~43 min read • Updated Mar 25, 2026
Tacitus
The policies of Nerva and Trajan freed Rome’s suppressed mind and gave the literature of their reigns a tone of intense hatred toward despotism that, though it had vanished, might return. Pliny’s panegyric in his address of welcome to the first of the three great Spaniards who ascended the Roman throne reflects this hatred; Juvenal rarely wrote anything without a trace of that hatred; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of historians, became, in his own words, “the inquisitor of former times” and flayed a century with his pen.
We know neither Tacitus’s birthplace nor even the name given him at birth. He was probably the son of Cornelius Tacitus, procurator of Belgic Gaul. With this man’s rise the family advanced from the equestrian to the new aristocratic order. The first certain information we have about the historian is his own statement: “When Agricola was consul (78) … he betrothed me to his daughter, who could certainly have aspired to a more distinguished marriage.” Tacitus received the usual education and thoroughly mastered the rhetorical arts that give life to his style and the skill in presenting arguments for and against that distinguishes his speeches. Pliny the Younger often heard him speak and admired his “dignified eloquence,” calling him the greatest orator of Rome. In 88 he became praetor; afterward he sat in the Senate and shamefully confesses that he did not dare speak against tyranny, and that he was one of the senators who condemned Domitian’s victims in the Senate. Nerva made him consul (97) and Trajan appointed him proconsul of Asia. He was famously hardworking and experienced in practical affairs. His books are the thoughts of a man who had lived a full and eventful life, the product of mature age combined with leisure and a ripe and profound mind.
These books are bound together by one theme — hatred of autocracy. His Dialogue on Orators (if it is his) attributes the decline of eloquence to the suppression of liberty. His Agricola — the most complete concise monograph the ancients knew as biography — proudly recounts the great deeds of his father-in-law as general and governor (of Britain), then records with bitter language his dismissal and neglect by Domitian. The short treatise on the Origin and Situation of the Germans compares the manly virtues of a free people with the decadence and cowardice of the Romans under despots. When Tacitus praises the Germans for regarding infanticide as a disgrace and granting no privilege for childlessness, he is not really describing the Germans but trampling on the Romans. The philosophical discussion ultimately harms the work’s objectivity, but it allows the interesting breadth of vision of a high Roman official to appear in praise of the Germans’ power to resist Rome.
The success of these treatises led Tacitus to explain the evils of tyranny and oppression in detail with merciless claims against the despots’ record. He began with what was freshest in his own memory and in the testimony of older friends — the period from Galba to Domitian’s death; and when the delighted aristocracy praised these histories as the best historical work since Livy, he continued his story in the Annals by describing the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Of the fourteen (some say thirty) “books” of the Histories, four and a half survive, entirely devoted to the years 69 and 70; of the Annals, twelve of the original sixteen or eighteen books remain. Tacitus also hoped to record the events of Augustus’s reign, Nerva’s, and Trajan’s and thus soften the gloom of his published works by recalling some positive statesmanship. But his life was not long enough; and later generations judge him only from the sorrowful side, just as he judged the past.
