Marcus Aurelius

Picture a tent on the frozen bank of the Danube, a lamp, and behind it a man to whom the whole known world belongs. Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome at the height of its power and spent almost all of that time on the frontier, in grinding wars against the Germanic tribes pressing down from the north. At night, when the camp fell quiet, he would take out a notebook and set down a few lines to himself in Greek – reminders of how to bear an insult, how not to grow bitter, how to meet death, how to keep power from spoiling him. It is the loneliest post in the world, and the man who held it kept a notebook at his side.

Those night-notes became the Meditations – twelve short books he never meant to publish and did not even title for himself. There is no system here and no proof; there is an honest man talking himself, every morning, back into living by the Stoic principles he inherited from his teachers. Remember that you are mortal. Look at things from above, from the height of the stars, from where even the empire is an anthill. Everything flows and alters, and the one thing in your power is your own mind. He buried most of his children, was often ill, was worn to the bone, and was never for a moment certain he was doing right. And still he went out to people and did his work. Here is the answer to the question that troubles everyone who reads the Stoics: what does this philosophy look like in a living life? It looks like Marcus.

Now the uncomfortable part, without which the portrait would be a lie. Under the reign of this gentle sage the empire persecuted Christians: in 177, at Lyon, a group of believers was thrown to the arena, among them the slave girl Blandina, and the law that killed them came from under his hand. And there was the failure he slept beside his own throne. For almost a century the good emperors had passed power to the ablest man they could adopt rather than to a son; Marcus broke the custom and left Rome to his own blood – to his son Commodus, a vain and brutal boy who fancied himself Hercules and fought in the arena like a gladiator. Historians date the empire's long slide from Commodus. The wisest ruler, who watched himself more closely than anyone, failed to make out the man growing up a step away from him.

In this lies both the bitterness and the strength. A man who could judge himself without mercy saved neither the innocents on the Lyon sand nor his own inheritance. And yet the notebook he wrote for himself alone outlived him, and Commodus, and the empire itself, and today it is opened by soldiers in trenches and by those who cannot sleep. It promises nothing except one thing: the circumstances are not in your power, and who you are within them is. Marcus was not always right, and he knew it. But every morning, and above all on the mornings when he could see no point in it, he got up and went out to his work.