Antoninus, said Renan, “would have been without competition for the reputation of being the best of sovereigns, had he not designated Marcus Aurelius as his heir.”41 “If,” said Gibbon, “a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”42
Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in 121. The Annii had come a century before from Succubo, near Cordova; there, it seems, their honesty had won them the cognomen Verus, “true.” Three months after the boy’s birth his father died, and he was taken into the home of his rich grandfather, then consul. Hadrian was a frequent visitor there; he took a fancy to the boy and saw in him the stuff of kings. Seldom has any lad had so propitious a youth, or so keenly appreciated his good fortune. “To the gods,” he wrote fifty years later, “I am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good”;43 time struck a balance by giving him a questionable wife and a worthless son. His Meditations lists the virtues these people had, and the lessons he received from them in modesty, patience, manliness, abstemiousness, piety, benevolence, and “a simplicity of life far removed from the habits of the rich”44—though wealth surrounded him on every side.
Never was a boy so persistently educated. He was attached in boyhood to the service of temples and priests; he committed to memory every word of the ancient and unintelligible liturgy; and though philosophy later shook his faith, it never diminished his sedulous performance of the old exacting ritual. Marcus liked games and sports, even bird snaring and hunting, and some efforts were made to train his body as well as his mind and character. But seventeen tutors in childhood are a heavy handicap. Four grammarians, four rhetors, one jurist, and eight philosophers divided his soul among them. The most famous of these teachers was M. Cornelius Fronto, who taught him rhetoric. Though Marcus loved him, lavished upon him all the kindnesses of an affectionate and royal pupil, and exchanged with him letters of intimate charm, the youth turned his back upon oratory as a vain and dishonest art, and abandoned himself to philosophy.
He thanks his instructors for sparing him logic and astrology, thanks Diognetus the Stoic for freeing him from superstition, Junius Rusticus for acquainting him with Epictetus, and Sextus of Chaeronea for teaching him to live in conformity with nature. He is grateful to his brother Severus for telling him about Brutus, Cato of Utica, Thrasea, and Helvidius; “from him I received the idea of a state in which there is the same law for all, a polity of equal rights and freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government that most of all respects the freedom of the governed”;45 here the Stoic ideal of monarchy takes possession of the throne. He thanks Maximus for teaching him “self-government, and not to be led aside by anything; cheerfulness in all circumstances, and a just admixture of gentleness and dignity, and to do appointed tasks without complaining.”46 It is clear that the leading philosophers of the time were priests without religion rather than metaphysicians without life. Marcus took them so seriously that for a time he almost ruined a naturally weak constitution with ascetic devotions. At the age of twelve he took on the rude cloak of a philosopher, slept on a little straw strewn over the floor, and long resisted the entreaties of his mother to use a couch. He was a Stoic before he became a man. He offers thanks “that I preserved the flower of my youth; that I took not upon me to be a man before my time, but rather put it off longer than I needed . . . that I never had to do with Benedicta . . . and afterwards, when I fell into some fits of love, I was soon cured.”47
Two influences diverted him from professional philosophy and sancity. One was the succession of minor political offices to which he was appointed; the realism of an administrator was crossed with the idealism of a meditative youth. The other was his close association with Antoninus Pius. He did not fret at Antoninus’ longevity, but continued his life of stoic simplicity, philosophical study, and official duties, while living in the palace and serving his protracted apprenticeship; and the example of his adoptive father’s devotion and honesty in government became a powerful influence in his development. The name by which we know him, Aurelius, was the clan name of Antoninus, which both Marcus and Lucius, on their adoption, had taken as their own. Lucius became a gay man of the world, 2 graceful adept in the pleasures of life. When, in 146, Pius desired a colleague to share the government with him, he named Marcus only and left to Lucius the empire of love. On the death of Antoninus, Marcus became sole emperor; but remembering Hadrian’s wish, he at once made Lucius Verus his full colleague and gave him his daughter Lucilla in marriage. At the outset of his reign, as at the end, the philosopher erred through kindness. The division of rule was a bad precedent, which, in the heirs of Diocletian and Constantine, would divide and weaken the realm.
