In Our Time - Marcus Aurelius

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the man who, according to Machiavelli, was the last of the Five Good Emperors. Marcus Aurelius, 121 to 180 AD, has long been known as a model of the philosopher king, a Stoic who, while on military campaigns, compiled ideas on how best to live his life, and how best to rule. These ideas became known as his Meditations, and they have been treasured by many as an insight into the mind of a Roman emperor, and an example of how to avoid the corruption of power in turbulent times.The image above shows part of a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.With Simon Goldhill Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of King’s College, CambridgeAngie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldAndCatharine Edwards Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Marcus Aurelius 1-21 to 180 AD, is known as the last of the five good emperors of Rome and as a model of the philosopher king.

He was a stoic, and while on military campaigns, he compiled ideas on how best. to live his life and how best to rule. These became known as his meditations. They've been treasured ever since as an insight into the mind of a Roman emperor and an example of how to avoid the corruption of power in turbulent times. With me, from their homes to discuss Marcus Aurelius are Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge.

Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient Historic. at Birkbeck University of London. Catherine Edwards, what was it about the Roman Empire in the second century that made it seem stable? Well, I think in some ways it's a piece of good fortune that there had been a succession of emperors who were all relatively sensible and conscientious, and all of whom who had had relatively long reigns. So the Emperor Trajan reigned for around 20 years, it's followed by Hadrian for another 20-odd years,

then Antoninininus Pearce who reigned for another 20-od year. to 161, and then he succeeded by Marcus Aurelius. So that makes an enormous difference, really. There's very little sort of disruption in terms of the transmission of power. Why were they called good emperors by Machiavelli? He added Marcus Ruelas to that list. How did he define that? Well, I suppose that they managed not to be too much despised and resented by their subjects, and perhaps particularly influential there would be those subjects who were recording histories. someone like the historian Cassius Dio, who's writing a history in the early third century, and he looks back on these emperors and is largely admiring of them.

And, of course, there's also the very sharp contrast between their rules and particularly the rule of Marcus's son, Commodus, which was a very unhappy state of affairs. He was eventually assassinated. They ruled for a long time. What else made it seem to sayable? On the whole, these are all rulers who devote a lot. lot of attention to communicating with provincial governors, to paying attention to the legions, to managing the population of the city of Rome. All these different requirements on an emperor's

time are ones that they are largely attentive to, or they with some variation. So at the same time, I mean, you know, we could see this stability as perhaps to a degree illusory. There are all kinds of threatening things, kind of on the edges of the empire with the Germanic tribes in the North already creating difficulties earlier and difficulties on the eastern frontier as well. How did Marcus Aurelius come to power? Well, Marcus Aurelius was really picked out from a very young age as a potential emperor. His father, Anius Veras, was a distinguished Roman senator, but it's particularly his grandfather, His father died when he was quite young, but his grandfather, Annie Svarez, was clearly a very sort of big cheese.

Marcus had family connections to the Emperor Hadrian. His aunt was married to the Emperor Hadian. And then he also had a family connection to Hadrian's heir, Antoninus Pierce. And when Hadrian's initial plan for his succession, because he didn't have any children of his own, but he planned, he had a plan for his succession that didn't work out. but then he adopted Antoninus Pearce. And at the same time, he got Antoninus Pearce to adopt Marcus and another young man, Lucius Verus. He then has sort of over 20 years of being kind of in training to take over as emperor. Thank you. Simon Goldhill, how Greek was Rome at this point? You can quote Horace if you want.

I will quote Horace, yes. It's fascinating that in this day of fascination with, post-colonialism and with decolonising the curriculum, that the mother of all empires, the Roman Empire, was actually overwhelmed by the culture of one of the countries that it itself conquered. And as you said, Horace said, that captured Greece managed to capture its fierce conqueror. And it's the case that if you look at Roman architecture, it's borrowed from Greek. Greek art is the basis of Roman art. There would be no literature in Rome without Greek literature, education, the education system started with Homer, with Greek texts. And perhaps most importantly of all, the Roman elite spoke Greek as a normal part of their language. And of course,

maybe the soldiers on the street didn't, but the elite did, to the extent that we're very used to hearing about from Shakespeare that when Caesar was being assassinated, he said et tu bruter, but actually what he said was Kaiser Technon in Greek. He said, and you child. So at the moment at which, is actually being killed. You might think he could go to his mother tongue. But for him the mother tongue is Greek. And that's the Emperor Caesar. So, speaking...

So what effect did this have on the politics as pertaining to Marcus Aurelius? Well, I think it's more of a cultural politics. It's a fascinating time for thinking about how the cultural politics of the period worked. They tended to build cities of a particular sort. And there was a lot of benevolent, patronage of towns from the very wealthy and the literature and the culture of the period took over in that way. Greeks became senators

and Greeks could even become consuls. So there was a huge overlap between these areas. Of course, some Romans were always a bit worried about the Greeks of being a bit too effeminate with their arts and their philosophy. But when we see Marcus Aurelius writing something like the Meditations, he writes, of course, in Greek. Was this the real Greece?

