Marcus Aurelius quotes with context

An emperor on the Danube

Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome in 121 and was initially named Marcus Annius Verus. His family belonged to the senatorial upper class; his father’s line came from Baetica in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. His father died early. Part of his upbringing was overseen by his grandfather of the same name, an influential senator.

In 138, Emperor Hadrian reorganized his succession. He adopted Antoninus Pius on the condition that Antoninus would in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. It was now certain that a sixteen-year-old would one day rule the empire. He then had twenty-three years to prepare. Antoninus Pius gave him offices and involved him in the affairs of government. Marcus Aurelius watched a long and peaceful reign from close by. His own would be the opposite.

He assumed power in 161 and insisted that Lucius Verus be installed as an equal emperor. After Verus’s death in 169, he ruled alone. He spent most of his final years in military camps on the Danube, far from the city he governed. He died there in 180, during a campaign, after nineteen years in office.

What a former slave taught him

The most important teacher for what Marcus Aurelius would later write down was Junius Rusticus. He was a senator and a Stoic, and he urged his student to work on his own character. In Book One of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius thanks him for something very concrete: Rusticus lent him his own copy of Epictetus’s notes.

Epictetus had been enslaved before he taught as a philosopher. His lectures survive only because a student took notes. By this indirect route, the thoughts of a man without rights reached the most powerful man in the empire. In Book Eleven, Marcus Aurelius quotes him several times verbatim.

From Epictetus comes the distinction from which almost everything else follows. Our own judgment, impulse, pursuit, and avoidance are within our power. Outside it lie the body, property, reputation, and offices. Anyone who regards the second group as their own possession will, according to this teaching, inevitably become unhappy, because they are bound to things that can be taken away at any time.

Stoic philosophy came to him as borrowed notes from a lesson, long before it became useful to him as an emperor. That explains the tone of many of his sentences. They are addressed to one person, and that person is himself.

Notes without a reader

The Meditations now consists of twelve books. This division may not have come from Marcus Aurelius. Book One stands apart: a long list of people to whom he owed something, from his parents to his teachers. The other eleven gather admonitions, brief arguments, images, and quotations from others, often without any recognizable order.

The text rarely explains its technical terms. It names personal events so vaguely that they remain empty to outsiders. And it repeats itself constantly. The admonition to accept death as a natural process returns dozens of times across the books, each time worded a little differently.

Two passages include a place note. One names the territory of the Quadi on the river Gran; the other names Carnuntum, a legionary camp on the Danube. There is no indication for the rest.

Anyone expecting a reader does not say the same thing thirty times. Marcus Aurelius gave the work no title either. “To Himself” is attested only in the later Byzantine tradition. The English title Meditations comes from a later translation tradition.

Purple is wool dyed with snail’s blood

Book Two begins with a sentence Marcus Aurelius apparently recited to himself in the morning: Today you will meet intrusive and ungrateful people. The thought is meant to get ahead of anger. It is not an excuse for other people’s behavior. Anyone who expects it is less surprised, and surprise is a large part of what anger consists in.

A second exercise breaks desirable things down into their components. The purple of an imperial robe appears as sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a sea snail. An elaborate dish appears as the dead body of an animal. Elsewhere Marcus Aurelius takes a view from high above and sets a single day beside the vastness of time. He counts how many people before him pursued the same things, and how few of their names remain.

These sentences are tools. They work against a judgment that is just forming. When you read one as a quotation, you are reading a fragment of an exercise. An instruction such as “Erase the impression” is the next attempt in a series with no end. Anyone who writes it down obviously still has the impression.

What was good for him

Marcus Aurelius’s hierarchy of values explains most of his quotations. Good and bad concern, for him, only the use of one’s own judgment and actions. Health, property, status, and survival itself do not belong to that category. They may reasonably be preferred, but they decide nothing about whether a life is well lived.

This is stricter than the familiar shorthand that one should focus on what lies within one’s power. That shorthand leaves open what one’s power should then be used for. Marcus Aurelius answers it. He demands just action toward others because, to him, human beings belong to a shared rational order and are not imagined as self-sufficient islands. This has practical consequences. One may accept an office and perform it well. One must be able to lose it without thereby becoming someone else.

A loss is initially an event for him, and only your judgment of it turns it into harm. Almost all his famous sentences lead back to this. Anyone who reads him as a trainer in composure is getting half the story.

The war he himself waged

Marcus Aurelius urged himself toward gentleness while waging war at the same time. From 170 onward, Roman armies fought on the Danube against groups that Roman sources gather under names such as the Marcomanni and Quadi. These wars continued intermittently until his death. Roman troops killed, deported, and enslaved people in the process. The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome depicts these campaigns in reliefs, including decapitations and burning villages. It was erected as a victory monument.

He wrote about the natural community of all rational beings and never questioned slavery. Individual legal decisions improved the situation of certain vulnerable people; the system remained. In 177, Christians in Lugdunum, present-day Lyon, were abused and executed. No general edict of persecution by him is attested, and what he knew about the local events is disputed in scholarship. They took place within the legal system of his rule.

His texts offer a high standard; his government does not cleanly fulfill that standard. The contradiction remains. The reminder that he must be understood in his time merely shifts it. When you read one of his sentences about gentleness, you are reading it from a man who ordered military campaigns.

A different tone in the letters

In 1815, the librarian Angelo Mai found in Milan a manuscript that had been written over, a so-called palimpsest. Beneath the newer text lay an older one: the correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and his rhetoric teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto. The letters begin in Marcus Aurelius’s youth and extend into his imperial period. Mai found further sections four years later in the Vatican Library.

The tone there is entirely different. It is about stylistic exercises and reading, but also sore throats, poor sleep, family news, and mutual affection discussed at considerable length. Marcus Aurelius writes here in Latin, at length and often uncertainly, and asks for advice. Fronto, for his part, spent years trying to defend rhetoric against the growing influence of philosophy. He lost.

The man who admonishes himself toward independence in the Meditations visibly depends on teachers and friends in his letters. This corrects the image of the solitary Stoic in a tent. His philosophy arose in lessons and from borrowed books, even if the notes sound like a self-conversation. Both kinds of text come from the same man, and only one of them is quoted today.

Sentences he never wrote

Numerous sentences circulate under Marcus Aurelius’s name that appear nowhere in the Greek text. The route is always the same. A free translation becomes a paraphrase, the paraphrase is passed on, and in the next step it appears in quotation marks. For an author who has been printed since 1559 and translated into dozens of languages since then, this happens quickly.

Even attested passages lose something without their surroundings. At several points Marcus Aurelius considers both a world ordered by providence and a world made of atoms. A sentence taken out on its own can therefore make him sound more definite than the sequence of his reflections warrants. Neighboring notes often limit a statement or begin again from a new point.

Then there is translation itself. Marcus Aurelius distinguishes the body, the vital force, and the thinking part of a human being. He has a separate word for the thinking part, hegemonikon, the governing faculty. Depending on the edition, it may be rendered as mind, soul, reason, or self, and the sentence means something different each time.

Two translations of the same Greek sentence can differ widely, and both can be defensible. When a wording cannot be documented anywhere, the thought may still have come from him. The sentence itself then belongs to the history of translation.