The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A reluctant emperor who made his own character his first job: Marcus trained himself daily, in writing, to act without anger or self-pity, and he held the Roman empire together through plague, invasion and rebellion. The same code made him merciful to rebels, pitiless to "barbarians", and unable to deny the throne to a son he feared would be another Nero.
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Critical acts
- 1
Turning Philosophy from a Subject into a Life
In his mid-twenties Marcus turned away from all of it. He told Fronto that Aristo's books were "a joy for me and at the same time a torture," because they showed him "to what extent my inner dispositions are distant from these better things... at the age of twenty-five, I have not yet assimilated into my soul any of the salutary dogmas."
- 2
Waiting Twenty-Three Years Without Reaching for the Throne
Marcus chose apprenticeship over impatience. "In the twenty-three years of Antoninus's reign Marcus spent just two nights away from him." He watched Antoninus receive embassies, try cases and dictate letters.
- 3
Giving Away Half the Empire on Day One
Marcus's "first act as emperor was to insist that Lucius Verus... should be named as his co-ruler... the notion was entirely Marcus's." It was "a definite innovation" in Roman government. He even transferred his own surname, Verus, to his colleague "to establish a family connection."
- 4
Selling the Palace and Going to the Front
He raised money and men by unusual means and then went in person. He "conducted a two-month sale of imperial effects," including "gold goblets, silver flagons, crystals and chandeliers" and "his wife's silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels," and he suspended debts to the treasury.
- 5
Pardoning a Usurper and Burning the Evidence
Marcus told his troops he "could feel no anger" and that he would even have laid the matter before the Senate if only his own person were at stake. To the Senate he wrote that he meant to pardon the rebels and that "there is nothing which endears a Roman emperor to mankind as much as the quality of mercy...
- 6
Making Commodus His Heir
Marcus pushed his son up at speed. Commodus received a new title in November 176 and a triumph "as conqueror of Germany" that December, "during the ceremony Marcus trotted alongside Commodus's triumphal chariot." Then came a consulship on 1 January 177 at fifteen ("the youngest consul in Roman history"), and then tribunician power as co-emperor.
Maxims
Expect difficult people before breakfast
Every morning Marcus predicted he would meet the "meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly," and reminded himself that they acted "because they can't tell good from evil."
What stands in the way becomes the way
This is his own formula: "The impediment to action advances action." He lived it in 167, when the empty treasury and plague-thinned legions led to the palace auction and the recruitment of slaves and gladiators. See "Two Months of Auctions on the Palatine".
Get up; you're below your quota of work
The insomniac emperor who "hated getting out of bed" argued himself out of the blankets: "Nature set a limit on that... And you're over the limit... But not of working. There you're still below your quota."
Serve your apprenticeship; don't grab the crown
He waited twenty-three years as Antoninus's deputy, "just two nights away from him," studying the man he would later tell himself to "Take... as your model, always".
Choose the teacher who makes you angry
Fronto flattered him, while Rusticus "had the knack of making him furiously angry." Marcus ranked Rusticus first among the gods' gifts and learned from him how to master the very anger he provoked. See "Rusticus, Fronto and the Borrowed Copy of Epictetus".
Part IThe Story
The Head in the Bag
In the summer of 175, two Roman officers arrived at the emperor's headquarters carrying a bag. Inside it was the head of Avidius Cassius — the most feared general in the empire, the man who crucified looters and was rumoured to have burned prisoners alive on a pole nearly two hundred feet high, the man who three months and six days earlier had declared himself emperor of Rome and taken Syria, Palestine and Egypt with him. A centurion had stabbed him. The officers expected gratitude. Every Roman emperor before this one would have had the head displayed, the rebel's family hunted, the Senate purged of anyone who had written him a friendly letter.
Marcus Aurelius turned them away. He refused to look at the severed head of a man who had once been his friend and ally, and he instructed them to bury it. Then he told his council that he was grieved — not that Cassius had rebelled, but "that he had lost an opportunity to show mercy." To the Senate he had already written: "Vengeance for a personal wrong is never pleasing in an emperor, for the juster the vengeance the harsher it always seems."
And then he did something else, something less often quoted. He ordered all of Cassius's correspondence burned. The official reason was to protect the senators who had flirted with treason. The deeper reason, his biographer Frank McLynn believes, was "to cover up all evidence that Faustina was involved in the plot." Faustina was his wife.
That is Marcus Aurelius in a single scene: the most merciful act any Roman emperor ever performed, and a cover-up, in the same afternoon, by the same man, for overlapping reasons. He is remembered as the philosopher-king, the author of the Meditations — and he was. He is also the emperor who vowed to exterminate an entire people, who let Christians be torn apart in the arena at Lyons without a word of rebuke, and who handed the Roman world to a son who had once ordered a bath-keeper burned alive for running his bath too cool. McLynn's verdict holds both halves: "Marcus was largely a failure in politics and government, overwhelmed by circumstances mostly beyond the scope of any human being; even so he qualified as the best-ever Roman emperor."