Marcus asked the Senate to vote Pius divine honors, completed with perfect taste the temple that Pius had raised to his wife, and rededicated it to Antoninus and Faustina both.I He paid the Senate every courtesy and rejoiced to see that many of his philosopher friends had found their way into its membership. All Italy and all the provinces acclaimed him as Plato’s dream come true: the philosopher was king. But he had no thought of attempting a Utopia. Like Antoninus he was a conservative; radicals do not grow up in palaces. He was a philosopher-king in the Stoic rather than the Platonic sense. “Never hope,” he admonished himself, “to realize Plato’s Republic. Let it be sufficient that you have in some degree ameliorated mankind, and do not think such improvement a matter of small importance. Who can change the opinions of men? And without a change of sentiments what can you make but reluctant slaves and hypocrites?” He had discovered that not all men wished to be saints; and he sadly reconciled himself to a world of corruption and wickedness. “The immortal gods consent for countless ages to endure without anger, and even to surround with blessings, so many and such evil men; but thou, who hast so short a time to live, art thou already weary?”48 He decided to rely on example rather than law. He made himself in fact a public servant; he carried all the burdens of administration and judgment, even that part which Lucius had agreed to take but was neglecting; he allowed himself no luxury, treated all men with simple fellowship, and wore himself out by being easy of access. He was not a great statesman: he spent too much of the public funds in cash gifts to the people and the army, gave each member of the Praetorian Guard 20,000 sesterces, increased the number of those who could apply for free corn, provided frequent and costly games, and remitted large sums in unpaid taxes and tribute; it was generosity with many precedents, but unwise at a time when rebellion or war visibly threatened, or was breaking out, in several provinces and on far-spread frontiers.
Marcus continued sedulously that reform of law which Hadrian had begun. He increased the number of court days and reduced the length of trials. He himself often sat as judge, inflexible against grave offenses, but usually merciful. He devised legal protection for wards against dishonest guardians, for debtors against creditors, for provinces against governors. He connived at the rejuvenation of the forbidden collegia, legalized those associations which were chiefly burial societies, made them legal persons eligible for bequests, and established a fund for the interment of poor citizens. He gave the alimenta the widest extension in their history. After the death of his wife he created an endowment for the aid of young women; a pretty bas-relief shows us such girls crowding around the younger Faustina, who pours wheat into their laps. He abolished mixed bathing, forbade extravagant remuneration to actors and gladiators, restricted according to their wealth the expenditures of the cities on games, required the use of foiled weapons in gladiatorial contests, and did all that sanguinary custom would allow to banish death from the arena. The people loved him but not his laws. When he enlisted gladiators in his army for the Marcomannic Wars the populace cried out in good-humored anger: “He is taking our amusement from us; he wants to force us to be philosophers.”49 Rome was preparing, but not quite ready, to be puritan.
It was his misfortune that his fame as a philosopher, and the long peace under Hadrian and Antoninus, encouraged rebels within and barbarians without. In 162 revolt broke out in Britain, the Chatti invaded Roman Germany, and the Parthian king Vologases III declared war upon Rome. Marcus chose able generals to put down the revolt in the north, but he delegated to Lucius Verus the major task of fighting Parthia. Lucius got no farther than Antioch. For there lived Panthea, so beautiful and accomplished that Lucian thought all the perfections of all sculptural masterpieces had come together in her; to which were added a voice of intoxicating melody, fingers skilled on the lyre, and a mind enriched with literature and philosophy. Lucius saw her, and, like Gilgamesh, forgot when he was born. He abandoned himself to pleasure, to hunting, at last to debauchery, while the Parthians rode into terror-stricken Syria. Marcus made no comment on Lucius but sent to Avidius Cassius, second in charge in Lucius’ army, a plan of campaign whose military excellence helped the general’s own ability not only to drive the Parthians back across Mesopotamia, but to plant the Roman standards once more in Seleucia and Ctesiphon. This time the two cities were burned to the ground lest they serve again as bases for Parthian campaigns. Lucius returned from Antioch to Rome and was awarded a triumph, which he magnanimously insisted that Marcus should share.
Lucius brought with him the invisible victor of the war—pestilence. It had appeared first among the troops of Avidius in captured Seleucia; it spread so rapidly that he withdrew his army into Mesopotamia, while the Parthians rejoiced at the vengeance of their gods. The retreating legions carried the plague with them to Syria; Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to march in his triumph; they infected every city through which they passed and every region of the Empire to which they were later assigned. The ancient historians tell us more of its ravages than of its nature; their descriptions suggest exanthematous typhus or possibly bubonic plague.52 Galen thought it similar to the disease that had wasted the Athenians under Pericles: in both cases black pustules almost covered the body, the victim was racked with a hoarse cough, and his “breath stank.”53 Rapidly it swept through Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Gaul; within a year (166-67) it had killed more men than had been lost in the war. In Rome 2000 died of it in one day, including many of the aristocracy;54 corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Marcus, helpless before this intangible enemy, did all he could to mitigate the evil; but the medical science of his day could offer him no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it had established an immunity or had killed all its carriers. The effects were endless. Many localities were so despoiled of population that they reverted to jungle or desert;, food production fell, transport was disorganized, floods destroyed great quantities of grain, and famine succeeded plague. The happy hilaritas that had marked the beginning of Marcus’ reign vanished; men yielded to a bewildered pessimism, flocked to soothsayers and oracles, clouded the altars with incense and sacrifice, and sought consolation where alone it was offered them—in the new religions of personal immortality and heavenly peace.
