The Antonines by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General
ISBN: 9781317972105
Google: Ql0fDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-06T16:15:03+00:00

Marcus Aurelius

Against the ills and anxieties of the age, the remedy of novelists such as Apuleius was to note their existence obliquely and to ride triumphantly over them in the imagination; the remedy of Lucian was to make fun of them. For the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80),16 on the other hand, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the remedy was to do all in his power to put them right, with utter conscientiousness.

Marcus Aurelius had once intended to write a History of the Greeks and Romans, 17 but the project, if it ever materialized, did not prove significant. The dramatically intimate disclosures of his deepest thoughts and the admonitions to himself (perhaps written down in odd moments of leisure, unless the passages that we have are the scattered elements of a lost, coherent original or of what was intended to become one) were entitled by editors ‘his writings to himself’ and were later called his Meditations. They comprise the most famous book ever written by a monarch.

The Meditations have a literary cast, because Marcus Aurelius had a literary training, but they were private notebooks not designed for publication (cf. above): a cross, perhaps, between a diary and a commonplace book. Nor do the Meditations form a connected unity. Even if they are, for the most part, in chronological order, there is a case for putting Book I at the end.

The Meditations are a work of self-consolation and self-encouragement, an unparalleled self-scrutiny, each separate passage reflecting its own mood, hardly to be defined as philosophy, but a sort of personal creed, sometimes poetically expressed. The unpretentious and mundane letters which Marcus Aurelius had written to his friend and tutor Fronto (see p. 84) contain his thoughts from the age of seventeen. The Meditations take up the story, with greater profundity, during the last ten or fifteen years of the emperor’s life. The intensity of their imagery (resulting from the wars in which Marcus Aurelius was engaged, although they are only once mentioned in the Meditations) seem to have become increasingly bleak and gloomy. There is much reference to age and death, and it is ironical to recall that Fronto had once urged him: ‘Smile and be happy all your life.’18

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek, which was not his mother-tongue. Perhaps he felt that he needed its technical terms. He was writing at a time when bilinguality was becoming unusual, even though the interests of the Greek and Roman cultures were tending to converge, as the eastern provinces more and more asserted themselves (Chapter 8). His Greek was not incoherent or ungrammatical, but it shows a certain inelegance and awkwardness, betraying a sense of effort which occasionally reveals itself in an uncommon phrase.

Nevertheless, his writings convey the difficulty of moral and social effort with a more comprehensible urgency than had ever been used before to clothe such ideas. This, in terms of decent behaviour, is the climax of ancient Rome. But it is an austere creed, without consolations except its own performance.

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