Tacitus believed that “the chief duty of the historian is to judge men’s actions so that good men may receive the reward due to virtue, and corrupt citizens may be deterred from shameful deeds by the condemnation of posterity awaiting evil acts.” It is a strange assumption that turns history into a final judgment and the historian into a god. If history is viewed this way, it becomes a sermon — moral instruction with terrifying examples — and, as Tacitus assumed, falls under the heading of rhetoric. Anger makes eloquence easy but fairness difficult; no moral teacher should become a historian. Tacitus remembered tyranny and oppression too closely to study tyrants and oppressors with cool detachment; in Augustus he saw nothing but the destruction of liberty and thought that all Roman genius had ended at Actium. It apparently never occurred to him to balance his indictment by recording the excellent administration and steady progress of the provinces under the imperial giants; no one reading his history would guess that Rome was an empire as well as a city. Perhaps the lost books reflected the world of the provinces; but the surviving ones have made Tacitus a misleading guide who never lies but never quite reveals the truth. He often cites his sources and sometimes examines them with critical care — histories, speeches, letters, “daily acts,” “senate records,” and old family traditions; but the main part of his source is the stories of noble families that had been persecuted, and it never seems to occur to him that the execution of senators and the murder of emperors were episodes in a long series of struggles between bad and tyrannical kings and worthy ones, and between a decadent, tyrannical, and unworthy nobility. His attention is more drawn to personalities and attractive events than to forces and causes of ideas and movements. He draws the most brilliant and most inaccurate character portraits in history, but he has no conception of economic influence on political events and no interest in the life and work of the people, the flow of trade, the position of women, the succession and convergence of beliefs, and the major works of poetry, philosophy, and art. In Tacitus’s history Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius die but have no philosophical or poetic works; emperors kill but build nothing. Perhaps his readers limited the great historian; perhaps, according to the custom of the time, he read parts of his book to his aristocratic friends, whom Pliny says gathered at his dinners; if so, he would have told us that these men and women knew the life, industry, literature, and art of Rome and needed no reminder; what they wanted to hear again and again was the exciting story of wicked emperors and the heroic deeds of senators who renounced the pleasures of life and the long war of their noble class against the power of oppression. We cannot blame Tacitus for failing in a task he never attempted; we can only regret the smallness of his aim and the limitation of his keen mind. Tacitus does not pretend to be a philosopher. He praises Agricola’s mother for turning her son away from “an interest in philosophy stronger than was fitting for a Roman and a senator.” His imagination and art — like Shakespeare’s — were too creatively active to meditate calmly on the meaning and possibilities of life. He has as much unverified rumor as useful interpretations, but it is difficult to find any fixed theory about God, man, or the state in his book. On matters of faith he writes cautiously and vaguely and suggests that it is better for a man to accept the religion of his native land than to try to substitute science for it. Most scholars reject astrologers, soothsayers, omens, and miracles, but he accepts some. He is too generous to deny the possibility of truth in what many have confirmed. On the whole, events seem to show that “the gods are equally indifferent to good and bad” and that there is an unknown and perhaps capricious force that drives men and states irresistibly toward fate — Urgentibus imperii fatis. He hopes that Agricola has reached a happy life, but it is clear that he doubts it and consoles himself with the last illusion of great minds — the immortality of fame.
Nor does the dream of an ideal state console him. “Most plans for reform are at first warmly welcomed; but soon the novelty wears off and the plan goes nowhere.” He reluctantly admits that conditions have temporarily improved in his time; but even Trajan’s genius will not prevent the renewal of corruption and decay. Rome is rotten to the core; and this can be seen in the corruption of men’s spirits, in a population whose spiritual confusion has turned liberty into anarchy, and in a mob that is “eager for change and ready at every moment to join the stronger side.” He is moved by “the malice of the human mind” and, like Juvenal, lays the blame for sin on the foreign races living in Rome. After blackening the empire he dreams of a return to the Republic, but hopes that elected emperors will reconcile the imperial principle with liberty. At the end of the book he thinks that character is higher and more important than government; what makes a nation great is not its laws but its men.
If, despite the surprise we felt at finding sermon and drama where we sought history, we must still place Tacitus among the greatest historians, it is because the power of his art compensates for the limitation of his vision. Most important is that Tacitus sees intensely, sometimes profoundly, and always with brilliance and splendor. The character portraits he gives are clearer than any others left in historical literature and move more vividly across the stage. But here too there are defects. Tacitus composes speeches for his different characters, and all those speeches are in his own style and in his majestic prose. He describes Galba as a simpleton, but the words he puts in his mouth are those of a wise man, and he fails to achieve the difficult art that his historical figures evolve with time. Tiberius at the beginning of his reign is the same as at its end; and if he seemed human at first, in Tacitus’s opinion it was mere pretense.