What makes him one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness is not that he governed brilliantly. It is that he made his own character his first job — and kept at it, in writing, every day, for the rest of his life, while plague and war and treason came at him from every side.
By the Numbers
The Emperor's Ledger
23 yearsSpent as Antoninus Pius's heir and deputy before taking the throne
2 nightsTime Marcus spent away from Antoninus in those twenty-three years
230Court days a year after Marcus expanded the judicial calendar
2 monthsLength of the auction of palace treasures to fund the northern war
50,000+Men who perished in nine years of war on the Danube, plague aside
13+Children born to Marcus and Faustina; Commodus the only surviving son
7 daysFrom the start of his fast to his death on the Danube, March 180
The Most Truthful Child in Rome
He was born in 121 and noticed early by the man who mattered most. The emperor Hadrian, a family friend, enrolled the boy in the equestrian order at six and gave him a nickname that would follow him for life: Verissimus — "truest," or "most truthful." The historian Donald Robertson reads it as a sign that the child was "the most plainspoken individual at court," which in Hadrian's court was a distinction of some danger.
The boy was strange in the way earnest boys are strange. His painting master, Diognetus, told him "not to waste time on nonsense" and to choose "the Greek lifestyle — the camp-bed and the cloak." Marcus, McLynn says, "went slightly overboard." At twelve his mother found him sleeping on the ground in a philosopher's cloak, scolded him, and finally persuaded him to give up "this nonsense" and sleep in a bed. As a young man he would boast of eating a single slice of bread for lunch while others gorged. Long after his death, the emperor Julian remembered him as "careless of his appearance," with "a kind of transfigured look, deriving from his severe diets."
He was also, beneath the austerity, a young man with a short fuse. Once, riding with a mounted party, he was insulted by a shepherd who called the riders "a dab hand at pillaging." The future philosopher-king galloped into the flock and stampeded it. Much of what follows in his life is the story of a hot-tempered man teaching himself, deliberately and in writing, not to do that.
In 138 the dying Hadrian settled the succession. He chose Antoninus — later called Pius — on the condition that Antoninus adopt Marcus. It was not a gentle year. Hadrian had Marcus's step-great-grandfather, Catilius Severus, "liquidated" for resenting the choice, and in his last months was "identifying fresh enemies every day." Marcus, sixteen, had to move into Hadrian's house.
He was not overjoyed. "So far from being overjoyed by his elevation, he was appalled," McLynn writes. He told his friends that adoption meant he "must leave the realm of innocence behind, to assume the cares of office and experience the evil of mankind." That night he dreamed he had ivory shoulders. The ancient dream manual of Artemidorus read ivory as a sign of eloquence; McLynn prefers a modern reading — an "identity crisis arising from the chasm between the studious, ivory-tower world he had hitherto inhabited and the brutal public world of the Roman empire." Marcus kept living "as austerely and frugally there as he had at home." Decades later, an emperor in his fifties was still warning himself in his notebook against "imperialization — that indelible stain."
The ancient historian Cassius Dio thought him "genuinely reluctant to become emperor." Every emperor professed reluctance; it was part of the script. But McLynn says that "only in Marcus's case is there reason to believe" it was real.
The Teacher Who Flattered and the Teacher Who Infuriated
A Roman heir's education led to one destination: rhetoric. It was, in the words of the translator Gregory Hays, "the key to an active political career under the empire." Antoninus believed rhetoric was the most important part of an aristocrat's training, and Marcus was given the leading orator of the age as his tutor — Cornelius Fronto, "at one time thought of as a second Cicero."
Fronto's letters to his royal pupil were "wheedling and sycophantic": "before adolescence a good man, before manhood a practical speaker." Marcus wrote back in the fashionable language of the day: "I will love you more than anyone else loves you." But privately he found the teacher's endless hunt for the perfect word pedantic. "Marcus could not understand all the fuss about altering a single syllable." Fronto, for his part, distrusted Greek as the language of philosophy and regarded philosophy as a pastime for a gentleman, not a way of life.
Then, in his mid-twenties, he broke with the whole program. He told Fronto that the books of the philosopher Aristo were "a joy for me and at the same time a torture," because they showed him "to what extent my inner dispositions are distant from these better things... at the age of twenty-five, I have not yet assimilated into my soul any of the salutary dogmas."
