The Great Stoics: Marcus Aurelius

By Neel Burton | July 3, 2024

Did Stoicism Make Marcus Aurelius a Better Emperor?

Marcus Aurelius writing the Meditations — Marcus Aurelius wrote the *Meditations* as a private journal, never intending it to be published.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 28 July 2026.

Here he was at last, more than five hundred years later, rarer even than the Æthiopian phœnix: the fabled philosopher-king—and not just any vassal or kinglet, but the Emperor of Rome.

His private journal, the Meditations, has become one of the world’s most widely read works of philosophy, inspiring everyone from statesmen and soldiers to psychologists and countless ordinary readers seeking wisdom in difficult times. J. S. Mill, in On Liberty (1859), hailed it as ‘the highest ethical product of the ancient mind’.

So, how did it work out?

How Marcus Became Emperor

Marcus was born in 121 CE as Marcus Annius Verus, into a prominent senatorial family with intimate imperial ties. He began from an early age to evince signs of virtue, so that the emperor Hadrian noticed him and even punned on his name, Verus (‘True’), calling him Verissimus (‘The Truest’).

In 136, Hadrian, having no male heir, adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, who now became Lucius Aelius Caesar. But Lucius died in 138, and Hadrian had to choose again.

This time, Hadrian adopted Titus Aurelius Antoninus, the husband of Marcus’ aunt Faustina the Elder, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt Marcus and the son of the late Lucius, also Lucius.

The intricacy of these machinations suggests that Hadrian intended Antoninus as a simple placeholder for Marcus, and the much younger Lucius as a spare.

Whatever the case, by the age of 17, Marcus had already been marked out as a future emperor.

Childhood and Education

Whereas most would have been overjoyed, Marcus was not.

In 132, under the influence of Diognetus, the eleven-year-old Marcus had taken up the dress and habits of a philosopher—to the extent that his mother had had to talk him out of sleeping on the floor. In the Meditations, the grown-up Marcus thanks Diognetus, a Stoic and painter, for introducing him to ‘the Greek lifestyle—the camp-bed and the cloak.’

His other tutors came to include the lawyer and orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the rhetorician Herodes Atticus, and Plutarch’s grandson, Sextus of Chaeronea.

As an orator, Fronto was second only to Cicero, and had something of the Cicero about him when he purchased the fabled Gardens of Maecenas. Much of the extensive and years-long correspondence between Marcus and Fronto is still with us.

Herodes Atticus, one of the richest men in the empire, funded several public works including, in Athens, the Panathenaic Stadium and the odeon known as the Herodeon, both of which, remarkably, are still in use.

But although Marcus had for tutors the greatest men of his age, it is the dog-eared copy of Epictetus that he received from the Stoic Junius Rusticus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still today, it is difficult to read the Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus—the former slave who inspired an emperor.

Marriage and Children

In 136, Marcus had been betrothed to the daughter of Lucius Aelius Caesar.

But after the death of Hadrian, the engagement was annulled, and Antoninus, the new emperor, betrothed him to his daughter Faustina (even though Marcus and Faustina were legally brother and sister).

Marcus married Faustina seven years later, in 145, while serving out his second term as consul.

After the birth of their first child, a daughter, in 147, Antoninus gave Marcus the imperium and the tribunicia potestas(tribunician power), thereby elevating him, in effect, to the rank of junior emperor.

Faustina the Younger would bear Marcus at least thirteen more children, including two sets of twins, over the next 23 years—but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and echoes Homer in the Iliad: ‘Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.’

Relationship with His Co-Emperor

As Antoninus began to age and ail, Marcus took over more of his responsibilities—so that he was already well worn in upon his accession to the imperial throne in 161.

He could easily have ruled alone, but instead insisted upon making his adoptive brother Lucius co-emperor.

In truth, Marcus would rather have remained a philosopher, or private citizen, but considered it his Stoic duty to take up the purple. In the Meditations, he compares philosophy and the court to a mother and stepmother: ‘you would pay your respects to your stepmother, yes… but it’s your real mother you’d go home to. The court… and philosophy. Keep returning to it, to rest in its embrace. It’s all that makes the court—and you—endurable.’

In practice, Lucius—now Lucius Verus—deferred to Marcus, who was ten years older and, by experience and temperament, better suited to the role.

The burden Marcus inherited could scarcely have been greater. Rome stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia, embracing perhaps a quarter of the world’s population. Every frontier demanded vigilance, every province justice, every crisis a solution. Marcus found himself ruling the greatest empire on earth just as it entered one of the most turbulent periods in its history.

The Antonine Plague

Towards the end of 161, the Tiber broke its banks and flooded much of Rome, bringing about a famine.

At around the same time, the Parthians invaded the client state of Armenia and began destabilizing the East.