The first and last point in Tacitus is the grandeur of his style. No other author has expressed so much so compactly and concisely. This does not mean that Tacitus wrote tersely but, on the contrary, that he is agitated and verbose and has devoted 400 pages of the Histories to describing the events of two years. Sometimes the compression reaches the point of affectation and extreme obscurity; in such cases a single word in the original requires a sentence in translation, and verbs and connections are treated as crutches for lame minds. Tacitus’s prose is the sublimity of Sallust’s concise fluency, Seneca’s witty and effective turns, and the balanced sentences taught in the schools of rhetoric. In a long work such a style, despite passages of more moderate content, causes an exhausting excitement for the reader, and yet the reader returns to it with increasing fascination. This warlike rapidity of expression, which is more economical with words than with men, this mockery of the foundations of grammar, this intensity of feeling and clarity of vision, this strong flavor of fresh culture and the deadly sting of uncommon sentences give Tacitus’s prose a fluency, color, and force unmatched by any ancient writer. Its tone is dark and its mood mournful, its sarcasm biting, and its overall tone Dante’s without any trace of Dante’s kindness and gentleness; but taken as a whole the effect is irresistible. Carried along by this black river of relentless revelation, despite our resistance and opposition, we are borne on the shoulders of a narrator who is at once noble and turbulent, dignified and hasty. Actor after actor appears on the stage and is struck down; scene after scene unfolds until all Rome seems destroyed and all the actors dead. When we emerge from this house of horrors it is not easy to believe that this period of despotism, cowardice, and immorality led in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines to the height of monarchical power and the calm nobility of Pliny’s friends.
Tacitus was wrong in despising philosophy — that is, distant vision; all his faults spring from this lack of perspective. If he could have put his pen at the service of a cultivated mind, he would have inscribed his name at the head of the list of those who have tried to give shape and permanence to human memory and heritage.
Juvenal
Unfortunately Juvenal confirms Tacitus’s views with additional evidence. What one writes in biting prose about emperors and senators the other sings in stinging verse about women and men.
Decimus Junius Juvenalis, the son of a wealthy freedman, was born in Aquinum, Latium (59). He came to Rome for study and “for his own amusement” took up legal affairs. His Satires reveal the shock of rural tastes colliding with the unbridled clamor of urban life. Nevertheless, he seems to have been a friend of Martial, whose themes show no previous opposition to immorality. An unreliable tradition says that shortly before Domitian’s death Juvenal composed a lampoon on the influence of actors at court and circulated it among his friends. It is said that a pantomime actor named Paris was offended by the work and arranged for Juvenal to be exiled to Egypt. We can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this story nor say when Juvenal returned; in any case he published nothing until after Domitian’s death. The first volume of his sixteen books of Satires appeared in 101, and the rest in four volumes at various intervals during his long life. It is probable that the Satires were memories of the Domitianic period that still stung, but the anger that makes those satires so lively and unreliable shows that several years of “good emperors” had not cured the evils he denounced. He may also have chosen the satire form as a specifically Roman poetic genre, found models and material in Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, and cast his ranting and rage into the rhetorical principles he had learned in school. We shall never know how far the dark picture we have of the Roman Empire has been colored by the pleasure of rejection and condemnation.
Juvenal makes everything the subject of poetry and has no difficulty finding something condemnable in everything. He thinks “we have reached the height of sin and our descendants will never be able to surpass us;” so far his assumption has been correct. The root of corruption is the unrestrained pursuit of wealth without moral restraint. He blames the common people for once ruling armies and dethroning kings but now being buyable with bread and circuses. This is one of the dozens of phrases that Juvenal’s vital energy has preserved. He loathes the influence and effect of eastern faces, clothes, customs, perfumes, and gods; he protests against the clannishness of the Jewish people who accept no outsiders; and above all he despises the “greedy little Greeks” — the degenerate descendants of a people who were once great but never honest. He hates informers who, like Pliny’s Regulus, grow rich by reporting “unpatriotic” words, legacy-hunters who swarm around childless men, proconsuls who spend a lifetime in luxury on the profits of one provincial governorship, and clever lawyers who spin lawsuits like spider webs. Most of all he hates sexual excesses and perversions, the debauchee who discovers after marriage that his former vices have unmanned him, the effeminate youths whose manners, perfumes, and lusts make them indistinguishable from women, and the women who think that women’s freedom means erasing the distinction between them and men.
