Meditations of Marcus Aurelius / translated by George Long ; with an introduction by W. L. Courtney.

1910·7.8 MB·English

by  Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, 121-180

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THE MEDITATIONS OF
MARCUS AURELIUS
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I
Introduction
i
The perennial charm which surrounds the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is explicable on
several grounds. Perhaps in the first place
I
we should put the fact that the author was an
Emperor; that is to say, a man who was every
7 dayface toface withall the problems ofgovern-
ment, who had to lead his soldiers against out-
• —
landish tribes the Quadi, the Marcomanni,
and others. In his busy career of practical
industry one would hardly expect him to find
opportunity or leisure for the kind of diary,
_ in twelve books, which he has bequeathed to
*J us. Another point of interest is that, though
hehad the inestimable advantage of a father by
;
adoption, Antoninus Pius, to whom he gives a
remarkable tribute in his opening chapter, he
,3 was himself surrounded with figures of the
ordinary imperial depravity. His wife, Faus-
tina, had no particularly good character, al-
though probably some of the stories narrated
c^of her by Dion Cassius and others represent
nothing more nor less than the scandal of the
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INTRODUCTION
time. At all events, it is certain that his son,
Commodus, was a brutal ruffian, and it is diffi-
cult for usto understand how sogentle, so cul-
tured, so philosophic a father should have left
such few traces of his personality on the up-
bringing of Commodus. But a third and still
more important element in our interest in the
writings of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius An-
toninus is that he was so near to, and yet so
untouched by, Christianity. If we take the
series of his thoughts, which he put down, ap-
parently, day by day, as a kind of private com-
mentary to guide his own career, we are struck
over and over again at once by their likeness
to and their difference from Christian tenets.
The thoughts remind us of the Imitation,
especially in their constant enunciation of the
necessity for a definite purpose for human
beings, some specific goal or object, which is
to save men from stupid and idle vacillation.
YetMarcusAurelius's reflectionsarenotChris-
tian in spirit; they are Stoic. Together with
the writings of the enfranchised slave, Epic-
tetus, they give us the best possible picture of
what Stoicism had become in the second cen-
tury A.D.
Stoicism was a creed which especially recom-
mended itself to the Romans from the vermy
earliest time of its introduction, because
iv