Amid these domestic difficulties news came (167) that the tribes along the Danube—Chatti, Quadi, Marcomanni, Iazyges—had crossed the river, overwhelmed a Roman garrison of 20,000 men, and were pouring unhindered into Dacia, Raetia, Pannonia, Noricum; that some had made their way over the Alps, had defeated every army sent against them, were besieging Aquileia (near Venice), were threatening Verona, and were laying waste the rich fields of northern Italy. Never before had the German tribes moved with such unity or so closely threatened Rome. Marcus acted with surprising decisiveness. He put away the pleasures of philosophy and determined to take the field in what he foresaw would be the most momentous of Roman wars since Hannibal. He shocked Italy by enrolling policemen, gladiators, slaves, brigands, and barbarous mercenaries into legions depleted by war and pestilence. Even the gods were conscripted to his purpose: he bade the priests of alien faiths to offer sacrifice for Rome according to their various rites; and he himself burned such hecatombs at the altars that a wit circulated a message sent him by white oxen, begging him not to be too victorious; “if thou shouldst conquer, we are lost.”55 To raise war funds without levying special taxes he auctioned off in the Forum the wardrobes, art objects, and jewels of the imperial palaces. He took careful measures of defense—fortified the border towns from Gaul to the Aegean, blocked the passes into Italy, and bribed German and Scythian tribes to attack the invaders in the rear. With energy and courage all the more admirable in a man who hated war, he trained his army into disciplined strength, led them through a hard campaign mapped out with strategic skill, drove the besiegers from Aquileia, and routed them even to the Danube, until nearly all were captured or dead.
He understood that this action had not ended the German danger; but thinking the situation safe for a time, he returned with his colleague to Rome. On the way Lucius died of an apoplectic stroke, and gossip, which, like politics, has no bowels of mercy, whispered that Marcus had poisoned him. From January to September, 169, the Emperor rested at home from efforts that had strained his frail body close to the breaking point. He suffered from a stomach ailment that often left him too weak to talk; he controlled it by eating sparingly, one light meal a day. Those who knew his condition and his diet marveled at his labors in the palace and the field and could only say that he made up in resolution what he lacked in strength. On several occasions he called in the most famous physician of the age, Galen of Pergamum, and praised him for the unpretentious remedies he prescribed.56
Perhaps a succession of domestic disappointments co-operated with political and military crises to aggravate his illness and make him old at forty-eight. His wife Faustina, whose pretty face has come down to us in many a sculptured portrait, may not have relished sharing bed and board with incarnate philosophy; she was a lively creature, who longed for a gayer life than his sober nature could give her. The talk of the town assumed her infidelity; the mimes satirized him as a cuckold and even named his rivals.57 Like Antoninus with Faustina the mother, Marcus said nothing; instead, he promoted the supposed paramours to high office, gave Faustina every sign of tenderness and respect, had her deified when she died (175), and thanked the gods, in his Meditations, for “so obedient and affectionate a wife.”58 No evidence exists upon which to condemn her.59 Of the four children that she gave him—and whom he loved with a passion still warm in his letters to Fronto—one girl died in childhood; the surviving daughter was saddened by Lucius’ life, and widowed by his death. Twin sons came in 161; one died at birth, the other was Commodus. Scandalmongers called him a gladiator’s gift to Faustina,60 and he strove all his life long to confirm the tale. But he was a handsome and vigorous lad; Marcus forgivably doted on him, presented him to the legions in a manner symbolic of naming a successor, and engaged the best teachers in Rome to fit him for rule. The youth preferred to model cups, dance, sing, hunt, and fence; he developed an understandable aversion to books, scholars, and philosophers, but enjoyed the company of gladiators and athletes. Soon he surpassed all comrades in lying, cruelty, and coarse speech. Marcus was too good to be great enough to discipline him or renounce him; he kept on hoping that education and responsibility would sober him and make him grow into a king. The lonely Emperor, emaciated, beard untended, eyes weary with anxiety and sleeplessness, turned back from his wife and son to the tasks of government and war.
