Aurelius, MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS, the best of the Roman emperors, and one of the noblest figures in history, was the son of Annius Verus and Domitia Calvilla, and was born at Rome on the 26th of April 121 A.D. His original name was Marcus Annius Verus. On the death of his father, he was adopted by his grandfather, who spared no pains to render him pre-eminent in every art and science. His fine qualities early attracted the notice of the Emperor Hadrian, who, playing on the boy's paternal name of Verus, used to call him Verissimus ('the most true'), and who conferred high honours on him while yet a child. When only seventeen years of age, he was adopted, along with L. Ceionius Commodus, by Antoninus Pius, who had succeeded Hadrian; and Faustina, the daughter of Pius, was selected for his wife. In the year 140 A.D. he was made consul; and from this period to the death of Pius in 161, he continued to discharge his public duties with the greatest promptitude and fidelity, while he maintained relations with the emperor of the warmest and most friendly kind. On his accession to the throne, with characteristic magnanimity he voluntarily divided the government with his adopted brother, young Commodus, called since his adoption Lucius Aurelius Verus. As the latter excelled in manly exercises, Aurelius determined to intrust to him the management of war. Towards the close of 161, the Parthian war broke out, and Verus was sent to quell it; but he proved himself completely incompetent, and only the ability of his generals, especially Avidius Cassius, saved the Romans from disaster. Verus on his return enjoyed a triumph to which he had no real claim; for all the victories had been won by others while he was revelling in the most extravagant licentiousness. Meanwhile clouds were forming on the horizon elsewhere. A formidable insurrection had long been preparing in the German provinces; the Britons were on the point of revolt, and the Catti waiting for an opportunity to devastate the Rhenish provinces. Within Rome itself a pestilence began to rage, believed to have been brought home by the troops of Verus; while frightful inundations and earthquakes laid large portions of the city in ruins, destroyed the granaries in which were kept the supplies of corn, and thus created widespread famine and distress, adding to the terror which the citizens entertained of their savage enemies. Aurelius now resolved to lead his legions to the war himself. He was completely successful. The Marcomanni, and the other rebellious tribes inhabiting the country between Illyria and the sources of the Danube, were humbled, and compelled to sue for peace in 168; a year later Verus died. The contest was renewed two years afterwards, and the emperor was obliged to make up for the ravages of plague among his soldiers by enlisting vast numbers of gladiators and slaves. He made Pannonia his headquarters, and drove out the Marcomanni, whom he subsequently all but annihilated in crossing the Danube. The most famous victory of the war was that gained over the Quadi in 174 A.D., which was attributed by the Christians to an answer to the prayers of some soldiers of their faith in what afterwards became known as the 'Thundering Legion.' It is certain that a signal deliverance did save the army from disaster. Entangled in a defile, and under a broiling sun, the soldiers were ready to perish from thirst and fatigue, when suddenly the cloudless sky darkened, and heavy showers of rain fell, which they caught eagerly in their helmets. While they were thus engaged, the enemy attacked, and would have cut them to pieces had not a blinding storm of hail and lightning fallen immediately on their faces. But this deliverance was ascribed by the Romans to the prayers of the emperor himself, and it is certain that the title in question had belonged to a particular legion since the time of Augustus. 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. Hardly had the emperor had a moment's respite before he was summoned to the East by a rebellion of the ambitious governor, Avidius Cassius, who had seized the whole of Asia Minor. Before Aurelius arrived, the usurper had fallen by an assassin's hand. The emperor's conduct on hearing of his enemy's death was worthy of the sublime virtue of his character. He lamented that the Fates had not granted him his fondest wish—to have freely pardoned the man who had so basely conspired against his happiness. On his arrival in the East, he exhibited the same illustrious magnanimity. He burned the papers of Cassius without reading them, so that he might not be tempted to suspect any as traitors; treated the provinces which had rebelled with extreme gentleness; and disarmed the enmity and dispelled the fears of the nobles who had openly favoured his insurgent lieutenant. While pursuing his work of restoring tranquillity, his wife Faustina died in an obscure village at the foot of Mount Taurus; and her husband, though he could scarcely have been unconscious of her unworthiness, paid the most lavish honours to her memory.
