MARCUS AURELIUS (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), Roman Emperor. - Emperor and philosopher, b. in Rome on 26 March 121, d. at Vindobona on 17 March 180. Of a noble Spanish family, left an orphan by his father, he was adopted and received into the house of his grandfather Marcus Annius Verus. He had various teachers (Meditations, I, 1); the Stoics (Diognetus, Rusticus) had a particular effect on him, impelling him to a rigid austerity (ibid., I, 6). The emperor Hadrian adopted him in 136. In 138 Hadrian designated as successor Antoninus Pius, the uncle of M. A., obliging him to adopt his nephew, and L. Commodus; he then assumed the name of M. A. Verus. From 139 to 161 he passed through the cursus honorum, living at court, under the effective and honest guidance of Antoninus. With Cornelius Fronto he long devoted himself to rhetorical studies, until the rigid Stoic Rusticus and the reading of Epictetus completely subdued him. On 7 March 161 Antoninus Pius, dying, showed that he designated him as sole successor. He associated with himself L. Commodus, who, however, took no interest in governing. Upon M. A. there thus came to weigh an immense task. The Empire was in the greatest turmoil: assaults of barbarians, rebellions, plagues, floods, famines, financial difficulties. In 162 the barbarians of the north moved; from 161 to 166 the Parthians engaged huge military forces; these, on their return, brought the plague, which wrought havoc throughout the Empire. In 166 the barbarians besieged Aquileia. The two Emperors conducted the campaign from 166 to 169, the year in which Commodus died. M. A., having returned to Rome, sold at auction the furnishings of the imperial Palace, enlisted slaves and fugitives and set out again in 170 for the hard war that lasted until 175, and which is commemorated by the monumental column. To this war belongs the episode of the refreshing rain, which pagan writers attributed to Jupiter Pluvius, while Christian writers have handed it down as a true miracle, due to the prayers of the Christian soldiers of the legio fulminata (v.). Meanwhile the lieutenant Avidius Cassius proclaimed himself emperor in the East; M. A. went there: he arrived when the rebellion had been quelled with the killing of Cassius, pardoned the guilty and began a journey to reorganize the eastern provinces. Having returned to Rome, he conferred the tribuneship on his only surviving son, Commodus. In 178 the war recalled him to the north; the plague, which was decimating the army, struck him and he died of it, designating Commodus as successor. The ashes were brought to Rome, amid universal mourning.
During the nineteen most turbulent years of his reign, he devoted himself to great reforms within the State, to works of public good, not excluding charitable institutions, among them the puellae Faustinianae (from Faustina, the Emperor's wife) for the relief of needy adolescence. All his legislation is moreover inspired by a sincere Stoic humanitarianism toward the weak and slaves. There remains, as an incongruous and indelible stain, the persecution of the Christians, whom his attachment to the traditional religion and his Stoic rationalism prevented him from understanding. Recalling them expressly (Meditations, XI, 3), he mistakes their serene and unshakable firmness for theatrical exhibitionism; alluding to them perhaps indirectly (ibid., III, 16), he considers them atheists and immoral. He did not, however, substantially change the legal prescriptions concerning them. Among the most illustrious victims are to be remembered the famous martyrs of Lyons (v.). There were not lacking those condemned to the mines of Sardinia and Corinth (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., IV, 23, 10). The apologies of Justin (150), of Melito of Sardis (172), of Athenagoras (177), presented to the Emperor himself, did not avail to change his mind. The radical doctrinal antithesis between Stoicism and Christianity, despite the extrinsic consonance of certain ethical norms, precluded all understanding and was bloodily fatal to the Christians under the philosopher Emperor.
The Meditations (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν "Discourses with himself"), apparently date back to the last years of M. A., who, even amid wars and affairs, found the means and time to collect himself in philosophical reflection. They are occasional annotations, which M. A. elaborates in a highly personal form, clothing the Stoic theories he professed with profound humanity, with disconsolate sadness, with a most vivid religious feeling. Life, with its anguish and its tragedies, poses formidable problems, which demand an unavoidable solution, to be sought in knowing the essence of things, that is, in metaphysics. Reason frees from superficial vanities, showing the real, composed of cause and matter in necessary and rational evolution. In the harmony of the whole, individual dissonances disappear. The present world, and in it every individual, are an aspect and a moment of the universal and eternal order. The universe is animated by a λόγος-πνεῦμα that pervades and vivifies it; this λόγος is divine, is God. Doubts and hesitations about the gods are frequent, in the alternative hypotheses between a spiritualistic and rational conception and an atomistic mechanism. "The works of the gods are full of providence" (Meditations, II, 3). The divinity pervades and vivifies the world in an intrinsic union and dwells particularly in man, whose reason is a living part of the universal λόγος. The morality of M. A. is essentially and profoundly rational; insisting on the privileged situation of the mind, it leads to the valorization and exaltation of a markedly interior morality, which demands commitment, seriousness and firmness. M. A., a Roman and an emperor, accentuates and develops the social aspects of Stoicism. What has value in man is the spirit, a participation in the divine logos: the soul is mortal, in its distinct individuality. The happiness of the sage lies in the continuous and vigilant mastery of himself.
The exaltation of the spirit in Marcus Aurelian Stoicism (as in Stoicism in general) is in reality only apparent, since the spirit is therein reduced, in its deep essence, to matter. Nor was the supreme ideal of the sage attained, as M. A. himself confesses in a series of questions that remained unanswered (Meditations, XI, 1). The uncritically accepted metaphysics was at bottom in contradiction with the professed ethics, and the frequent accents of pessimistic inspiration are a confirmation of this inner discord. In M. A. there is a further voice of the dramatic torment of classical man suspended between the logos ardently sought and invoked and the pathos lived and suffered.