The man who broke Fronto's hold was Junius Rusticus, a Stoic statesman. Rusticus made Marcus see "that I needed to train and discipline my character." He taught him "not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons," to write plain letters, and "to read attentively — not to be satisfied with 'just getting the gist of it.'" Marcus gave up "oratory, poetry and belles lettres." The single key event, McLynn says, was that Rusticus introduced him to the lectures of Epictetus — "loaning me his own copy."
Rusticus was not a comfortable mentor. He "had the knack of making him furiously angry." And yet Marcus credited him, of all people, with teaching him to control his temper. Fronto took the defection badly. He told his pupil, "Even if you attain the wisdom of Cleanthes or of Zeno, you will still be obliged... to wear the purple pallium, and not that of the philosopher." He sneered that "even your Chrysippus himself... used to get drunk every day," and gloated when Rusticus admitted, "with a disgusted look on his face," that Marcus would have made a great lawyer. McLynn says Fronto "suffered grievously over the defection of his star pupil" and filled his later letters with "jibes and snide asides."
The final score is recorded in the Meditations. Rusticus gets thirteen lines. Fronto gets three "somewhat inconsequential ones" — and what Marcus says he took from Fronto, pointedly, is "the malice, cunning, and hypocrisy that power produces." Of all the gifts the gods had given him, Marcus counted knowing Rusticus the greatest.
As emperor he made the point publicly. He made Rusticus consul in 162 and again later, and, breaking court custom, always kissed Rusticus first when they met, "as if he were greeting his own brother" — making it plain that the philosopher held a special position at court.
Twenty-Three Years in Waiting
Hadrian had assumed that Antoninus, at fifty-one, "would not have long to live and that Marcus would take over in five years at most." Antoninus lived another twenty-three years.
Antoninus was a "micromanaging, controlling personality." "Can one imagine a Caligula, Nero, Commodus or Elagabalus waiting patiently for more than twenty years to become emperor?" McLynn asks.
Marcus waited, and he used the waiting as an apprenticeship. "In the twenty-three years of Antoninus's reign Marcus spent just two nights away from him." He watched the emperor receive embassies, try cases and dictate letters. As heir he was writing thirty letters a day. When the old man was ill, Marcus gave up going to the baths to keep him company, ate "the spartan fare of an invalid" with him, and even changed his sleeping habits to match — "with Marcus an owl and Antoninus a lark."
What he learned, he wrote down. The portrait of Antoninus in the Meditations appears twice, once in Book 1 and again in Book 6, more than a decade after Antoninus died. "Take Antoninus as your model, always," Marcus told himself. He recorded that "he couldn't be hurried," "how he wouldn't listen to informers," "his ability to work straight through till dusk," "his stewardship of the treasury," and "his willingness to take responsibility — and blame — for both." And he noted that Antoninus kept "games, building projects, distributions of money" within bounds, "because he looked to what needed doing and not the credit to be gained from doing it." Robertson calls Antoninus "his ideal role model as emperor," and Rusticus his model "as a Stoic."
Antoninus also showed him that "even at court you can live without a troop of bodyguards, and gorgeous clothes, lamps, sculpture — the whole charade." Marcus despised boastful imperial titles of the kind Hadrian had collected, and aspired only to "those denoting a philosopher or a good man."
When Antoninus died in 161, he gave the palace guard a last watchword: "Serenity." Marcus came to the throne at forty, trained as few emperors had ever been.
Giving Away Half an Empire
His first act as emperor astonished everyone. The dying Antoninus had said nothing whatever about a colleague. Marcus was sole ruler of the Roman world. And he immediately insisted that Lucius Verus — the other boy Hadrian had arranged to have adopted in 138 — be named his co-emperor. "The notion was entirely Marcus's," McLynn writes. It was "a definite innovation" in Roman government. Marcus even transferred his own surname, Verus, to his colleague "to establish a family connection."
Lucius was a strange choice. He had been "kept in the background and marginalised," was a charming lightweight with "an amused contempt for learning," and came from a notoriously short-lived family. McLynn asks the obvious question: "whatever possessed Marcus Aurelius to give away so much of his power?"
His best answer is political rather than sentimental. Lucius belonged to the Ceionius clan, and Marcus wanted "to co-opt him and head off the possibility of a coup." By bringing the rival claimant inside the tent, Marcus removed the reason for anyone to rally around him. "Having Verus at his side as a comrade-ruler was an act of statesmanship," McLynn concludes.
It held. Marcus stayed, in Hays's phrase, "the senior emperor in fact if not name." Lucius went east to fight the Parthians while Marcus ran the centre, and Robertson notes Marcus's relief that Lucius "remained loyal to him... rather than dividing the empire." The joint-emperor model Marcus invented would become "a commonplace in the fourth and fifth centuries."
But the east sent back a bill. Lucius's troops returned with "a devastating plague." The Antonine plague — smallpox, in all likelihood — would, by McLynn's estimate, kill between ten and eighteen million people across the empire. And when Lucius died suddenly in 169, "most of the burden was to be borne by Marcus alone."