Lucius nominally led the Roman response from Antioch, assisted by able generals such as the Assyrian Roman, Gaius Avidius Cassius.

As the war wore on, Lucius made a trip to Ephesus to wed Marcus’ daughter Lucilla.

The Romans prevailed, but the returning armies brought back a plague, possibly of smallpox. The so-called Antonine Plague raged throughout the empire for many years and quite literally decimated (killed one in every ten) the population.

The Marcomannic Wars

In 167 or 168, Marcus and Lucius set out on a punitive expedition across the Rhine and Danube, while a horde of German tribes invaded Italy from behind their backs.

In 169, Lucius suddenly died, perhaps of a stroke, or from the plague.

Marcus battled on for three more years to secure the north-eastern border, while other parts of the empire suffered smaller scale rebellions or invasions. It is at around this time that he kept the notebook which we now know as The Meditations.

He never intended these notes for publication. They were not a philosophical treatise but a private conversation with himself: reminders to remain patient, humble, just, and rational amid war, illness, political intrigue, and personal grief. Their very privacy adds to their enduring appeal. We encounter Marcus not as a distant emperor addressing his subjects, but as a fellow human being struggling, day after day, to become a better person.

Threat to His Throne

By 175, Avidius Cassius had taken control of the East, including Egypt, the granary of Rome.

In that year, he heard rumours of Marcus’ death and proclaimed himself emperor.

Marcus set off for the East, rejecting offers of assistance from some of the friendlier German tribes. But three months after his proclamation, Cassius was murdered by one of his own centurions.

His head was sent to Marcus, but the philosopher-king refused to behold it, and pardoned Cassius’ co-conspirators in the Senate.

Eastern Tour

Marcus then felt obliged to shore up the East, visiting Antioch, Alexandria, and Athens, where he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

In Athens, he endowed the first ever public chairs, one for each of the four major schools of philosophy, the Platonic, Peripatetic (Aristotelian), Stoic, and Epicurean.

His beloved Faustina, who had come with him, died in Cappadocia, and he honoured her service by having her deified.

Death and Succession

In 177, Marcus proclaimed his 16-year-old son Commodus co-emperor, breaking with the Nerva-Antonine dynasty’s remarkably successful practice of succession by the best man available—a tradition which, in truth, owed more to necessity than to enlightened principle.

This, with the benefit of hindsight, or even without, was a grave error, but what else could Marcus have done short of planting the seed of a civil war, or ordering the assassination of his own son?

In 180, Marcus, who had been sickly all his life, possibly with a stomach ulcer, passed away at his military headquarters in Sirmium, Pannonia, thereby bringing to an end the long period of relative peace and prosperity now known as the Pax Romana (27 BCE—180 CE).

In 192, Commodus was strangled in the bath by his wrestling partner Narcissus, acting in concert with other palace insiders, and with the retrospective approval of the Senate.

The demise of Commodus brought the Nerva-Antonine dynasty to a close, to be followed by the chaotic Year of the Five Emperors.

Assessment

Marcus did not merely write about Stoicism but sought to govern an empire according to its principles. Faced with flood, famine, plague, invasion, rebellion, bereavement, and chronic ill health, he repeatedly chose duty over inclination, clemency over retribution, and self-command over self-glorification. If any ruler came close to Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king, it was Marcus Aurelius.

I’ll leave the last word on Marcus to the historian Cassius Dio, who lived through his entire reign:

[Marcus Aurelius] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire. Just one thing prevented him from being completely happy, namely, that after rearing and educating his son in the best possible way he was vastly disappointed in him. This matter must be our next topic; for our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day.

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Marcus Aurelius Never Meant You to Read the Meditations

By Neel Burton | June 26, 2023

Marcus Aurelius Wrote the Meditations for Himself—Here’s Why

Marcus Aurelius writing the Meditations on the German Front — Marcus Aurelius wrote the *Meditations* as a private journal, never intending it to be published.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

Marcus Aurelius never meant you, or anyone but himself, to read the Meditations. In fact, he may never have thought of it as a book at all.

In the latter years of his life, Marcus kept what amounted to a private journal: a series of reflections written for his own benefit—for strength, for guidance, and for self-improvement. We do not even know what he wrote them on. He might have made individual entries on papyrus sheets or rolls, wooden or wax tablets, or perhaps an early codex or notebook. Nor is it clear that the familiar division into twelve books is his own.

Books 1 and 2 end with geographical notes traditionally rendered ‘Among the Quadi, at the Gran’ and ‘At Carnuntum’—placing at least some of the writing amid Marcus’ Danubian campaigns against the Germanic peoples.

The Meditations, in other words, may never have existed as a ‘book’ in Marcus’ lifetime. At some point, someone divided his writings into twelve parts, or chapters—but the joins, as you might have felt, are entirely artificial.