Or was this an ideal? or heavily appropriated version. Well, for both the Greeks and the Romans of the second century, there was a fantastic projection of what we ourselves are interested in as the classical city, the city of Athens in the 5th and the 4th century. So quite remarkably, most of the people who wrote grown-up Greek, that is to say the elites, the doctors, the philosophers, wrote Greek of a sort that was being spoken and written by Plato some 600 years earlier.

It's a little like us sitting around talking Chaucer to each other on the grounds that we're really English. So it's quite remarkable that there is this sort of fantasised version. People, if you read Greek novels of the period, and there are some great Greek novels of the period, they write as if Rome didn't exist and they're as if they were living in a world of the 5th century BC. So there was indeed a fantastic sense of an ideal Greece which people were trying to live up to. Angie, Angie Hobbes, Stoicism is going to be part of this discussion. It was very much part of Marcus Ruehiel's life. What were the main aspects of Stoicism relevant to him?

Yes, so we live in a materialist cosmos interpenetrated by divine rational fire, which has arranged everything for the best. And our individual human reason is a spark of, of this divine reason and our task is to understand how everything has in fact been arranged for the best and accept that something which appears terrible to us now is in fact part of this greater providential plan and as rational beings we are connected to all other rational beings in the cosmopolis, the world city. So there's, for Marcus, there's always going to be this tension between his allegiance to the city of Rome and to the cosmopolis, the Stoic World City.

What particularly drew Marcus Aurelius to it? I mean, that's a very good wide shot. But what particularly drew him to it? Why did he go for it and stick with it so tenaciously and profitably for the rest of his life? Well, because if we understand and follow the tenets that we've looked at, then that is what it means to live in accordance with nature. And our virtue and happiness lie in this. And virtue is the only thing good in itself for the Stoics.

Everything else which people call good, such as wealth or status or even health, are usually to be preferred in Stoic terminology, but they're not actually good. So this means, and this is what I think is crucial for Marcus, this means that our virtue and happiness are up to us. and are not dependent on external factors outside our control. So Catherine's been talking about all the problems he has.

And, you know, the Germanic tribes in Britain and the eastern edges of the empire, there's a plague as well. He's got all these problems. But what can he control? He can control his inner rational virtue and happiness. So the past is gone. The future is yet to come. All we can do is live in the present moment and accept it.

and enjoy it. So don't waste time regretting the past or fearing the future. Stoicism is a therapy of the soul. And it's that notion of therapy, of a guide through life, as philosophy as medicine. That's, I think, what attracts Marcus most of all. One of the things that attracts him most, you're correct me if I'm wrong, is the insistence on and the attraction to him of self-control. Yes, I think that's a really good point, because although stoicism, was intended by its Greek founding fathers as a philosophy for all times, both peaceful and turbulent. It was developed in Greece and the late 4th and 3rd century's BCE by Zeno of Kittium and Crescphers and others during a period of enormous upheaval after the Macedonian

Empire of Alexander the Great had swept away the old political structure of independent city states. So many people were feeling powerless over external events and feeling that they could only exert control over their inner selves, over their thoughts, and how they responded to events, over their inner rational virtue. Now, you might think, well, goodness me, Marcus is the most powerful person in the Roman Empire. Why is he feeling out of control? Well, he often does. It's very clear from the intimacy of his meditations, that he often feels that external events, he is there. His job is to accept them, to embrace them to. And all he can do is to respond to them virtuously.

Would it be true or would it be accurate to say that although he's emperor, this massive empire and lives in enormous buildings and has all the money in the world, let's leave it at that, he still insists on leading a simpler life as possible. He sleeps on the floor until he's told that it doesn't do if an emperor sleeps on the floor. He is rebelleded by sexual congress, let's call it, and anything to do with the body, dirt, sweat, that sort of thing. He seems determined to sort of, what we might call, sort of normalise himself and get rid of the imperial carapace.

Does that make any sense? I think it makes complete sense, because in some ways Marcus is not a typical stoic. but what you've picked out is this sort of almost revulsion disgust at the earthly world and particularly at the functions of the body and bodily fluids. And he almost sort of veers towards the platonic two-world view at times. Though as a good stoic, unlike Plato, he always thinks that the divine world is still material, it's made of matter.

But he seems to think there is still a separation between our earthly, bodily sort of confinement. And often it disgusts him. And he does go for the sort of simple purity. And that's what is attracting him. And as you say, he loathes court life a lot of the time. He dislikes the flatterers and the hypocrisies of it. There's a very famous quote in 630

when he reprimands himself and says, be careful, don't become Caesarified, don't become like Caesar, don't be dipped in the purple dye, purple being, of course, the colour not just of emperors, but also of tyrants. So he finds that world morally disgusting, but he's also honest enough to accept that it might have some seductions for him and he's got to guard against it. Thank you, Catherine. Catherine Edwards, in Marcus Reelis, we have an opportunity to examine the making of an emperor's mind. Can you tell us about his tutor, Fronto, and his impact?