The sixth satire, the fiercest of them, is devoted to the fair sex. Postumus is thinking of marriage; Juvenal warns him not to do it, and then the poet describes the women of Rome as selfish, sharp-tongued, superstitious, extravagant, quarrelsome, arrogant, conceited, contentious, and adulterous, saying that every marriage ends in divorce and that instead of raising children they nurse dogs in their laps. They give their hearts to sport and, worse, to literature, and whatever you say they answer with Virgil’s poetry and spit philosophy and rhetoric — “Ah, may the gods deliver us from a learned woman!” He concludes that in the whole city fewer women worthy of marriage can be found. A good woman is a rare bird and more astonishing than a white crow. He wonders that Postumus has thought of marriage when “there are so many halters available, so many high and dizzy windows, and the Aemilian bridge is not far off.” No, remain single. Leave this madhouse called Rome and settle in a quiet Italian town where you can see honest people and be safe from criminals, poets, houses on the verge of collapse, and Greeks. Abandon high ambition; the goal is not worth the effort. The labor is so long and fame so short. Live simply, cultivate your garden, desire only enough to satisfy hunger, thirst, cold, and heat. Learn mercy, be kind to children, keep a healthy mind in a healthy body; only a madman would wish for a long life.
This state of mind can be understood. Watching the faults of neighbors and the contemptible pettiness of the world compared with one’s dreams is a pleasant pastime. Our pleasure in the case is intensified by the street-language Juvenal uses and by the smooth, popular eight-syllable verses of his gloomy wit and strong style. But his statements should not be taken as literal fact. He was angry; he had not advanced in Rome as quickly as he hoped; attacking in all directions with the club of a hatred that never claimed fairness was sweet revenge. His moral principles were high and sound, though colored by cautious imaginings and illusions of a virtuous past; with such moral standards applied without mercy or humility every generation anywhere in the world can be put on trial. Seneca knew how old this form of entertainment was. He writes: “Our ancestors complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain that our morals have decayed, wickedness rules affairs, people fall daily deeper into sin, and the human condition grows worse from bad to worse.” Around moral corruption life proceeds by a rule in which the threads of tradition, religious moral commands and prohibitions, the economic compulsions of family, love, and instinctive care for children, and the vigilance of women and guardians are sufficient to keep us visibly sound and moderately sane. Juvenal is the greatest satirist of Rome, just as Tacitus is its greatest historian. But if we accept as literal the picture these two have drawn we are as wrong as if we uncritically accepted the pleasant and civilized scene that reading Pliny’s letters conjures before our eyes.
A Roman Gentleman
When he was born in Comum in 61 his name was Publius Caecilius Secundus. His father had an estate and villa near Lake Como and held an important position in the city. Publius, orphaned very early, was first adopted and educated by Verginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, and later by his uncle, Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), author of the Natural History. This tireless scholar made the boy his son and heir and soon afterward died. According to custom the young man took his adoptive father’s name, and thus for 2,000 years created confusion. In Rome he studied under Quintilian; this teacher instilled in him a love of Cicero — and some of the rhetorical fluency of Pliny’s style, which is Ciceronian, is owed to Quintilian. At eighteen he was admitted to the bar; at thirty-nine the Senate chose him to deliver the address of welcome to Trajan. In the same year he became consul; in 103 a priest, and in 105 “curator of the bed and banks of the Tiber and the city’s sewers.” For his judicial services he took no fee or gift, but he was a wealthy man and could afford generosity. He owned estates in Etruria, Beneventum, Comum, and Laurentum, and offered 3,000,000 sesterces for another property.