The Fabled Philosopher-King

After the three Flavian emperors—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian—came the ‘Five Good Emperors’ of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and our man Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE). These emperors, wrote Machiavelli, ‘had no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the goodwill of their subjects, and the attachment of the Senate.’ Whereas Vespasian and Domitian had persecuted philosophers, Hadrian and Antoninus had courted them—until Marcus crossed over to the other side.

In Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), Socrates says that his vision of the ideal state could not exist ‘until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy… then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.’ Here he was at last, more than five hundred years later, rarer even than the Egyptian phoenix, the fabled philosopher-king—and not just any vassal or kinglet, but the Emperor of Rome.

Barging Into an Emperor’s Thoughts

The twelve books of the Meditations do not present any chronological or thematic order but consist of a variety of unrelated reflections that seem to have been written for Marcus’ own benefit: for strength, for guidance, and for self-improvement—for example, ‘To speak to the Senate—or anyone—in the right tone, without being overbearing. To choose the right words.’

This touching intimacy, and the epigrammatic character of many of his reflections, have ensured the appeal and perennial popularity of the work.

The first book, in which Marcus reflects with gratitude on what he has learnt from various relatives and mentors, stands out from the rest as being more structured and autobiographical. He concludes this first book by thanking the gods that ‘when I became interested in philosophy, I didn’t fall into the hands of charlatans, and didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics.’ The influence of the Stoic teacher Epictetus, here and elsewhere, is easy enough to discern.

It is unlikely that Marcus intended his thoughts for publication, or, even, for anyone’s eyes except his own. The ‘you’ that he often uses is not a generic ‘you’, but him addressing himself—for example, ‘When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors… Then let it hit you: Where are they now?’

We are not so much reading Marcus’ philosophy as overhearing him trying to live by it—and barging into an emperor’s most intimate thoughts.

Was Marcus even a Stoic?

In one place, Marcus refers to the Stoics in the third person: ‘Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble.’

This suggests that he did not consider himself a Stoic, or even a philosopher, but merely a friend or student of philosophy.

Whatever the case, he clearly held the Stoics, and Epictetus, in the highest regard, and endeavoured all his life to live up to their precepts. In the Discourses, Epictetus advises the reader to rehearse and write down Stoic responses to life’s challenges.

This embedding of Stoic principles, this turning of theory into practice, is what Marcus appears to be doing in and by the Meditations. The journal was not primarily a record of what he thought, but a means of changing how he thought, of turning his best inclinations into habits.

Ancient Therapy

This kind of reflective journalling is not original to Epictetus. In On Anger, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that he acquired the habit from his teacher Sextius, who would nightly ask himself: ‘Which of your ills did you heal today? Which vice did you resist? In what aspect are you better?’ ‘Your anger,’ says Seneca, ‘will cease and become more controllable if it knows that every day it must come before a judge.’

Is there anything finer, then, than this habit of scrutinizing the entire day? What sort of sleep follows this self-examination—how peaceful, how deep and free… I exercise this jurisdiction daily and plead my case before myself. When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent… I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. —Seneca, On Anger, 3.36

According to Epictetus, students of Stoicism ought to be trained in three areas, or disciplines, if they are to become good and virtuous and happy: desire, action, and assent. This pedagogy is echoed by Marcus when he writes, ‘Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power.’ That Marcus’ principal themes break down around the three disciplines supports the notion that the work represents his attempt to apply and embed the precepts of Stoicism.

For Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, philosophy was not something merely to be read and understood. It had to be reinforced until its principles became second nature. This may explain the repetitive nature of much of the Meditations.

The Miracle Book

Who discovered the Meditations after the death of Marcus? Who copied it? Who disseminated it? We may never find out.

The first categorical mention of the Meditations, after more than four centuries of radio silence, is from the late ninth or early tenth century. In 1558, the German scholar Wilhelm Xylander translated the work into Latin (Marcus wrote in Greek), after which it came to assume its place in the Western canon.

The transmission of the Meditations is nothing short of a miracle. Private reflections never intended for publication somehow passed from hand to hand and copy to copy until, many centuries after Marcus’ death, they became one of the most circulated works of ancient philosophy.

After Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China from 2003 to 2013, revealed that he had read the Meditations over a hundred times, it became a surprise bestseller in China too. How fitting, then, that the first recorded Roman embassy to China, at that time under the Han, arrived in 166, in the reign of Marcus.

In the Meditations, Marcus repeatedly reminds himself that fame is fleeting, that reputation is worthless, and that even the greatest names are destined for oblivion. How ironic that these very thoughts have become his greatest claim to immortality. Today, the philosopher-emperor’s private journal is the Number 1 philosophy bestseller.