Well, Fronto is appointed to be Marcus's tutor in sort of around the time that Antoninus Pierce becomes emperor. He's sort of 18, 19 at this point. So he comes to work with Fronto initially as a teenager, and we're very fortunate because we do actually have a collection of letters exchanged between Marcus and Fronto, written over a roughly 20, well, more than 20-year appearance, They only come to an end, it seems, with the death of Fronto in the late 160s.

So what's frustrating about this collection of letters is that we don't have any dates on them. So people have sort of tried to guess what order they come in. But there are a very sort of intimate body of correspondence in many ways. And what's quite interesting is... What do you mean by intimate? Well, Angie's just been talking about... And you were talking about the ways in which in the meditations, Marcus, appears to be disgusted by the body and very sort of detached from his physical self as much

as he could be. In fact, in the letters, there's an awful lot of kind of toing and throwing about the health of Fronto, indeed the health of Marcus, that seems to be in a very different kind of a register. There's almost a flirtation between them, which is very intriguing. And some scholars were suggested they were lovers, potentially. And even if one doesn't want to go, quite that far. I mean, I think we can certainly see here a sort of engagement in the sort of tradition, perhaps, within the platonic school of kind of the teaching relationship as a sort of almost eroticised relationship. But what did Fronto teach him? Okay, so Fronto was teaching Marcus oratory. So Fronto was a distinguished orator. He came from North Africa, one of many

North Africans in Rome, prominent in Rome, he was regarded as the Rome's best orator since Cicero. And so he was really teaching Marcus how to make speeches. And during this time, Marcus was actually called upon to make speeches in the Senate. So this was, you know, it was pushing that teaching into practice straight away. But he was also training him in how to write letters, because that's also another really important part of the emperor's job and writing letters to officials and, you know, subjects in distant provinces of the empire. And you want to come in? Well, yes, because I wanted to ask Catherine and Simon,

because though I knew the meditations fairly well, I hadn't actually read the correspondence with Fronto before preparing for this programme. And I was pretty startled reading it for the first time. And to my ears, it read as if this was a really intimate and romantic relationship. And I thought maybe I've misunderstood. Maybe this is typical of letters of the time between student and master.

But as I said, I was quite startled, and particularly as Marcus is already moving away from Fronto's sort of rather contempt for philosophy. Marcus is interested in philosophy from about 11 or 12. He's got Stoic mentors from quite early on in his teen. So it's very much not front. it's Fronto's character and personality that's really appealing to him. And as I said to me, it did read very romantically. Yeah, well, I think it's quite important that the letters survive. And they're not going to be deeply embarrassing to the emperor.

So they're not suggesting there was some sort of corrupt and dangerous relationship between teacher and pupil. I think it's a heightened emotional sense that gives us some idea of the sensitivity and intimacy that you might expect from a philosopher king. Yes, right. Simon, while I'm with you, another influence was Herodes Atticus. He was another tutor, as I understand, another teacher. What was he and what in fact did he have? He was a very different sort of character. He was Greek rather than Roman.

He certainly wasn't from North Africa. He was from Athens. And he went on to be a Roman senator, a consul, actually. He was super rich, which always helps. It also helps. Helps what in this case? It helps in having a strong. relationship with power. So he was a Greek who came right up to the centre of power. He worked under

Hadrian, he worked under Antoninus Pius, and then he got to work with the third emperor as a teacher, well, a teacher of culture. Herodes Aticus was a patron of the arts. He, as I said earlier, in terms of cultural politics, he built stadiums, he built religious building, he built odians where you could go and listen to poetry. And he was not a stoic. He was very much not a stoic. In fact, he thought stoics were rather dull. And by getting rid of emotions in the way that Angie was talking about in terms of control and not liking the body, he thought that just made you rather heavy and boring.

And I think he'd much rather have a glass of wine and sit around. And he had no problems whatsoever in having sex. And he didn't have any problems about his body. So I think he was giving a quite different version of the world to Marcus Aurelius. And one of the fascinating things is to see how Marcus Aurelius emerges from Fronto on the one side and Herodes Atticus on the other to become his own man.

We should note that Marcus Aurelius and his wife, Osteena, do have at least 13 children, so he obviously overcame his revulsion to sex fairly often. Not necessarily. That's right. That's great. He's doing his duty. In what ways, Angie, can we go back to the stoicism of Marcus Reelius?