Like many aristocrats of his time he amused himself with writing: first a Greek tragedy and later some light and occasionally immoral verses. When some people reproached him he confessed his fault without remorse and again suggested “plunging into pleasure, jest, joy, and entering the merciless spirit of poetry.” When he heard that his letters were well received he composed several for publication and issued them at intervals from 97 to 109. In these letters, which are not only for the public but also for the pleasure of the circles he describes, the darker sides of Roman life are avoided and more important issues of philosophy and statesmanship are passed over as too serious for his purpose. The value of the letters lies in their courteous sincerity and the soft light they throw on Roman characteristics and noble habits.
Pliny’s works have half the charm and all the fluency of Montaigne. He also has the incurable vanity of authors. “I confess that nothing affects me so strongly as the desire for immortal fame.” He speaks of others and of himself with understanding and dignity and adds that “one may be sure that if a man praises others’ virtues he himself has many.” In any case, after reading Juvenal and Tacitus it is a relief to meet a writer who speaks well of his fellows. He was generous in deed and word, always ready to show favor, lend, and give gifts, and spared nothing from finding a husband for a friend’s niece to donating money to his native city. When he learned that Quintilian could not give his daughter a dowry worthy of the high rank of the man who wished to marry her, he sent 50,000 sesterces for the girl and apologized for the smallness of the gift. He gave 300,000 sesterces to an old schoolfellow to qualify him for the equestrian order; when the daughter of one of his friends inherited her father’s debts Pliny paid them; and, aware of the risk, he lent a substantial sum to a philosopher whom Domitian had exiled. To the city of Comum he gave a temple, a secondary school, a training school for poor children, a public bath, and 11,000,000 sesterces for a public library.
What is especially pleasing in his works is his attachment to his home or native place. He does not reject Rome, but he is happier in Comum or Laurentum, near the lake or the sea. There his main occupation is reading or doing nothing. He loves his gardens and the mountain views behind them; Pliny did not need to wait for Rousseau to teach him the enjoyment of nature. With great tenderness he speaks of his third wife Calpurnia, of her sweet disposition and pure mind, and her sincere delight in her husband’s success and books. Calpurnia had read all his books (Pliny believed so) and memorized many pages, set his poems to music and sang them, and had a staff of private couriers who kept her informed of every development when Pliny had an important case in court. Calpurnia was one of the many good women around him. Pliny tells with feeling of a fourteen-year-old girl of modesty and patience who, as soon as she was betrothed, learned she had an incurable disease and awaited death with cheerfulness. He relates the story of Pompeia Celerina’s wife whose letters to her husband were affectionate lyrics and excellent Latin. He tells of Fannia, daughter of Thrasea, who without complaint endured exile for defending her husband Helvidius, nursed a relative through a dangerous illness, caught it herself, and died of it; then he says with wonder: “How complete is her virtue, her purity, her chastity, and her courage!”
He had dozens of friends, some great and some good. He cooperated with Tacitus in the prosecution of Marius Priscus for corruption and cruelty as proconsul of Africa; the two orators corrected each other’s speeches, and each paid compliments to the other in his own address. Tacitus raised Pliny to the skies by noting that the literary world ranked the two as the foremost writers of the age. Pliny knew Martial, but from the distance proper to his aristocratic rank. He took Suetonius with him to Bithynia and helped him obtain the “right of three children” without having any. His house was filled with lovers of literature, music, recitation of poetry, and oratory. Boissier says: “I do not think that at any other period literature was so greatly loved.” On the banks of the Danube and the Rhine they studied Homer and Virgil, and the Thames shook with their rhetoric. That society in its upper half was a refined and lovable one, with love-matches, parental affection, kind masters, sincere friendships, and delicate courtesies. In one letter Pliny writes: “I accept your invitation to dinner, but we must agree in advance that you will dismiss me early and not be extravagant in entertaining me. Let there be only much philosophical conversation at our table, and even in enjoying that let us set a limit.”
