Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius

Somewhere on the Danube frontier, in the 170s, at the end of a long day of war and plague, the most powerful man alive sat down in a tent and wrote himself a note. Not a proclamation, not a letter, not a book for anyone else: a note to himself, in Greek, reminding himself that he would die, that fame is smoke, that the people who had annoyed him that day were only doing what they took to be good, and that the one thing actually required of him was to do the next right thing well. He kept this up for years, and the loose pages survived by something close to accident, and we call them the Meditations. There is nothing quite like it from the ancient world, and arguably from any world: the private spiritual diary of an emperor, never meant for our eyes, in which Marcus Aurelius talks himself, night after night, into being good. To read it is to read over the shoulder of the loneliest powerful man in history.

A book that argues with itself. The Meditations is not a system and was never meant to be read straight through; it is a workbook. The entries are uneven and repetitive, sometimes only a line long, because Marcus is not explaining Stoicism to a reader, he is applying it to himself, over and over, the way you re-tie a knot that keeps slipping. And what sets the book apart from every other Stoic text is that you can hear him struggling. He orders himself out of bed in the morning, because the work of a human being is waiting and he would rather stay warm. He reminds himself, plainly through gritted teeth, not to lose his temper with the fools and frauds he has to deal with all day. He talks himself, again and again, out of the fear of dying. The polished Stoicism of Epictetus's handbook tells you what the sage would do; the Meditations shows you a real and exhausted man, the most burdened man in the empire, actually trying to do it and not always managing. That honesty is exactly why it has outlasted the tidier treatises.

The view from above. His favorite exercise is to pull the camera back. When the day's troubles crowd in, Marcus lifts his mind to a great height and looks down: the cities and the armies shrink to ant-trails, the urgent present narrows to a pinprick on the long line of time, and his own enormous power dwindles to a brief administrative errand. From up high, he writes, the herds and the camps and the weddings and the lawsuits all blur into one small busy pattern. He runs the same move on time itself, listing the emperors and the geniuses and the conquerors the earth has already swallowed and quietly placing his own name at the back of the queue. This is not despair; it is medicine. Seen from far enough off, the things that were strangling you with worry stand revealed as the small things they are, and a mind briefly freed of them can turn back to the one task that was ever genuinely its own.

The use of death. No theme returns more often. Marcus reminds himself, on what can feel like every other page, that he is going to die, and he does it not to frighten himself but to free himself. Death, he insists, is nothing to dread: it is only nature doing to him what it does to all things, the same nature that lent him his body quietly calling the loan back, a change no different in kind from the changes that have run through him his whole life long. The fear of it, he sees clearly, is the great hidden source of human servility, the thing that makes people flatter and cling and betray. Defuse that fear, hold your own mortality steadily in view, and a strange freedom opens up: if you have already made your peace with losing everything, then nothing can be held over you, and you are free to spend the time you do have on what actually matters. It is the same liberation Epictetus found at the bottom of fortune as a slave, reached here by the emperor from the very top of it.

A citizen of the cosmos. The strangest thing about the book is who wrote it. The doctrine Marcus keeps coming back to is the old Stoic one: that the universe is a single rational order, and that every reasoning being, slave or emperor, Roman or barbarian, is a citizen of one vast city, the cosmopolis, beside which Rome is merely a province. And the man writing this down ruled that province. Here is the emperor of the whole Mediterranean world, in his private notebook, reminding himself that his crown is a temporary posting, that the barbarians across the river are his fellow citizens in the deeper city, and that he is one small rational part of a whole he did not make and cannot command. Power, in the Meditations, is never celebrated; it is relativized, treated as one more external that fortune has lent and will reclaim, a duty to discharge well and to hold lightly. It may be the most genuinely humble book ever written by a person with absolute power.

The notebook that survived. The room reads the Meditations in George Long's old translation, cited by book and chapter; the Greek title is simply "To Himself." The book came within a hair of vanishing, since Marcus never published it and it reaches us by a single thin thread of manuscripts, so that we are reading something we were never meant to see. What it has done since is out of all proportion to that fragile survival. Frederick the Great annotated his copy, Goethe loved it, and a great many ordinary people now keep it by the bed and read one entry in the morning, in exactly the spirit Marcus wrote them, as a reminder set down before the day starts pulling. The practical core needs no Stoic physics to put to use: that you suffer far more from your judgments than from events; that the view from above cuts your troubles back to their real size; that keeping your mortality in sight frees you rather than sinking you; and that the only moment you ever truly hold, or can ever lose, is this one.

Three generations of Roman Stoics wrote the tradition's lasting books, and the spread of them is almost unbelievable: Seneca the fabulously rich courtier, Epictetus the freed slave, and Marcus the emperor, arriving at the same place from the top, the bottom, and the throne of the social world. That a multimillionaire, a slave, and a king all found the same medicine is itself a kind of argument for it. Not everyone has been persuaded; Nietzsche read the Meditations with care and heard in its calm acceptance a defeat dressed up as wisdom, and the charge is worth taking seriously. But the book keeps being picked up, in hospital rooms and prison cells and on ordinary hard mornings, because it offers something rare and undramatic: not a doctrine to believe but a set of exercises to do, written by a man who plainly needed them as badly as any reader will. The most powerful person in the world turns out, in private, to have been just someone trying to be a little kinder and a little braver tomorrow than he had managed to be today.