Were there any ways in which he was not? a typical stoic. Yes, I mean, and we've already touched on some of these. We've touched on his sort of revulsion from the body and bodily functions. And I think that's part of a sort of rather melancholy, almost elegiac worldview that comes through really quite often in the meditations. He again and again, he writes of humans, including emperors, including the most powerful generals of all time, that we are just. insignificant specs in the limitless sweeps of time and space and, you know, when we die, so we're all going to sort of disappear into the great nothingness and we'll all be forgotten

very quickly. I mean, he was wrong about that in his case. But there is this rather melancholy... Well, it was right in terms of being a tiny speck like the rest of us. He's bang on now, wasn't he? He was wrong about being forgotten. So he's struggling quite often to go along with the stoic idea that you should always embrace what happens and be cheerful and be calm and accept everything gladly. I think he's quite often of a melancholy disposition and he has to struggle quite hard to be a good stoic. Another big difference I think is that he's much more gentle and more forgiving of moral failings in others than the original founding Stoic fathers who were pretty uncompromising, pretty stern.

That said, sorry, that said, he's often pretty irritated with those around him, and he has to, again, struggle quite hard to be forgiving. You get the sense that he didn't suffer fools gladly, but he did suffer them stoically. I also get the sense here, forgive me, Angie. You've been a star contributed to this series for a very long time, but there's a bit of whitewash going on there. I mean, he was a military commander.

He went into wars. The big monument to him is ringed by the number of barbarians he slaughtered. Christians were, seemed to be near his philosophy in a way, but there were still criminals when he took power, and he didn't pass a law stopping them being criminals, and so on. He got about the business of being a good old battling, butchering Roman emperor when he was necessary.

Is that a bit of a caricature too? I mean, he's a complex character. I think that's one of the reasons he fascinates me. And there are always these tensions between his practical daily life as a ruler, as a very active ruler, very hands-on, and these sort of quiet retreats in the evening to sort of write up, you know, the meditations of the day. And in fact, he says in the meditations that, you should, you know,

he reprimands himself for wanting to just reflect and study and read, all the time. He says, no, no, no, you can only have short retreats into the citadel of your mind. And then you've got to go back to being active. And yes, he was pretty tough. I mean, there were two known instances of persecution of the Christians in his reign. Catherine, if we look at other of his actions, can we see signs that Marcus Riegelius was acting as a Stoic should, or was only acting as a Stoic when it suited him? I know this is a bit coarse, What do you think of that? Well, I mean, in some ways,

one of the things that we need to recognize about stoicism and particularly the Roman version of stoicism is that it's very much about embracing the job that you're given. So Marcus has given the job of being a Roman emperor, and so performing his job properly is, you know, actually being a good stoic. And even though some of it he finds uncongenial, it's a struggle for him,

the very struggle is itself, can be embraced for stoicism. Stoics like to struggle. When you struggle, that's when you get to exercise your virtue. So doing things that are not to your taste is kind of actually a good thing if you're a stoic in some respect. So doing the job of being a Roman emperor, in some ways we don't really see any very obviously stoic actions on Marcus's part in terms of the way he's praised for the attention that he gives to the law. He makes some minor adjustments to the law. His interpretation of the law tends to favour a slave being given their freedom,

all other things being equal. He's conscientious about registering the births of children so that their free status can be more easily proved, if necessary, at a later stage. So there are ways in which he's a sort of very, you know, he's a good emperor, but he's exercising those absolutely traditional imperial virtues of, you know, clemency, justice, and so on.

That's exactly the sort of virtue that the Emperor Augustus was praised for exercising. But the fact is, he went to war, slaughtered a lot of people, saw the people slaughtered, saw a law pass that made Christian criminals one way out for them was to become gladiators, so that up the stock of gladiators and so on. I just think there's that side of him which has to be faced up to, and maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think that has to be quite faced up to. I think you're absolutely spot on on that because I think the crucial thing is if we did not have the texts of the meditations, we would simply say, here is an extremely strong, powerful ruler of one of the biggest empowers the world's ever seen, who was involved with military activity, and during the course of it, some Christians were killed. I don't think he cared a great deal about them. They weren't important enough at that point. And he would have gone down as a decent emperor. But the fact is the meditations has become one of the best publicity documents for power. that's ever been.

We think of him completely differently. Let's start talking about them and let's start talking about them. Simon, can we start talking about the meditations here? We have quite a bit to say. How would you describe them in outline? There's 12 books and each book is taken up with a series of paragraphs, each one of which you could call a saying. And as such, it fits very well into two sorts of traditions.

One of them is the Micellany tradition. and in this period of culture, people like to put together anthologies, miscellanism, cultures got morselized into bits so that you have a nice paragraph and you could learn it and you could bring it out at a dinner party and say something profound in that way. And that was part of the culture of the Roman Empire at that point. But there was also a stronger tradition, which was the sayings of philosophers. And that circulates in various forms when somebody was a strong philosopher, his sayings might be put together and that would also help.