Most of the people Pliny describes were members of the new aristocracy who had come to Rome from the provinces. They were not idle, for almost every one of them held an administrative post and shared in the excellent administration of the empire under Trajan. Pliny himself went to Bithynia as propraetor to restore the finances of some cities there. His letters include inquiries addressed to the emperor, together with Trajan’s sensible replies; these letters show that Pliny performed his mission with power and honor, though he strangely relies on the emperor’s guidance even in details. In the last letter he apologizes for having sent his sick wife home by the imperial post-chaise. After that letter Pliny disappears from the literary and historical scene, leaving behind a valuable portrait of Roman gentlemanliness and of Italy in its happiest age.
Cultural Decline
If we were to surround these outstanding individuals with fainter sources of light they would themselves stand in shadow. After them there was no great figure in pagan Latin literature. Reason had done its mighty work from Ennius to Tacitus and was exhausted. Passing from the grandeur of Tacitus’s Histories and Annals to the scandalous gossip of Suetonius’s Lives of the Famous Men (110) shocks the reader; in this book history declines into biography and biography into anecdote. Omens, miracles, and superstitions fill the pages, and only the Elizabethan English that Philemon Holland used in his translation (1606) has raised that book to the level of literature for English speakers. But descending from the level of Pliny’s letters to the level of Fronto’s letters is not so disturbing. Perhaps those letters were not written for publication, and it would be unfair to compare them with Pliny’s; some have suffered from the search for older phrasing, but many show the genuine affection of a teacher for his pupil. Aulus Gellius supported the archaizing movement in his Attic Nights (169) — the greatest collection of worthless things in ancient literature — and Apuleius carried it to its peak in The Golden Ass. Apuleius and Fronto came from Africa and that frenzy may be partly due to the fact that written Latin in Africa had deviated less from the speech of the people and the Republic than written Latin in Rome. Fronto rightly believed that literature should be strengthened by the language of the people, just as a sapling is strengthened by turning over the soil around its roots. But youth does not come twice to a man or a nation or literature or language. Imitation of the East had begun and there was no stopping it. The common Greek of the Hellenistic East and the Greek East became the language of literature and life. Fronto’s pupil chose that language for his Meditations. Appian, a Greek from Alexandria living in Rome, chose Greek for his lively Histories of the Roman Wars (about 160). Claudius Aelianus, who was Roman both by race and by birth, did the same. Half a century later Dio Cassius, a Roman senator, wrote his history of Rome in Greek, and leadership in literature returned from Rome to the Greek East; this was not a return to the Greek spirit but to the Eastern spirit using the Greek language. Later great figures appeared in Latin literature in Rome, but they were Christian saints.
Roman art declined more slowly than Roman literature. Technical skill survived for a time and produced good architecture, sculpture, painting, and mosaic. The bust of Nerva in the Vatican still has the vivid realism of Flavian portraits; and Trajan’s Column, despite much crudeness, is an interesting relief. Hadrian tried to revive old Hellenistic sculpture, but sculpture found no Phidias to match his Pericles, the inspiration that had stirred Greece after Marathon and Rome after Actium had vanished in an age of restricted breath, contentment, and peace. Hadrian’s busts with their soft Hellenistic lines lack strong expression; the heads of Plotina and Sabina are beautiful, but the images of Antinous with their effeminate and flashy prettiness repel the viewer. Hadrian’s archaizing reaction was probably a mistake. It ended the strong natural expression and individual distinction visible in Flavian and Trajanic sculpture and rooted in Italian tradition and character. Nothing reaches maturity except through the perfection of its own nature.
