rediscovered during the Renaissance and have been continuously in print since the sixteenth century, translated into most major languages, read by European monarchs and politicians as a guide to power, adopted by the Stoic revival of recent decades as a practical manual for managing modern life. The readership of a book written by an emperor in the second century AD for his private self-improvement, in a philosophical tradition that was itself several centuries old when he was writing, is today global and growing. This is not something Marcus Aurelius would have predicted, and his likely response to the information — something about the worthlessness of posthumous fame, carefully noted and imperfectly felt — is itself preserved in the text.