And of course, some people think that's how Jesus's sayings first circulated. So the one thing it's not is a coherent treatise. So if you were looking for a long philosophical argument. No, but I'm looking for a taste of it. I'm not looking for a long term. Can you give us a few instances? So he would say something like, so I've just got one open here in front of me. And he says, harmonize yourself to the circumstances which you are allotted

and love the men with whom you share the circumstances. and do so truthfully. Now, you could say that's philosophy, or you could say it's a piece of homespun wisdom to help control power. That is, don't long to be somewhere where you're not. As Catherine said, do your duty, do your job, that's good stoicism. Care for the people who you're put in a circumstances with. That's also good advice. And do so honestly and be an honest person. So you could see it as a bit of moralism. I'm not sure I would say that's a piece of philosophy. I would say it's a piece of good advice that he's writing for himself and for others to think that he thinks.

Yes, so many more examples in front of you. Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be, be one. And then rather sadly, just because you have given up all hope of being a thinker and a student of science, you can still be free, modest, sociable and obedient to God. So again, very much trying to sort of, urge himself towards stoic acceptance of his role in the universe. So he is a good stoic.

Do you have any to hand, Catherine? Marcus talks about sort of dying his thoughts, dying the character of his thoughts by repeating things. And in some ways, this practice of writing his own little sayings, but also quotations from Ethictetus, quotations from other philosophers, it's all a way of sort of keeping these thoughts kind of at the forefront of his mind, keeping himself in the right place, if you like.

I mean, Seneca said you should, at the end of every day, you should make an account of what you've done and write it down and think about it. And that's a way of becoming a better person. And in some sense, that's what he's setting out to do, to write down his thoughts at the end of each day and to help him become a better person. So it's a very, I mean, I can say, it's a very common thing until quite recently that people would keep commonplace books. They would write down sentences that occur. to them. It's only recently with Google and the rest that we've lost that particular habit. I think

we're being a bit unfair to him as a stoic and in terms of his philosophical knowledge because I think the meditation shows really quite a deep engagement with the physical and logical basis of stoic ethics. Not an enormous amount, but it's there. He understands

the arguments that fate sort of gives us the push but it gives the cylinder the push but it's because the cylinder is the shape that it is that it, you know, rolls down the hill. So he's really thinking about the relationship between our individual moral responsibility and what's been pre-determined. And also there's a real knowledge of a lot of philosophers. I mean, we've mentioned Plato. He's, and he had some platonic teachers as well as stoic ones. He knows a lot of Plato. He loves the Theaitetus and the comparison between

the philosopher and the man of affairs there. But he also, he quotes a lot of the Presbyocratics, he quotes Heraclitus, he knows about Empedocles, he knows about Permanides, he knows about the cynics and the skeptics. So he's the only person he doesn't, as far as I can remember, really discusses Aristotle, whose works were not well known at this time.

We keep describing what it is and not saying what they are. I think it would be terrific for the listeners to have a few more of his meditations. Headlines. I'll give you some short ones. Bullet points from the past. I'd be delighted to give you some short ones because I think Angie is over... I think Angie is completely overstressed. The philosophy, consider this. Train yourself to pay careful attention to what's being said by another and as far as possible enter into his soul.

Well, be a good listener. I'm not sure that is a philosophical statement so much as a piece of self-help. You know, we need not form any opinion about the thing in question or be Harris and soul. for nature gives the thing itself no power to compel our judgments. Well, okay, fine. Is that philosophy? I think these are just, you know, a lot of what you're getting there is extremely familiar sentences that you might, as it were, have seen sewn into a sampler onto a Victorian wall. And I think, I think Angie is rather overstressed the philosophy here. There certainly are some moments where we get this slightly more paradoxical kind of,

a more obviously stereotyical statement. So he says, where life can be lived, so can a good life, but life can be lived in a palace, therefore a good life can be lived in a palace. That sort of grudging sense that virtue is possible anywhere. You could say, well, even a slave can live a virtuous life for Marcus. Even an emperor can live a virtuous life. That kind of recognition of the particular challenges that an emperor faces.

That is a sort of sense, as Angie was emphasizing earlier, that for the Stoics only virtue is important, and that's what we see a kind of quite specifically stoic edge to his observations, I think. Oh, no, I shall continue to defend Marcus Sirelius. I think it's a really good example of stoic ethics in practice by a man of action. He's not pretending to be an original thinker, but he knows his stoic philosophy, and he's really trying to put it into practice. He was celebrated for his philosophical interests,

even by his contemporaries. So the biography of him, admittedly, a rather sort of unreliable work, but the biography of him that should survive from antiquity specifically praises his kind of philosophical calm at the very outset and connects that with his virtuous rule. But of course there's a great deal of pressure being put on this because everybody wants to appear to be the good philosophical ruler. So it's also about self-presentation and how you want to be remembered

and how you want to come across. after all he didn't just write these down he wrote them down in such a way they were preserved and passed on he published them Simon do we know how they were valued at the time early in their existence well that's a very very they were copied it yes they were obviously they were copied

otherwise we wouldn't have them and they were preserved by Christians too who liked the sound of them but it's very striking that there are almost no references to this book in his own lifetime or shortly after us it takes quite a long time before they become as popular as they now are

So in fact, we don't know how they want. Why do you think that is? It's extremely hard to tell it. It could be just by chance. But there are very good reasons why it would have survived and why it might have circulated. After all, it's written by the emperor, the most powerful man in the world. It's a coherent book, as Angie will say. It gives us the fascinating insight into his inner life. And it lets us see something about power's ability to control itself. As you said earlier, to self-control and whether education really can temper absolute power. And of course, we're also talking. We started by saying it was a period of calm, but it's also a period which has been called an age of anxiety.