In the reigns of the Antonines Roman sculpture made its penultimate display. At least once it reached perfection, and that was in the figure of a young woman whose veiled and humble clothing is modeled with enchanting grace and power and firmness of line. The statue of Faustina, wife of Marcus Aurelius, is almost as good, aristocratic in its refinement and sensual enough to agree with the hints of history. Hundreds of types of statues or busts were made of Marcus Aurelius himself. From the thoughtful and simple yet highly sensitive young man in the Capitoline to the armored and curly-haired commander in the same collection. Every tourist is familiar with the magnificent bronze equestrian statue of “Emperor Aurelius” that, since Michelangelo restored it, has dominated the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.
Relief remained a favorite Roman art to the end. The Etruscan and Hellenistic custom of carving mythological or historical scenes on sarcophagi returned in Hadrian’s time, when hope of immortality became more personal and even physical and burial replaced cremation. Eleven panels that survive from the triumphal arches commemorating Marcus Aurelius’s campaigns show the naturalistic style at its height. No one has been portrayed better or more pleasantly than he really was; each individual is a distinct person; Marcus Aurelius, accepting the submission of a fallen enemy without arrogance, is pleasingly human; and the defeated are not shown as savages but as men worthy of the long struggle they had made for their freedom. In 174 the Senate and people of Rome erected the Column of Marcus Aurelius that still adorns the Piazza Colonna. Inspired by Trajan’s Column, this column depicts the Marcomannic wars with a healthy art that treats victors and vanquished with equal respect.
The emperor’s spirit had helped shape the art and ethics of his time. Gladiatorial games became less cruel and laws more favorable to the weak; marriage seemed more stable and satisfactory. Ugliness and debauchery continued, as in all ages, openly among a minority and secretly among the majority; but with Nero himself this quality had reached its peak and passed, and it was no longer fashionable. Men and women again turned to the old religion or embraced new ones, and philosophers approved the change. Rome now had many philosophers; Marcus Aurelius invited them, welcomed them, and endured them. The philosophers made the fullest use of Marcus Aurelius’s kindness and power, crowded his court, obtained offices and gifts, delivered countless speeches, and opened many schools; in the person of the emperor’s pupil they presented to the world the consummation and dissolution of ancient philosophy.
The Philosopher Emperor
Six years before his death Marcus Aurelius sat in his tent to put his thoughts on life and the fate of man into finished form. We cannot be sure whether the Meditations were written for the public. Perhaps they were, for even saints are vain and the greatest men of action have moments of weakness in which they think of writing a book. Marcus Aurelius was not a skilled author. Most of the Latin instruction Fronto had given him had by then been wasted, because Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek. In addition, these “Golden Thoughts” were written at intervals during travel, war, revolt, and many troubles. If they are disconnected, unsystematic, often repetitive, and sometimes dull, allowance must be made. The book has value only for its content — its grace and purity, its half-conscious vision of an individual half-pagan Christian and a medieval spirit in antiquity.
Marcus Aurelius, like most thinkers of his time, did not regard philosophy as a theoretical explanation of the infinite but as a school of virtue and a way of life. He does not trouble his mind much to think about God; sometimes he speaks like an agnostic. He confesses that he knows nothing, but after that confession he accepts the old Roman cult with the piety of simple people. He asks: “What value can life have for me in a world without gods or divinity?” On the divine nature he sometimes speaks in the singular and sometimes in the plural and, in any case, maintains the indifferent attitude of the author of Genesis. He prays openly to the old gods and offers sacrifice, but in the privacy of his own thought he is a pantheist and is deeply moved by the order of the universe and the mind of God. Like the Hindus he believes in the interdependence and mutual connection of man and the world. He marvels at the growth of a child from a small seed, the miraculous formation of limbs, power, mind, and breath with the help of a little food. He believes that if we can understand, we shall find in the universe the same order and creative power that we find in man. “All things point to one another and that relationship is sacred. … In all intelligible things there is a common reason. One God, one substance, one law, one truth, is diffused through everything. … Is it possible that there should be clear order in you and disorder in everything and everyone?”
