The bust in the Altes Museum in Berlin is one of the more technically striking Roman portrait pieces in any German collection. The head is Carrara marble — white, fine-grained, the standard material for imperial portraiture — but the drapery is carved from a deeply veined breccia, red and brown and amber in layered striations that catch the light differently at every angle. The polychrome combination, fashionable in later reworkings of ancient busts, gives the portrait an unusual visual richness: the cool classical face above the warm geological drama of the clothing. The label identifies her plainly. Kaiserin Faustina die Jüngere. Empress Faustina the Younger. Wife of Marcus Aurelius. Marble, 141–175 AD.

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.