This is the period in which Christianity is getting going, in which there are a lot of cults going going, rabbinical Judaism is getting going. There's lots of people trying to understand how we might live with the world. And Marcus Aurelius gives another version of that for people to work with. So there are lots of reasons of why. And how to deal with the Antenine Plague. something that has become slightly more pressing now.

But there are lots of reasons why people might have wanted to read it. But oddly enough, we don't, I think, have any reference to it until really quite late. Well, can we talk about the quite lateness of it? Catherine, when were the meditations really picked up by more readers? Because they went underground for a while. And what was most valued in them? Okay, well, stoicism becomes quite popular in the sort of early modern period. But that initial interest in socialism focuses perhaps more on Seneca and Epictetus.

And Marcus only really becomes prominent in the mid-17th century. So there's a couple of English translations of Marcus' meditations in the mid-17th century, and he's quite widely read at that time, particularly favoured by royalists in turbulent time, who found comfort in the words of this Roman emperor. 18th century, Gibbon does single him out as among the more admirable Roman emperors, with perhaps a little bit of a comment about the way in which he liked to think of himself as being virtuous, to sort of pick up on the kinds of comments that Simon was making earlier. There's another sort of really big Marcus Aurelius moment in the Victorian period,

where we find John Stuart Mill thinks he's really great, and particularly Matthew Arnold, who writes an essay on Marcus Aurelius in 1863, that really sort of accommodates his kind of genial stoicism to a sort of Judeo-Christian perspective. So he's sort of made to cohere with Christianity in a way which we might think is slightly curious, given he's associated with persecutions of the Christians. But that is sort of, and obviously there's a lot of effort to kind of massage that away. But he's seen as being a sort of prototype for the man of action who is not a sort of bloodthirsty kind of violent person, but who has these virtues of self-control, who exercises power reluctantly,

governs his empire, you know, conducts these great military campaigns. And, of course, you know, for another imperial nation, that's a fantastic model, really, a sort of, you know, the virtuous exercise of power, just defending the empire's borders, no militarism, no gung-ho campaigns, but, you know, a model of kindness and geniality, justice. Except, except. Except he was also the favourite book of Cecil Rhodes. So a slightly darker side of imperialism there. I mean, and you mentioned Matthew Arnold,

and of course his father had been headmaster at rugby school. So as you say, there's the kind of muscular Christianity meets stoicism, which was kind of the religion of the British public schools, you know, meant to be training officers for the empire. But it is a darker side to this. It is a popular work. amongst imperialists. And for sure, I wasn't, I wasn't at all suggesting that this wasn't a dark conjunction.

I mean, I think it's, you know, it's precisely because of that sort of imperial mission, the sort of reluctant imperial mission that is detected in Marcus Aurelius, that makes it the ideal book for those who want to present virtuous imperialism. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, of course, because of its form as a sort of miscellany, that taps right into Victorian literary culture, where sayings from George Elliott, sayings from Shakespeare were big sellers,

where you would get books with little individual quotations that you could use. And the great advantage of Marcus, unlike some more severe philosophers, is that you can pick and choose your remarks. And so for the Christian imperialist, who wanted to have classical training and classical support for imperialism, Marcus as an emperor, became a very useful machine for quotation. and I think that's when he becomes really popular and I think that's how he's continued today.

Is there any other way that it went into our culture? Let's talk about this country for a while, went into our culture. Well, I think first of all, the idea of the Christian emperor, the idea that goes all the way back to Constantine, finds a formation in Marcus Aurelius as a Stoic. I think both Angie and Catherine said, look, there's a way in which some of this material is close to Christianity. So if we want to imagine what is a good ruler,

Marcus Auredus has been absolutely crucial in the formation of that imaginary. And that continued particularly strongly in the 19th century when people spent a lot of time trying to imagine what a British empire would look like and what good rule would look like. And the idea that you could do it through self-control and through decency was a very important part of self-justification for the Victorians. But as Angie said, it was self-justification for imperialism. And of course that that sort of regime of sleeping on the floor and eating very basic meals fits perfectly with the public school ethos as well.

