BIOGRAPHY: Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, EmperorBy Frank McLynn, The Bodley Head, 684pp, £20.
Those of the readership who had a chance to see the film Gladiator(by no means the worst of its genre) may recall, early on in it, the vignette of an elderly emperor on a horse gazing meditatively into a German forest. This was Marcus Aurelius, played by our own Richard Harris (a man unlike the philosophical emperor in almost every way). The real Marcus was no doubt engaged in composing some pithy reflection, which, that evening in his tent, before turning in, he would commit to his private journal (a number of books of which were in fact composed on his German campaigns in the years AD 171-173). The real Harris was probably contemplating his next pint.
It is this journal, known to posterity as The Meditations, but originally entitled by its author simply "To Himself", that has accorded Marcus most of his subsequent fame as the most philosophical of Roman emperors (along with the later Emperor Julian, another fascinating figure). The accomplished biographer and historian Frank McLynn has made much good use of it in this truly massive study, though interweaving it skilfully with much other information, such as Marcus's letters to his rather fussy tutor, Fronto, and the rather unreliable narratives of the Historia Augusta, a composite history of the later Roman emperors.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born into the Roman aristocracy in AD 121, early in what was perhaps the most prosperous and peaceful century the ancient Mediterranean world had ever seen. The Roman empire, now in place for more than 150 years, seemed a permanent reality. While there were great inequalities of wealth, and occasional misfortunes such as earthquakes, plagues or droughts, life for most people was unprecedentedly good – though it was never much fun being a peasant or a common soldier. Admittedly, on the northern and eastern frontiers, Germans and Persians caused intermittent trouble, but this hardly penetrated to the central portions of this vast domain, stretching as it did from Hadrian’s Wall, via the Rhine, Danube and the northern borders of the Sahara, to the River Euphrates.
And yet it has been acutely characterised, by the great Irish classical scholar ER Dodds, as an “age of anxiety”. As at present (though with rather less reason, it must be said), people worried inordinately about the meaning of life, and its many uncertainties, and recorded their concerns in literary and inscriptional form. Of such an age, Marcus is a rather suitable representative.
On the other hand, he was actually, one would think, a most unsuitable candidate for emperor (a position he held from AD 161 to AD 180), being one who despised the mob and its enthusiasms, and who liked nothing so much as retiring into himself, in solitude, to meditate on the transitoriness and futility of human existence. And yet, for a rather unworldly man, he was actually a pretty good ruler – not only fair and honourable in matters of civil administration, but surprisingly effective in the conduct of war.
Against the Parthians in the 160s he sent his rather feckless junior co-emperor, Lucius Verus (who triumphed with the help of a number of good generals – but who brought back a nasty plague in 166); but against the German tribes he went himself, and in a series of campaigns, from 170 to 175, subdued a series of hooligans – Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges – temporarily annexing much of present-day Austria, Hungary and southern Germany.
The revolt of the governor of Syria, Avidius Cassius, in 175 (possibly encouraged by Marcus’s rather flighty wife, Faustina), served as a further distraction, and necessitated a visit to his eastern dominions in 176, from which he returned to Rome in triumph, only to have to head north again to deal with more Germans in 177. He died, sadly, on the northern frontier on March 17th, 180, probably of smallpox, aged only 59, leaving the empire to the tender mercies of his crazy and evil son Commodus.
All this Frank McLynn chronicles with enormous learning and much witty comment – though, it must be said, at great length. We are given a good deal of background to the history of the empire, its relations with its main enemies, the growth of Christianity, and the structure of the administration – all helpful, certainly, but adding greatly to the bulk of the work.
It is, however, as I say, both impressively well researched and unfailingly engaging. McLynn has strong views on most of the characters involved, mostly negative. He dislikes the Emperor Hadrian, Marcus's tutor Fronto, the Athenian grandee Herodes Atticus, even the distinguished physician Galen. He is pretty sceptical, also, of the coherence of Marcus's Stoicism, and he may be right; and yet without the Meditations, we would hardly be bothered with Marcus at all.
John Dillon is Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) in Trinity College Dublin, and author of
The Middle Platonists
(second edition, 1996) and
The Heirs of Plato
(2003), among other works