The Judge
Before war consumed him, Marcus governed as a lawyer-emperor, and in this he was genuinely reformist. He increased the number of court days to 230 a year. He appointed judges from whom there was no appeal. He rebuked a praetor "for trying to gallop through a trial too quickly." He wrote new laws protecting orphans' estates from plundering guardians. "The thrust of Marcus's legal reforms was always towards the removal of cruel and unusual punishments," McLynn writes, "and his habit was to punish with lighter penalties than those allowed." He "did not believe in visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons."
He could be persuaded. On the bench, after "a long discussion with his jurists and amici," he allowed himself to be convinced "that the intrinsic interests of justice overrode precedent." He softened the arena too: he insisted that gladiators fighting before him use blunted weapons "so that they would be fighting like athletes." When Fronto warned him that reading in the stands offended the crowd, he began holding informal cabinet meetings at the games and dictating letters instead.
But the reformer had limits that McLynn does not soften. Although Stoicism taught that everything is in flux, Marcus "was at heart a deeply conservative man who loathed change." His "greatest weakness as emperor," McLynn says, was "his knee-jerk conservatism, lack of imagination and failure to think through the social implications of imperial policy." He sided with the senatorial class. In Athens he "debarred descendants of freed slaves" from office. Through his tutor Claudius Severus he had once "conceived of a society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." He admired the republican martyrs — "Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion and Brutus," among them Cato the Younger. He did not build that society.
He maintained instead a careful theatre of senatorial respect, going "through the charade of asking the Senate for funds for the war when he had access to them in any case." McLynn calls this "humbug." Hays observes that it is, "as much as anything else," the reason senatorial historians gave him such good press.
Two Months of Auctions on the Palatine
In 167 the Marcomanni broke through the Danube frontier and made their "sensational march on Aquileia" in Italy itself. "A sense of gloomy foreboding suffused the city of Rome." The timing could not have been worse. Rome was reeling from famine and from the plague, which killed most of the praetorian guard and its commander. Three legions had been moved east for the Parthian war, leaving the Danube weak. The mint had lost the Dacian gold mines. The treasury was strained.
And the emperor was nearly fifty, chronically ill, and had "no military experience to speak of." He suffered "pains in his stomach and chest... blood-spitting, vertigo," and insomnia, and took a medicine called theriac that his physician Galen laced with opium. The future usurper Avidius Cassius sneered at him as an "old woman" of a philosopher.
Marcus "had to tack between stressing the urgency of the situation and not affecting the morale of Romans by anything that smacked of panic." His answer was theatre that was also sacrifice. "Leading by example, he conducted a two-month sale of imperial effects and possessions, putting under the hammer not just sumptuous furniture from the imperial apartments, gold goblets, silver flagons, crystals and chandeliers, but also his wife's silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels." He cancelled debts owed to the imperial treasury. He ordered that "all funerals for plague victims were paid for by the state." Reaching back to the emergency methods of the Punic Wars, he enlisted slaves, gladiators and city policemen, and paid "a substantial bounty to members of bandit groups" to fight for Rome — "the equivalent of about six modern divisions."
McLynn is unsentimental: the auction "was more a propaganda move than a serious fund-raising effort, but it did the trick in terms of public relations." Robertson reads the same months through the Stoic lens. Rome "was thrown into a panic," while "Marcus responded calmly and with self-assurance," having rehearsed in advance for "sudden crises that would have left other men reeling." Both readings can be true.
Then he "donned the military cape and boots, rode forth from Rome, and stationed himself on the front line," at the head of "the largest army ever assembled on the frontier of the Roman empire."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.20The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
A Decade on the Danube
It became a decade of grinding war. In 170 came a defeat, with "losses of 20,000 reported." Then the victories began. In the winter of 173, on the frozen Danube, "he timed his attack perfectly and destroyed the enemy force." The camp at Carnuntum that had first regarded him as "an absolute novice" changed its mind. "Seven years later we find him a hardened veteran, and the northern legions... are now fiercely loyal." Cassius Dio wrote that "he had developed his body from a very weak one to one capable of the greatest endurance."
He fought with his head as much as his legions. Against the pan-German alliance he negotiated tribe by tribe, "seeking to detach flaky and unreliable tribes." He bought a temporary peace with the Quadi in exchange for 13,000 captives, and posted rewards for the usurper Ariogaesus — more if he was brought in alive than if only his head was produced. The enemy "watched appalled as Marcus successfully broke up the grand coalition, setting German against German." When he made peace with the Iazyges he demanded "8,000 horsemen, to serve as mercenaries," and sent 5,500 of them straight to Britain. Other prisoners were settled as indentured peasants on great estates inside the empire. He built the fortifications at the alpine passes and brought river fleets from Misenum, Ravenna and Britain "to ensure that he had command of the Danube itself."
