MARCUS AURELIUS, A BIOGRAPHY
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loginMARCUS AURELIUS is one of the best recorded individuals from antiquity. Evenhis face became more than usually familiar: the imperial coinage displayed hisportrait for over forty years, from the clean-shaven young heir of Antoninus to thewar-weary, heavily bearded ruler who died at his post in his late fifties. For hischildhood and early youth we depend largely on anecdote and reconstruction. Thenin the correspondence of his tutor Fronto, spanning nearly three decades, we have aseries of vivid and revealing glimpses into the family life and preoccupations ofMarcus and the court. But what made Marcus Aurelius a household name was theprivate notebook that he kept in his last ten years, the Meditations. The ‘philosopherin the purple’ has never lacked admirers, ancient or modern. Critics are hard to find– although the author of the Historia Augusta was able to invent a notable one, in hisfictional life of Avidius Cassius. Gibbon (in 1783) paid sober tribute to a man‘severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfection of others, just and beneficent to allmankind.’ Eighty years later, Matthew Arnold – inspired by reading a new Englishversion of the Meditations – was unrestrained: ‘The acquaintance of a man likeMarcus Aurelius is an imperishable benefit’. Marcus was ‘perhaps the mostbeautiful figure in history. . . . Besides him, history presents one or two othersovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But MarcusAurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis orAlfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essentialcharacteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilisation. . . .By its accents of emotion . . . the morality of Marcus Aurelius acquires a specialcharacter . . . [his] sentences find their way to the soul . . . it is this very admixture ofsweetness with his dignity which makes him so beautiful a moralist. It enables himto carry even into his observation of nature a delicate penetration, a sympathetictenderness, worthy of Wordsworth.’ Walter Pater made the hero of his ‘novel’Marius the Epicurean (1885) – who became the emperor’s secretary – a peg onwhich to hang a set elaborate essays on Antonine Rome, in which the sereneAurelius figures prominently. Meanwhile, Ernest Renan devoted the eighth and lastvolume of his Histoire des Origines du Christianisme to Marcus – ‘and the end ofthe ancient world’. Christianity receives much more attention than the emperor in his pages; and he was at pains to defend the reputation of the beautiful and fertileFaustina and to discuss the paradox of Marcus’ degenerate heir Commodus. Gibboncould not use Fronto’s letters, Arnold was interested almost solely in theMeditations. But Gibbon, Pater and Renan alike – it is unfortunate – swallowedwhole the fictional parts of the Historia Augusta. The unmasking of the author ofthat curious work was to begin with Hermann Dessau in 1889 and the task ofdecontaminating the source continues – spurious items, notably from the Aelius andAvidius Cassius, still infect serious scholarship.