On his way home he visited Lower Egypt and Greece, displaying everywhere the greatest solicitude for the welfare of his vast empire. At Athens, which this imperial pagan philosopher must have venerated as a pious Jew venerates Jerusalem, he showed a catholicity of intellect worthy of his great heart, by founding chairs of philosophy for each of the four chief sects—Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean. No man ever laboured 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. Towards the close of the year 176, he reached Italy, and celebrated his merciful and bloodless triumph. In the succeeding autumn he departed for Germany, where fresh disturbances had broken out among the restless and volatile barbarians. Victory again crowned his arms; but his constitution, never robust, and now shattered by perpetual anxiety and fatigue, at length gave way, and he died either at Vienna or at Sirnium, on the 17th of March 180, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, and the twentieth of his reign.
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 either pagan or Christian history can show. In him stoicism loses all its haughty self-assertion, and is replaced by a humility that is usually regarded as the most peculiar, if almost the rarest, of the Christian graces. His youth was marked by the same lofty virtue as his maturer life. Already at twelve years of age the young philosopher was an avowed follower of Zeno and Epictetus. The Stoics, Diogenes, Apollonius, and Junius Rusticus, were his teachers, and he himself must be considered one of the most thoughtful teachers of the school. Oratory he studied under Herodes Atticus and Cornelius Fronto. His love of learning was insatiable. Even after he had attained to the highest dignity of the state, he did not disdain to attend the school of Sextus of Chæronea, a grandson of the celebrated Plutarch. Men of letters were his most intimate friends, and received the highest honours both when alive and dead. His own range of studies was extensive, embracing morals, metaphysics, mathematics, jurisprudence, music, poetry, and painting. There are few books that have had such a potent charm over so many hearts as the sad Meditations of Aurelius. His sentences reveal the loneliness of his soul, but they show us that he did not suffer himself to be embittered as well as saddened by his experience of life. A kind of self-revelation, marked by a penetrating insight, they reveal the rare serenity and elevation of his heart, and its rarer tenderness and pity. We must not forget that he did not cultivate philosophy merely in the spring-time of his life, when enthusiasm was strong, and experience had not saddened his thoughts, and when study was his only labour, 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 noble life his philosophic and philanthropic aspirations. After his decease, which was felt to be a national calamity, every Roman citizen, 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.
Aurelius twice persecuted the Christians: in the first persecution (166) Polycarp perished; in the second (177), Irenæus. Many have found it difficult to understand how a mind of such lofty virtue should have consented to the persecution of Christianity. The explanation is to be found in that very earnestness with which he clung to the old faith of his ancestors. He believed it to be true, and to be the parent of those philosophies which had sprung up 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.
The Meditations were written in Greek, solely for personal purposes; their doubts, aspirations, perpendings of the problems of life, rather sad than serene, though expressing the mind of an ancient Roman philosopher, come wonderfully near the heart and conscience of modern Christians. Of this famous work Rendall says: 'For nine centuries no note or whisper betrays its existence; fourteen hundred years after they were written down the Thoughts re-emerge, a revelation of a personality without parallel in Greek or Roman literature.' The first edition of the text was by Xylander (Zurich, 1558), the next by Casaubon (1643); another, long the standard, by the English Puritan Gataker (1652); and a modern one by Stich (Leip. 1882). The chief English translations are by Jeremy Collier (1701), George Long (1869), and Dr G. H. Rendall (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself, 1898). See Rendall's introduction, Renan's Marc Aurèle (1882), the Life by Watson (N.Y. 1884), Farrar's Seckers after God (1868), and Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1888).