He kept his claims modest. "Unlike Lucius Verus, he never had commemorative coins struck unless there actually had been a great victory. Even when victorious, he liked to speak of 'mixed success' and 'cautious optimism.'" He accepted acclamation for the so-called Rain Miracle only reluctantly, knowing it "was a minor engagement that had been inflated by propaganda." When the troops wanted a victory donative, he refused: the money "would have to be squeezed from the blood of the troops' relatives and families."
But the philosopher's calm did not extend to the people beyond the frontier. Marcus declared that the Iazyges, "inherently untrustworthy," would be exterminated "utterly," and later added the Quadi to the list "for extermination and genocide." The column that commemorates his war shows massacres, beheadings, "long lines of unarmed men being decapitated," and "the killing of infants." "At least 50,000 men perished in nine years of warfare," not counting the plague. And the gains, in the end, "had not proved permanent." McLynn's summary of the man in this mode is blunt: "Marcus was always a Roman first, last and foremost."
The crisis also exposed a superstition that sits oddly beside the Meditations. Taught as a boy to distrust "conjurors and hoodoo artists," in the war crisis he performed rites to "Isis, Magna Mater, Mithras (but not, of course, Jesus Christ)," and "even employed Chaldean necromancers." On the advice of the charlatan Alexander of Abonoteichos he had two lions thrown into the Danube. The Marcomanni clubbed them to death, taking them for "a new breed of dog or wolf."
An Old Man Fears Little
In 174, at his war headquarters at Sirmium, Marcus heard a case brought by the Athenians against his old tutor Herodes Atticus — a fabulously rich man, "tactless and insensitive, making many enemies." Herodes arrived in a state of "hysterical grief." Lightning had struck his lodgings and killed twin girls he had raised since childhood.
When the hearing opened, he "launched a vituperative personal attack on the emperor": "This is all I get in return for my hospitality to Lucius... you are sacrificing me to the whim of a woman and a three-year-old child." It was a jab at Faustina, and at Marcus's little daughter Vibia Sabina, who had been lisping to her father that he must "save the Athenians." When Herodes stepped toward the emperor, the praetorian prefect Bassaeus Rufus drew his sword to cut him down.
Marcus waved him off. "Poker-faced and betraying no emotion, Marcus rose from his chair and made the enigmatic remark, 'My good fellow, an old man fears little.'" He adjourned, and promised the Athenians a hearing the next day, "even though Herodes does not give you leave." Their case moved him to tears. He found for them — but gave Herodes's freedmen "the mildest [punishment] the law allowed," and instead of exiling Herodes he "suggested" a long holiday at his villa in Epirus: "banishment in all but name." Two years later he invited Herodes to supervise his own initiation into the mysteries at Eleusis.
The Usurper and the Burned Letters
Then came 175. Avidius Cassius — "virtual regent of the Eastern empire," a commander who once had men chained together and drowned — declared himself emperor, apparently believing a false report that Marcus was dead. Rumour said Faustina had encouraged him, fearing for Commodus if her ailing husband died. Syria, Palestine and Egypt, the grain supply of Rome, went over to the rebel. The Senate declared him a public enemy. Herodes Atticus sent Cassius a one-word note in Greek: "emanes" — "You're mad."
Marcus first kept the news secret so that the Iazyges would not learn Rome was divided. When rumours spread, he spoke to the legions "displaying no anger or animosity, but merely sadness and resignation." He told them he "could feel no anger," and that if only his own person were at stake he would lay the matter before the Senate and let it decide between them — but civil war concerned every man present. His dearest wish was that the rebellion "would be wrapped up quickly, without revenge or reprisals." To the Senate he wrote that he meant to pardon the rebels, and that "there is nothing which endears a Roman emperor to mankind as much as the quality of mercy... Would that I could also recall many others from the grave!" Of Cassius he told his courtiers: "It is impossible to make men exactly as one would wish them to be; we must use them such as they are."
Then came the centurion, the head in the bag, and the burned letters.
Civil war was avoided. Cities were pardoned. Cassius's family was protected. Marcus rushed through a law that no senator could become governor in the province where he had been born, and Robertson reports that his popularity in the East "grew considerably." In 178 he swore on the Capitol that he had never caused a senator's death. McLynn tells the reader to take that oath "with a pinch of salt," and he is harsh about the gaps. Marcus was "excessively lenient" to senators, and "in a rank display of inequity" the prefect of Egypt, Calvisius Statianus, got only exile while Cassius's son Maecianus was executed. The burning of the correspondence was mercy, and it was also a cover-up. Years later, Commodus would burn a second set of copies, "not wishing to incriminate his mother."