But also there's been a revival in recent years in stoicism generally and Marcus Aurelis' meditations has played a huge part in that. And in cognitive behavioral therapy, in the mindfulness movement, and I can understand why. So I want to continue defending the meditations a bit here. Because though I personally don't subscribe to the Stoic doctrine, that everything is ordained for the best and that grief and anger and appropriate responses, I do think it can still be helpful sometimes to ask whether I can change how I view and respond to something.

And I certainly think it can be helpful to focus on enjoying the positive, preferable in Stoic terms, the preferable things about one's present, situation and not spend too much time or energy, regretting the past or worrying about the future. And I strongly and probably unfashionably agree with the stoic emphasis and particularly Marcus's emphasis on trying to cultivate one's own virtues as a current fashion for cynically dismissing all these attempts at virtue cultivation as mere virtue signaling. But I personally find that a really lazy response.

and I think we could do with a bit more, a bit more virtue amongst. Well, Angie, you, apart from everything else, you're a mind reader. I've got on my sheet of paper here, very little time left, and we haven't talked about the thing that mattered most to him, which was virtue. Yes, well. What did he mean by virtue, and how did he want to see it practiced? Virtue is your rational acceptance of your place as a spark, as a rational spark of the cosmic rational order.

It's acceptance of that, and more than acceptance. It's embracing it and all that follows from it, which will result in you living in accordance with nature. So virtue is literally living in accordance with nature, but to understand what that means. But what's order of nature? The nature of wolves or the nature of virgin trees. The nature of the cosmos,

which is this rational, ordered whole permeated by divine rational fire, in which everything has been preordained for the best. Self-control is absolutely crucial. and control of the emotions. And that would be part of the virtue, that you didn't allow, crucially, you don't allow anger to disturb you, you don't allow grief to disturb you,

you don't allow pleasure to disturb you, but you always aim at the balance, which leads to the control of yourself and to harmony with the universe. The danger with that, where Aristotle would come back and say, a just man has to be angry at injustice. I know, and I agree with Aristotle.

And I agree with Aristotle. So that's why I'm resisting this. Well, thank you all very much. I am joined and hope everybody else said. Thanks to Angie Hobbs, Catherine Edwards and Simon Goldhill next week. Coal Ridge, water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. It's the rhyme of the ancient marriage, of course, and our 900th edition of this programme.

So thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Wow. 900 editions, amazing. That's incredible. Wow. Right, but let me start where I usually start.

What grieves you that we left out? I don't want to completely defend Marcus because there are some really chilling bits in the meditations and the most chilling chapters to me are where he follows Epictetus in saying that you should not wish for your children to survive. The worst passage of me is when he quotes Epictetus saying every time you kissed your child could night, you should remind yourself that tomorrow you may be dead.

The child may be dead. And not that you're wishing that that should happen, but that if it does happen, it's all been part of God's plan and that grief is for the week. Well, he might have been afflicted by the fact that he had 13 children, most of whom died. Of course, yes.

He might have been traumatised many times over. That could be a personal excuse for that? Of course. Catherine, could you? I mean, sorry, yes, I was going to say. I mean, I think we should see those. comments is precisely reflecting the very great difficulty that Marcus is having, of coming to terms with the deaths of his children. That's why he has to keep on saying

you should not be affected by the death of your child because he very evidently was. And that was an ongoing challenge for him. I completely agree with you, but I still dislike the aspect of stoicism, which says that, which defines anger and grief as passions, which are inappropriate judgments about the world and, you know, affections are fine, but the passions are not, I think that grief and anger are sometimes not only appropriate responses, but the only responses. Okay, I wanted to talk about the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which stood on the Capitoline Hill until very recently from 1538. And it's one of the very,

very few equestrian statues to have survived from antiquity, and survived because it was mistaken for the Emperor Constantine for many centuries and therefore preserved. But a 12th century visitor to Rome, remarks that one of the horses' hooves is actually resting on a trampled barbarian. So although the statue now sort of radiates this incredible stoic calm, we also need to think about what it might have been like, what impression it might have made when it showed the sort of triumphant emperor trampling on his enemies. I think what's fascinating is the tension that's appeared, two tensions really. One of the tensions is between, is he a philosopher or is he a self-professing?

publicist who happens to have some nice things to say. And the second is for me the fascinating question about why does he matter if he's a good or a bad philosopher? And I think there is a really, really long history here of how we think about what is good rule, in which he has had a very, very powerful effect. And I don't know whether it's a good effect or a bad effect, but it's certainly been a powerful effect. And it's very interesting that both Julian the Appostate and Constantine, who come not long after, are emperors who are intent on proving themselves to be philosophers. And that goes off into the early modern period, as Catherine said earlier, and becomes a real issue. What is the training for rule? I mean, in our own country, we don't really believe

there's any training for rule as far as I can see. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's very interesting that here's somebody says, no, there is a training for rule and it looks like this. And I think that would have been a very good and interesting thing for us to think about. Bill Clinton apparently loves the meditations and had recourse to it quite often. I didn't necessarily always put it in practice in terms of self-restraint. I'm going to say self-restraint being his middle name. Not his middle name, no. I'd like to ask Catherine and Simon what they think about the passage in 11-3,

