Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [17]
This is not a point modern grief counselors would be inclined to dwell on, but it is one that Marcus would have understood perfectly, and its appeal to him casts light on both his character and his background. Marcus may have been a Stoic, but he was also a Roman, influenced not only by Zeno and Chrysippus but by Homer and Vergil. Vergil is nowhere mentioned in the Meditations, and in a Greek work could hardly be quoted or alluded to, but there is a note of melancholy that runs through the work that one can only call Vergilian.
Other concerns surface as well. A number of entries discuss methods of dealing with pain or bodily weakness of other sorts. “When you have trouble getting out of bed . . .” begin several entries (5.1, 8.12). A persistent motif is the need to restrain anger and irritation with other people, to put up with their incompetence or malice, to show them the errors of their ways. Several entries focus on the frustrations of life at court, nowhere more present than when Marcus tells himself to stop complaining about them (8.9). He contrasts the court against philosophy as a stepmother against a mother—to be visited out of duty, but not someone we can really love (6.12). Yet the court need not be an obstacle: it can be a challenge, even an opportunity. One can lead a good life anywhere, even at court, as Antoninus showed (5.16, 1.16). “No role [is] so well suited to philosophy,” Marcus tells himself, “as the one you happen to be in right now” (11.7).
A more subtle clue to Marcus’s personality is the imagery that he prefers. It is worth noting, for example, how many images of nature occur in the Meditations. Many readers have been struck by Meditations 3.2, with its evocation of “nature’s inadvertence” in baking bread or ripening figs, olives, and stalks of wheat. Metaphors and offhand comparisons in other entries evoke the pastoral and agricultural rhythms of the Mediterranean world, with its flocks, herds, and vines, its seasons of sowing and harvesting, its grapes drying slowly into raisins. Some of these may be stock examples, but even a stock example can be revealing. One can hardly read a page of Plato without tripping over the helmsmen, doctors, shoemakers, and other craftsmen who populated ancient Athens; such figures are much rarer in Marcus. The image of society as a tree whose branches are individual human beings expresses an important Stoic principle, but the image is developed further than one might expect and informed by what might be personal observation: “You can see the difference between the branch that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that’s been cut off and grafted back.”
Affection for the natural world contrasts with a persistent sense of disgust and contempt for human life and other human beings—a sense that it is difficult to derive from (or even reconcile with) Stoicism. As P. A. Brunt puts it, “Reason told Marcus that the world was good beyond improvement, and yet it constantly appeared to him evil beyond remedy.” The courtiers who surround him are vain and obsequious, while the people he deals with on a daily basis are “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly” (2.1). One of the most frequently recurring points in the Meditations is the reminder that human beings are social animals, as if this was a point Marcus had a particularly hard time accepting. The gods care for mortals, he reminds himself, “and you—on the verge of death—you still refuse to care for them.”
There is a persistent strain of pessimism in the work. “The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—‘gone from the earth and only found in