The same man's record on the Christians is contested. Hays thinks "there is no reason to think that it bulked large in his mind." McLynn argues he "cannot have been an innocent bystander." His own mentor Rusticus had Justin Martyr "scourged with whips and beheaded." After the pogrom at Lyons in 177, in which a fifteen-year-old boy was "torn apart by wild dogs," the governor "was not reprimanded by Marcus Aurelius."
The Son
Marcus owed his own throne to adoption, as Hadrian had, and as Antoninus had. Yet "there was no reason for Marcus to continue the policy of adoption," Hays writes, "and there is no reason to think he even considered it." By the mid-170s Commodus was the only surviving son of at least thirteen children Faustina had borne him.
The boy was already notorious. At twelve, finding his bath too cool, he "ordered his bath-keeper burned alive." Septimius Severus later said Marcus "should have quietly done away with such an unpromising specimen."
Marcus pushed him up at speed instead. Commodus received a new title in November 176 and a triumph "as conqueror of Germany" that December; "during the ceremony Marcus trotted alongside Commodus's triumphal chariot." A consulship followed on 1 January 177, at fifteen — "the youngest consul in Roman history" — and then tribunician power as co-emperor, all "without any reference to the wishes of the Senate."
McLynn lists the reasons: a "visceral feeling for blood kin"; the ideal of philostorgia, family warmth, which Marcus prized; the way imperial wealth was bound up with the family; and the grim logic that "he either had to make him his heir or kill him." Marcus did look for alternatives. At one stage he hoped his sons-in-law Pompeianus and Severus might rule jointly, and he sounded out Pompeianus, "but he, wisely, was having none of it."
He knew the risk. He compared himself to Philip of Macedon with his son Alexander — a comparison that cuts both ways. It is one of the three flaws Julian the Apostate counted against him.
Go to the Rising Sun
In March 180, in winter quarters on the Danube with the final campaign almost won, Marcus caught the plague — "in reality smallpox," whose symptoms he and Galen had watched in its victims since 166.
He summoned Commodus and urged him to finish the war, warning that failing to do so "would constitute a betrayal of the interests of the Roman state." Commodus hedged: his own health came first, and "a dead man can achieve nothing." Marcus then "decided to accelerate the inevitable by abstaining from food and drink."
On the sixth day he gathered his friends — Pompeianus, Severus, Bruttius Praesens, Vitrasius Pollio and Aufidius Victorinus. When they wept, "Marcus reproached them with taking such an unphilosophical attitude." He was saddened that the only men who might have checked Commodus "had always been at daggers drawn," and he admitted he "feared his son would become another Caligula, Nero or Domitian." Still, he commended the boy to them: "You who are many must be fathers to him in place of me alone." The troops who had once despised the philosopher now "loved him as no other."
On the seventh day he sent Commodus away quickly, for fear of infecting him, covered his head and slept. When a tribune came to ask for the day's watchword, he answered: "Go to the rising sun. For I am already setting."
He had rehearsed the moment for years in his notebook: "It was nature that bound you to them — that tied the knot. And nature that now unties you."
Commodus "was to be remembered as a dissolute tyrant." Immediately after Marcus died, "ignoring his father's orders for clemency, Commodus would have the descendants of Cassius hunted down and burned alive." His eventual murder "would usher in the first in a series of power struggles that would burden the empire for the next century."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.16Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one. — Lives are led at court... Then good ones can be.
The Notebook
What survives of Marcus, beyond the column and the coins, is a private notebook. The Meditations were "certainly never considered for publication." McLynn and Hays agree that Marcus wrote them "as a kind of meditative technique," for his own eyes. Robertson suggests he may have begun after Rusticus died, so that he could "assume responsibility for mentoring himself" once his living teacher was gone. Marcus put it his own way: philosophy was "not... your instructor, but... the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia" — not a lecture, but a treatment.
Much of it is Marcus arguing with Marcus, usually in the second person. He scolds himself out of bed: "So you were born to feel 'nice'?... Nature set a limit on that... And you're over the limit... But not of working. There you're still below your quota." He reminds himself that "Lasting reputation is oblivion," that Alexander, Pompey and Julius Caesar, "who utterly destroyed so many cities," "departed this life" too, and that "Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both."
And in one line he condenses the whole project: "To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one."
Part IIThe Playbook
Marcus Aurelius governed an empire under plague, invasion, rebellion and a succession problem he could not solve. He was, by his best modern biographer's account, a mediocre statesman and the best emperor Rome ever had. The gap between those two verdicts is where his usefulness lies. He could not control the circumstances; what he could control, he trained, daily and in writing. The principles below are drawn from what he did and what he told himself to do — including the places where the code failed.
The principles
- 1.Make your own character the first job.