The assaults of the central European tribes against the frontier had stopped only for a breathing spell; in this struggle to destroy an Empire and make barbarism free, peace was but an armistice. In 169 the Chatti invaded the Roman regions of the upper Rhine. In 170 the Chauci attacked Belgica, and another force besieged Sarmizegetusa; the Costoboii crossed the Balkans into Greece and plundered the Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens; the Mauri or Moors invaded Spain from Africa, and a new tribe, the Longobardi or Lombards, made its first appearance on the Rhine. Despite a hundred defeats, the fertile barbarians were growing stronger, the barren Romans weaker. Marcus saw that it was now a war to the death, that one side must destroy the other or go under. Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so completely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and successful general. The philosopher remained, hidden under the imperator’s armor; in the very tumult of this Second Marcomannic War (169-75), in his camp facing the Quadi on the river Granna,II Marcus wrote that little book of Meditations by which the world chiefly remembers him. This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of the Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men. Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sympathy of them at night: “A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare … or who has captured Sarmatians. . . . Are they not all alike robbers?”61
Nevertheless, he fought the Sarmatians, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazyges, through six hard years, defeated them, and marched his legions as far north as Bohemia. It was apparently his plan to use the Hercynian and Carpathian ranges as a new frontier; if he had succeeded, Roman civilization might have made Germany, like Gaul, Latin in speech and classical in heritage. But at the height of his successes he was shocked to learn that Avidius Cassius, after putting down a revolt in Egypt, had declared himself emperor. Marcus surprised the barbarians with a hasty peace, merely annexing a ten-mile strip on the north bank of the Danube and leaving strong garrisons on the southern side. He summoned his soldiers, told them that he would gladly yield his place to Avidius if Rome wished it, promised to pardon the rebel, and marched into Asia to encounter him. Meanwhile a centurion killed Cassius, and the rebellion collapsed. Marcus passed through Asia Minor and Syria to Alexandria, mourning like Caesar that he had been cheated of a chance for clemency. At Smyrna, Alexandria, and Athens he walked the streets without a guard, wore the mantle of a philosopher, attended the lectures of the leading teachers, and joined with them in discussion, speaking Greek. During his stay at Athens he endowed professorships in each of the great schools of doctrine—Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean.
In the fall of 176, after almost seven years of war, Aurelius reached Rome and was accorded a triumph as the savior of the Empire. The Emperor associated Commodus with himself in the victory and now made him, a lad of fifteen, his colleague on the throne. For the first time in nearly a century the principle of adoption was put aside and the hereditary principate was resumed. Marcus knew what perils he was inviting for the Empire; he chose them as a lesser evil than the civil war that Commodus and his friends would wage if he were denied the throne. We must not judge him with hindsight; neither did Rome anticipate the consequences of this love. There the plague had burned itself out, and men were beginning to be happy again. The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation; while battle raged on the frontiers trade flourished within, and money jingled everywhere. It was the height of Rome’s tide and of its Emperor’s popularity; all the world acclaimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint.
But his triumph did not deceive him; he knew that the problem of Germany had not been solved. Convinced that further invasions could be prevented only by an active policy of extending the frontier to the mountains of Bohemia, he set forth with Commodus, in 178, on the Third Marcomannic War. Crossing the Danube, he again defeated the Quadi after a long and arduous campaign. No resistance remained, and he was about to annex the lands of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmatians (roughly Bohemia and Danubian Galicia) as new provinces, when sickness struck him down in his camp at Vindobona (Vienna). Feeling death’s hand, he called Commodus to his side and warned him to carry through the policy which was now so near fulfillment, and realize the dream of Augustus by pushing the boundary of the Empire to the Elbe.III Then he refused all further food or drink. On the sixth day he rose with his last strength and presented Commodus to the army as the new emperor. Returning to his couch he covered his head with the sheet and soon afterward died. When his body reached Rome the people had already begun to worship him as a god who for a while had consented to live on the earth.
I Its ten Corinthian monolithic columns are among the finest remains in the Forum. The portico is intact, and the cella, though shorn of its marble facing, has survived as the Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.
II Probably the Gran, a tributary of the Danube.
III “We must not merely acknowledge the resolution and tenacity of the ruler,” says the impartial Mommsen, “but must also admit that he did what right policy enjoined.”62