which is the only apparent reference to Christians in the meditations, where he appears to be irritated with them for rushing off to martyrdom when they could have recounted and they could have worshipped the Roman gods and they could have escaped being. Well, I mean, I think the point of the contrast that's being drawn in that passage

is between a stoic approach to choosing death when you think very carefully before you take your own life. And of course, that's a very established and particularly stoic practice that's associated with, you know, Cato, the younger at the end of the Roman Republic, associated obviously with Seneca in the time of Nero. So there's that sort of very careful weighing up of the good and the bad in your life.

Are you still able to live a virtuous life? Are you suffering so much from pain that actually it's wiser to look for a way at? That's a sort of stoic approach to taking your own life. And the Christians who just sort of throw themselves into the arena. That's the thing. That's the thing he doesn't think is right because they're not thinking about it for themselves. like sheep, just kind of, you know, following on from one another. Well, I can, I completely agree.

But if you actually look at the, but if you look at the martyr texts, he's actually right, that there are very few people who actually have a rational procedure to say, I'm going to do this because that the early martyr texts in particular are full of people just saying, I must die as a martyr. And there's no argument whatsoever. So in that sense, he has a good case. But we shouldn't forget that this is still the second century. And it's unclear to me how much Christianity mattered.

to the Roman Emperor. I think probably not very much at all. I agree with that, but it's just this particular phrase like the Christians. Do you think Marcus actually wrote that or do you think it's been inserted later? Because to me, the grammar of that chapter doesn't quite seem to fit. I think it's not there. I think, I mean, it's the last word of the paragraph. Yes, and the whole issue with the Christians in the arena in Lyon seems to be sparked by the sort of shortage of gladiators. That's the real problem. I mean, when you're a Roman emperor, you need to make sure everyone's being properly entertained. Marcus is praised in the ancient biography for putting on games where 100 lions are killed. But the gladiators, the reason there's a shortage

of gladiators is often associated with the effects of the Antonine plague and that, you know, gladiators have to be kind of co-opted into the Roman army, apparently. So that's a, That's his main concern rather than, you know, what may or may not happen to the Christians. I think one of the most interesting things is precisely these tensions and the meditations between Marcus wanting to put into practice the Stoic philosophy that I think he genuinely believes in. He may be a self-publicist too, but I think he genuinely believes in all this. And his doubts, you know, some evenings he's saying, I didn't do so well to. I need to do better tomorrow. And he also has doubts about really core tenets of Stoic philosophy.

So what we haven't mentioned is how often he sets up an opposition and says, well, is it the stoic way of everything being ordained for the best, or is it the Epicurean doctrine of random collisions and sort of dissolutions of atomic structures? and he often sort of, he doesn't believe in Epicureanism, but he's prepared to consider it. He admires Epicurus himself. And there are moments when he has doubts about stoicism. And there's a passage where he's longing for an afterlife.

He doesn't think he's going to have a personal afterlife, but he really rather wishes he would. And to me, we've said that there's no particular structure to the meditations, but actually, I don't even, you know, reading it all the way through, as I have done in the last few days, I thought the final book's 10, 11, 12, I know that the books are later divisions, but I thought there were more meditations on death. And he's really thinking about his own death as imminent approaching, what's it going to be like, is his soul going to live on, is it going to just disperse, is he going to disappear into infinite nothingness?

and I find those doubts very attractive. We could see that as already characteristic of stoicism. We find Seneca coming up with very similar sorts of reflections, who's, you know, again, perhaps seen as a more orthodox stoic, although there are some questions about that too. Can I ask a rather a bald question? What did the army think of him? Did they think he was a good general?

Was he a good general? He seems to have been largely successful as a military commander. I mean, he does go out there and fight, you know, with his troops. And I think that's seen as absolutely key. And if we look at the relief on the column of Marcus Aurelius, if we look at the reliefs that seemed to have been on his triumphal arch. And he had two triumphs. His first triumph was the first in Rome for 50 years.

So, you know, in a way, he was kind of very much the military man and popular with the legions. I'm very concerned that his legion should be proper. looked after. So the reliefs show him addressing his troops. That's often a key sort of scene really for showing the kind of good relationship between the emperor and his legions. And that's very central to his image, I think. As you said, he's trampling barbarians underfoot in his public imagery. Well, thank you all very much indeed. I hope you enjoyed it. And thanks a lot for these rather testing circumstances. Thank you. It was great fun. Thank you.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. A new podcast series from BBC Radio 4. In the first stage of a poltergeist haunting, the entity will confine itself to making noise, as if it's testing its victims. The Battersea Paltgeist. My name is Shirley Hitchens. I'm 15 years old. I live with my mum, dad, brother, grand.

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