- 2.Itemise what you learn from everyone.
- 3.Serve the apprenticeship; don't grab the crown.
- 4.Co-opt the rival claimant.
- 5.Sell your own gold first.
- 6.Rehearse the worst before breakfast.
- 7.Treat obstacles as fuel.
- 8.Make mercy a strategy, not a mood.
- 9.Don't let love write the succession plan.
Principle 1
Make your own character the first job
In his mid-twenties, Marcus confessed to Fronto that philosophy was "a joy for me and at the same time a torture," because it showed him how far his "inner dispositions" were from what he admired. Most people who feel that gap either stop reading or keep reading as a hobby. Marcus did neither. He gave up the career track he had been trained for — oratory, the instrument of every ambitious Roman — and made the training of his own character the core discipline of his life.
He did not do it in public. The Meditations were never meant to be read. They are a working document: reminders, rebukes, drills. "Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you," he told himself as emperor. And: "To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one." McLynn credits this lifelong discipline for the moral stature that remains "secure" eighteen centuries later — and records its price: a "divided self," because "Stoic forbearance would not stop barbarians crossing the frontier."
Tactic: Keep a private, unpublished written practice aimed at your own conduct, not your ideas. Write in the second person. Its audience is the person you need to correct.
Principle 2
Itemise what you learn from everyone
Book 1 of the Meditations is the most practical document Marcus left. It is a list of the people who formed him, and against each name a specific thing he took. Not "my grandfather was a great man" but "Character and self-control." Not "my teacher was wise" but "Not to support this side or that in chariot-racing." From the literary critic Alexander, a small and precise lesson in tact: don't pounce on other people's errors; "insert the right expression, unobtrusively."
Even Fronto, the teacher he outgrew, gets an entry — and the entry is a warning: what Marcus learned from him was "the malice, cunning, and hypocrisy that power produces." The method treats every person, including the disappointing ones, as a source of exactly one lesson. It also turns admiration into something usable: Marcus catalogued Antoninus, then told himself, "Take Antoninus as your model, always."
Tactic: For each important person in your working life, write down the single specific behaviour you want to take from them — or avoid. Vague admiration teaches nothing; an itemised trait can be practised.
Principle 3
Serve the apprenticeship; don't grab the crown
Hadrian expected Marcus to wait five years. He waited twenty-three, deputy to a controlling, micromanaging emperor, spending "just two nights away from him" in all that time. He sat in on embassies and trials. He wrote thirty letters a day. He changed his sleep schedule to match the old man's.
The waiting was the training. When Marcus took power at forty, he had watched the job done well for two decades and had written down how — and what he wrote became the template for his own reign.
Tactic: If you are positioned to inherit, use the waiting as deliberate apprenticeship: stay close to the person doing the job, document their methods, and resist every temptation to accelerate the handover.
Principle 4
Co-opt the rival claimant
Marcus's first act as sole emperor was to give half his title away. Making Lucius Verus co-emperor looked like generosity; McLynn reads it as "an act of statesmanship" designed to "head off the possibility of a coup by the Ceionius clan." A rival inside the government has no reason to lead a faction against it. Marcus even gave Lucius his own surname, binding the families together.
He used the move more than once. After the Cassius revolt he "cunningly wound up by asking the senators to accept his son-in-law Claudius Pompeianus as next year's consul," and he had earlier used Cassius himself "as a counter-balance to Claudius Pompeianus." "It was not just with Germans and Sarmatians that Marcus played 'divide and rule.'" The joint-emperor model outlived him by centuries.
Tactic: When a credible rival exists, consider bringing them inside with real status and a shared identity. Keep the substance of seniority, and give away the title.
Principle 5
Sell your own gold first
When the Marcomanni reached Italy and the treasury ran dry, Marcus did not begin by taxing Rome. He began by auctioning his own household for two months — the gold goblets, the silver flagons, the chandeliers, Faustina's embroidered robes and jewels. He paid for plague victims' funerals from the state. Only then did he recruit slaves, gladiators and bandits and march north.
The auction mattered more as a signal than as revenue. A leader who asks for sacrifice after visibly making one asks from a different position. Marcus applied the same logic to the army: he refused a victory donative by telling the troops it would have to be "squeezed from the blood of the troops' relatives and families." The refusal stood because the man refusing had already sold his palace.
Tactic: Before you ask anyone to give something up, give up something of your own, visibly and first. The symbolic sacrifice buys the authority for the substantive one.
Principle 6
Rehearse the worst before breakfast
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly." Marcus began his days by predicting other people's bad behaviour, and by reminding himself why it happens — "because they can't tell good from evil." Robertson calls it the Stoic "premeditation of adversity," and connects it to a real crisis: when a Roman client king betrayed him and brought the Marcomanni into Italy, Rome panicked and Marcus "responded calmly and with self-assurance."
