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Marcus Aurelius Biography

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AURELIUS, MARCUS, surnamed Antoninus (121-180 A.D.). A Roman Emperor. He was born at Rome, April 21, 121, the son of Annius Verus and Domitia Calvilla. His original name was Marcus Annius Verus. On his father's death he was adopted by his grandfather, who spared no pains to render him preeminent in every art and science. His fine qualities early attracted the notice of the Emperor Hadrian who used to term him not Verus, but Verissimus, and who conferred high honors on him, even while he was yet a child. When only 17 years of age, he was adopted, with Lucius Ceionius Commodus Verus (commonly known as Lucius Verus), by Antoninus Pius, the successor of Hadrian; and Faustina, the daughter of Antoninus, was selected for his wife. His name henceforth was Marcus Ælius Aurelius Antoninus (Ælius he derived from Hadrian's family; Aurelius was the original name of Antoninus Pius). In the year 140 he was made consul; and from this period to the death of Antoninus, in 161, he continued to discharge the duties of his various offices with the greatest promptitude and fidelity. The relation which subsisted between him and the Emperor was of the warmest and most familiar kind. On his accession to the throne he strikingly illustrated the magnanimity of his character by voluntarily sharing the government (which Antoninus had left, in his last moments, and the Senate offered, to him alone) with young Lucius Verus, to whom Aurelius gave his daughter Lucilla in marriage. Toward the close of 161 the Parthian War broke out, and Lucius was sent to the frontiers of the Empire to repel the incursions of the barbarians; but, intoxicated with the enervating pleasures of the East, he obstinately refused to go beyond Antioch, and intrusted the command of the army to his lieutenant, Avidius Cassius, who gained several brilliant victories. Lucius returned to Rome in 166 and enjoyed a triumph to which he had no real claim; for all the great achievements of the war were accomplished by his officers, while he was reveling in the most extravagant licentiousness.

In the meantime Marcus Aurelius had distinguished himself by the prudence and energy with which he administered affairs at home. A formidable insurrection had long been preparing in the German provinces; the Britons were on the point of revolt, and the Chatti (Hessians) were waiting for an opportunity to devastate the Rhenish provinces. Within Rome itself raged a pestilence, believed to have been brought home by the troops of Lucius; frightful inundations and earthquakes had laid large portions of the city in ruins, destroyed the granaries and thus created almost universal distress, which stimulated to an incalculable degree the terror which the citizens entertained of their savage enemies. To allay the popular perturbation, Marcus resolved to go forth to the war himself. Hecatombs were offered to the offended a gods, and the Roman legions set out for the north. Marcus and Lucius were, for the time, completely successful. The pride of the Marcomanni and the other rebellious tribes inhabiting the country between Illyria and the sources of the Danube was humbled, and they were compelled to sue for peace in 168; in the following year Lucius died. The contest was renewed in 170 and may be said to have continued with intermissions during the whole life of the Emperor. Although fond of peace, both from natural disposition and philosophic culture, he displayed the sternest rigor in suppressing the revolts of the barbarians; but, in order to accomplish this he had to enroll among his soldiery vast numbers of gladiators and slaves, for his army had been thinned by the ravages of the plague. His headquarters were Pannonia, out of which he drove the Marcomanni, whom he subsequently all but annihilated as they were crossing the Danube. The same fate befell the Iazyges; but the most famous as well as the most extraordinary of all his victories was the miraculous one which he gained over the Quadi (174), and which gave rise to copious discussion among Christian historians and others. Dio Cassius's account is that the Romans were perishing of thirst in the heat of summer, when suddenly the cloudless sky darkened and abundant showers fell; as the soldiers were taking advantage of the water thus unexpectedly supplied to them, the barbarians attacked them and would have cut them to pieces, had not the barbarians themselves, bewildered by a storm of hail and fire, been vanquished by the Romans. That some extraordinary phenomenon occurred is evident, for there is a letter of Aurelius still extant in which he commemorates the event; and he was a man incapable of uttering a falsehood, not to mention that there was an entire army living to disprove the statement if untrue. The effect of this remarkable victory was instantaneously and widely felt. The Germanic tribes hurried from all quarters to make their submission and obtain clemency; but the practical advantages that might have resulted. from this were nullified by a new outbreak in the East. Though suffering from failing health, he was obliged to leave Pannonia. Before long, however, he learned that Avidius Cassius, who had rebelled against him in Asia and had seized the whole of Asia Minor, had perished by assassination. The conduct of Marcus Aurelius on hearing of his enemy's death was worthy of the sublime virtue of his character. He lamented that the fates had not granted his his fondest wish-to have freely pardoned the man who had so basely conspired against his happiness. Like Cæsar in similar circumstances, but in a more purely humane spirit, he received the head of his murdered adversary with feelings quite opposite to what had been anticipated, rejecting the bloody gift with all the loathing of a benevolent nature and even shrinking from the presence of the murderers. On his arrival in the East he exhibited the same remarkable magnanimity. He burned the papers of Cassius without reading them, so that he might not be at liberty to suspect any as traitors; treated with extreme gentleness the provinces which had rebelled; disarmed the enmity and dispelled the fears of the nobles who had openly favored his insurgent lieutenant. While he was pursuing his work of restoring tranquillity, Faustina died in an obscure village at the foot of Mount Taurus; he paid the most lavish honors to her memory. Dio Cassius and Capitolinus charge her with gross infidelity and various crimes and blame Aurelius for giving no heed to her wrongdoing.

