Marcus Aurelius

Abstract

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (b. 121–d. 180) was the author of a series of philosophical reflections that are best known in the English-speaking world under the title Meditations. In the Meditations Marcus reflects on a range of philosophical topics as well as challenges in his own life. The book is unlike any other philosophical text that has come down to us from Antiquity, taking the form of a collection of notebook jottings that were probably never intended for wider circulation. With the exception of Book 1, which reflects on Marcus’s debts to various people that have been important in his life, the remaining eleven books of philosophical and personal reflections are in no particular order and display no obvious structure. Many of the philosophical positions that Marcus holds, and the arguments underpinning them, remain unstated but various remarks in the text and elsewhere (especially Marcus’s correspondence with his rhetoric tutor Fronto) make it clear that Marcus was committed to Stoicism. The Meditations contains numerous examples of someone trying to respond to problems in everyday life in the light of not just Stoic ethics but also Stoic physics and Stoic logic. Although Marcus quotes often from Plato and occasionally uses Platonic terminology, his philosophical worldview remains thoroughly Stoic. He often quotes from the Stoic Epictetus, whom he explicitly acknowledges as an important influence, and he also quotes from Heraclitus, whose image of nature as everlasting fire influenced Stoic physics. How the Meditations were preserved after Marcus’s death and through the Middle Ages remains obscure, and the text did not attract any significant number of readers until the first printed edition in the sixteenth century. Since then, it has proved especially popular with general readers although less so with professional philosophers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Henry More, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson were all avid readers of Marcus. More recently, he has been an important influence on Pierre Hadot’s account of philosophy as a way of life, which, in turn, influenced the late work of Michel Foucault.