He paired the morning rehearsal with a nine-point checklist against anger in Book 11, which includes "That you've made enough mistakes yourself," "that human life is very short," and "That kindness is invincible, provided it's sincere." From Rusticus he learned to "wait until our feelings have naturally abated and then calmly consider what someone wise would do."
Tactic: Start each day by naming the specific frictions you expect and how you intend to respond. When anger arrives, run a fixed checklist before acting. Composure under pressure is mostly rehearsal.
Principle 7
Treat obstacles as fuel
"The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Our inward power "turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp."
Marcus lived the line in 167. An empty treasury produced the palace auction. Plague-thinned legions produced the recruitment of slaves and gladiators. A frail, middle-aged civilian with no military experience produced, after seven years at the front, "a hardened veteran" whose legions were "fiercely loyal." He kept two lenses on any problem: break a responsibility "down into individual parts," or "look down on the earth from above."
Tactic: When a constraint blocks the plan, ask what the constraint makes possible that the plan did not. Then alternate between the close view (the next concrete step) and the wide view (how much this matters in the whole) until you can act.
Principle 8
Make mercy a strategy, not a mood
Marcus's clemency was not softness. When Cassius rebelled, mercy was the fastest way to end a civil war: pardon the cities and the defection loses its reason. When Herodes Atticus raged at him in open court, poker-faced calm defused a moment in which his prefect had already drawn a sword — and the "mildest" sentence plus a suggested holiday in Epirus achieved exile without humiliation. "The best revenge is not to be like that," he wrote. Correct the wrongdoer "affectionately — with no hatred in your heart. And not ex cathedra or to impress third parties, but speaking directly."
⚖
Mercy and Its Limits
The same code produced very different outcomes depending on who stood inside the Roman order.
| Where the code held | Where it did not |
|---|---|
| Pardoned the cities and family of the usurper Cassius. | Cassius's son Maecianus executed while the prefect of Egypt got exile. |
| Mildest lawful penalty for Herodes Atticus's freedmen. | Vowed to exterminate the Iazyges "utterly," then the Quadi. |
| Legal reforms toward lighter penalties; sons not punished for fathers. | No rebuke for the governor after the martyrdoms at Lyons in 177. |
| No senator put to death during his reign. | Burned the rebel's letters, partly to shield his wife. |
The table is the honest version. Marcus's mercy had a border, and the border was Rome. McLynn's phrase — "a Roman first, last and foremost" — is the key to both columns.
Tactic: Use clemency deliberately where it ends a conflict faster than punishment would. And audit where your standards quietly stop applying; everyone's code has a border, and the people outside it notice.
Principle 9
Don't let love write the succession plan
This is the principle Marcus broke. Hadrian and Marcus himself owed their thrones to adoption. Marcus gave the empire to Commodus, a son who at twelve had ordered a bath-keeper burned alive. He made him consul at fifteen and co-emperor without consulting the Senate. He knew the danger; on his deathbed he "feared his son would become another Caligula, Nero or Domitian." He still commended the boy to his friends: "You who are many must be fathers to him in place of me alone."
McLynn's reasons are human rather than foolish — blood feeling, family warmth, dynastic wealth, and the grim logic that Marcus "either had to make him his heir or kill him." Pompeianus refused the alternative. The outcome is not in dispute. Commodus overturned his father's clemency within days of his death, and his reign opened a century of power struggles.
Tactic: Separate the question "who do I love?" from the question "who should run this?" If the honest answer to the second is not your heir, build the alternative early, while you still have the authority to make it stick.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Expect difficult people before breakfast. Predict the meddling and the surly in advance, and remember they act out of ignorance. Rehearsal turns a panic into a procedure.
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What stands in the way becomes the way. An empty treasury produced the palace auction; thin legions produced a new army. The obstacle is the material.
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Serve your apprenticeship; don't grab the crown. Twenty-three years at the elbow of the man doing the job is not a delay. It is the preparation.
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Choose the teacher who makes you angry. Flattery taught Marcus rhetoric. Irritation taught him character.
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Sell your own gold before taxing anyone else's. A visible personal sacrifice is what makes a request for collective sacrifice legitimate.
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Refuse to look at your enemy's severed head. Grieve the chance to pardon. "The best revenge is not to be like that."
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Stay poker-faced when the sword comes out. "My good fellow, an old man fears little." Then rule on the merits the next day.
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Stop describing the good man; be one. Write for yourself, in the second person, and act on what you write.
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Your mercy has a border; know where it lies. The emperor who pardoned rebels also vowed to exterminate whole peoples. Find where your own standards stop.
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Love for your son is not a succession plan. Marcus reached the throne by adoption and gave it away by blood. Rome paid for a century.
