Meditations

Picture the author of Meditations and you probably see a serene old man in a marble study, with nothing more urgent on his desk than the nature of the soul.

Now look at how two of the books end. One carries the line "Among the Quadi at the Granua", a river on the Danube frontier. Another says only "This in Carnuntum", the legionary town where the emperor spent three years at war with the Marcomanni.

These are not lecture notes. They are reminders written in a war camp, by a man with an empire to hold together, who once warned himself not to be turned into a Caesar.

He started early. Long's sketch says that at eleven the boy put on the plain, coarse dress of the philosophers and threw himself into study so hard, and ate so sparingly, that he damaged his health.

He had been given the best education Rome could buy: rhetoric under Fronto, whose affectionate letters with his pupil still survive, poetry, like many young Romans, and law under a distinguished jurist, because he was being groomed to rule. In the end he gave up poetry and rhetoric and attached himself to the Stoics.

That choice matters for everything that follows. The polished speaker Rome expected became a man who wanted philosophy as a way of living, not as a way of sounding impressive.

According to Long's sketch, what did the young Marcus finally abandon when he attached himself to the Stoics?

• Military training, which he left to his generals
• The study of law, which he found useless
• Poetry and rhetoric, the arts of eloquence✓Correct answer
• His claim to the throne, until the Senate insisted

He left poetry and rhetoric for philosophy but kept studying law, precisely because it prepared him for the high place he was meant to fill. Philosophy was added to his duties, never a way out of them.

Among all those teachers, the one he loved most was Junius Rusticus, a philosopher who also had practical good sense in public affairs. Rusticus did not stay behind in the lecture room: after Marcus became emperor, he became his adviser.

That detail is easy to skim past, and it is the key to the whole book. Marcus's philosophy was never an alternative to government. It was a tool for doing the job, and the man who taught it to him sat beside him while he did it.

Long is not a man given to gushing, yet here he lets himself go: such a group of teachers will hardly be gathered again, and there has never been another pupil like this one.

When his adoptive father Antoninus Pius died in 161, the Senate, it is said, urged Marcus to rule alone. He refused, and made his adoptive brother Lucius Verus co-emperor. For the first time, Rome had two emperors.

Verus was, in Long's blunt judgement, an idle man of pleasure and unworthy of the post. Sent to command the war against Parthia, he did nothing; the victories were won by his generals. Marcus bore with him anyway, and even gave him his daughter Lucilla as a wife.

This is the first thing to know about the man behind the notebook. He chose to share power with someone plainly worse at it, and then bore with that choice for eight years.

According to Long, Marcus could have ruled alone in 161, but chose to make the idle Lucius Verus his co-emperor.

True✓Correct answer

True. The Senate reportedly urged him to take sole power, and he shared it instead with Verus, who proved useless in the Parthian war. Marcus bore with him until Verus died suddenly in 169.