On his way home he visited lower Egypt and Greece, displaying everywhere the noblest solicitude for the welfare of his vast Empire, and drawing forth from his subjects, who were astonished at his goodness, sentiments of the profoundest admiration and regard. At Athens, which this Imperial pagan philosopher must have venerated as a pious Jew did the city of Jerusalem, he showed a catholicity of intellect by founding chairs of philosophy for each of the four chief sects-Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean. No man ever labored more earnestly to make that heathen faith which he loved so well, and that heathen philosophy which he believed in so truly, a vital and dominant reality. Toward the close of the year 176 he reached Italy and celebrated his merciful and bloodless triumph on December 23. In the succeeding autumn he departed for Germany, where fresh disturbances had broken out among the restless and volatile barbarians. He was again successful in several sanguinary engagements; but his originally weak constitution, shattered by perpetual anxiety and fatigue, at length failed, and he died, either at Vienna or at Sirmium, on March 17, 180, after a reign of 20 years. In his honor his son Commodus erected the Antonine Column (q.v.).

Marcus Aurelius was the flower of the Stoic philosophy. It seems almost inexplicable that so harsh and crabbed a system should have produced as pure and gentle an example of humanity as the records of pagan history can show. Perhaps, as a modern philosophic theologian suggests, it was because Stoicism was the most solid and practical of the philosophic theories, and the one which most earnestly opposed itself to the rapidly increasing licentiousness of the time, that the chaste heart of the youth was drawn toward it. At 12 years of age he avowed himself a follower of Zeno and Epicetus. Stoics were his teachers-Diognotus, Apollonius, and Junius Rusticus; and he himself is to be considered one of the most thoughtful teachers of the school. Oratory he studied under Atticus Herodes and Cornelius Fronto. With Fronto he long corresponded. His love of learning was insatiable. Even after he had attained the highest dignity of the State, he did not disdain to attend the school of Sextus of Chæronea. Men of letters were his most intimate friends and received the highest honors, both when alive and dead. His range of studies was extensive, embracing morals, metaphysics, mathematics, jurisprudence, music, poetry, and painting. Nor must we forget that these were cultivated not merely in the springtime of his life, when enthusiasm was strong and experience had not saddened his thoughts and when study was his only labor, but during the tumults of perpetual war, and the distraction necessarily arising from the government of so vast an Empire. The man who loved peace with his whole soul died without beholding it, and yet the everlasting presence of war never tempted him to sink into a mere warrior. He maintained, uncorrupted to the end of his life, his philosophic and philanthropic aspirations. After his decease, which was felt to be a national calamity, Roman citizens everywhere, and many others in distant portions of the Empire, procured an image or statue of him, which more than a hundred years after was still found among their household gods. He became almost an object of worship and was believed to appear in dreams, like the saints of subsequent Christian ages.

There is one feature in his character, however, which it would be dishonest to pass over -his hostility to Christianity. He was a persecutor of the new religion, and, it is clearly demonstrated, was cognizant, to a certain extent at least, of the atrocities perpetrated upon its followers. Numerous explanations have been offered of his conduct in this matter. The most popular one is that he for once allowed himself to be led away by evil counselors; but a deeper reason is to be found in that very earnestness with which he clung to the old heathen faith of his ancestors. He believed it to be true and to be the parent of those philosophies which had sprung out of the same soil; he saw that a new religion, the character of which had been assiduously, though perhaps unconsciously, misrepresented to him, both as an immoral superstition and a mysterious political conspiracy, was secretly spreading throughout the Empire, and that it would hold no commerce with the older religion, but condemned it, generally in the strongest terms. It was, therefore, comparatively easy, even for so humane a ruler, to imagine it his duty to extirpate this unnaturally hostile sect. John Stuart Mill finds in this tragic error of the great Emperor a most striking warning against the danger of interfering with the liberty of thought.

In 177 Aurelius published his first edict against the Christians, and the persecution lasted during this and the following year. The aged Polycarp was burned at the stake at Smyrna, and St. Cecilia was martyred at Rome (Sept. 16, 178) , while large numbers perished in the furious persecution at Lugdunum (Lyons), in Gaul. Athenagoras of Athens, a Christian philosopher, addressed to the Emperor a defense (Apologia) of the Christians, still extant, which did not avail to check the martyrdom.

Aurelius was the author of a beautiful ethical work, known now as the Meditations, though Aurelian himself gave it a different name. It is written in Greek, and is the finest product of the Stoic philosophy. The work is not a systematic treatise, but a series of communings, worked out at widely different times, amid public business or when battles were imminent. It has been edited by Stich (Leipzig, 1903) ; translated by Long (London, 1862, 1900), Rendall (London, 1897) , and (in selections) by Smith (London, 1899).