He admits the difficulty of reconciling apparent undeserved evil, suffering, and misfortune with a good Creator. But he says we cannot determine the place of any element or event in the scheme of things unless we have grasped the whole; and who can claim such total vision? It is therefore an arrogant and ridiculous task for us to judge the world; reason lies in recognizing our limitations, in trying to be harmonious parts of the order of the universe, in striving to understand the universal reason behind the world’s appearance, and in cooperating with it with a cheerful mind. For one who has reached this theory “whatever happens happens justly” — that is, it happens as it would in the course of universal nature. “There is nothing that is according to nature and evil. Everything that is natural is beautiful to one who understands. Everything is determined by the reason of the universe, and that reason is in itself the whole; and every part must accept its small share and destiny with joy. ‘Security of mind’ or ‘peace of mind’ (the very word that Antoninus gave as the password at his death) lies in the willing acceptance of the things that universal nature has entrusted to you.”
O world, whatever is in harmony with you is in harmony with me. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is in season for you. O nature, whatever your seasons bring is fruit for me; everything is from you, everything is in you, and everything returns to you.
Science has value only as a tool for the good life. “What then can guide a man? Only one thing — philosophy” and that not as logic or learning but as the constant learning of moral improvement. “Be straight yourself, or be made straight.” God has given every man an inner guide, which is reason itself. Virtue is the rational life.
The principles of the rational being are these. It passes through the whole universe, examines its form, expands itself through infinite time, embraces the cyclic renewal of all things, and understands that those who come after us will see nothing new and those who came before us saw nothing more; but in a sense the man of forty, if he has any understanding at all, has by this very unity seen the form of all things that have been and will be.
Marcus Aurelius thinks that the premises he has laid down lead him to piety. “Pleasure is neither good nor useful.” He rejects the body and all its actions, and sometimes speaks as if Antoninus were speaking in Thebaid:
Behold how fleeting and worthless are the affairs of men, and what yesterday was a little mucus will tomorrow be a mummy or ashes. … The whole space of man’s life is but a little thing, and yet how full of miseries it is. … And through what a wretched body it must be passed! … Turn it from within outward and see what sort of thing it is.
The mind must be a citadel free from passions and desires and from bodily anger or hatred. It must be so absorbed in its own work that it hardly perceives the attacks of fortune or the stings of hostility. “The worth of every man is exactly the measure of the things he busies himself with.” He reluctantly admits that there are bad men in this world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they too are human: helpless victims of their own faults by the force of external circumstances. “If anyone has done you wrong the harm is his; it is your duty to forgive him.” If the existence of evil men distresses you, think of all the good men you have seen and all the virtues mixed in imperfect persons. All men, good and bad, are brothers, kindred in one God; even the ugliest barbarian is a citizen of the fatherland that we all share. “As an Aurelius, Rome is my country; as a man, the world.” Does this philosophy seem impractical? On the contrary, nothing is more invincible than a truly good character and disposition, if it is sincere. A man who is truly good is safe from misfortune, because whatever evil befalls him still leaves his spirit for him.
Is this evil that has happened a hindrance to your being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent … humble and free? … Suppose men curse you, kill you, tear you in pieces. What does this prevent your mind from remaining pure and wise and just? If a man stands beside a clear and pure spring and curses it, the spring will never cease to pour forth pure water; if he throws filth or dung into it, the spring will quickly wash it out and remain unpolluted. … In every case of misfortune that befalls you, remember to apply this principle: this misfortune is not a calamity and bearing it with magnanimity is happiness. … You see how few things are needed for a man to live a life that moves calmly forward and is like that of the gods.
Nevertheless Marcus Aurelius’s life did not move calmly forward. While he was writing the “Fifth Gospel” he was forced to kill Germans, and at the end of his life, when he faced death, he had no consolation in the son who would succeed him and no hope of happiness beyond the grave. Body and soul alike return to their original elements.
For just as the transformation and dissolution of bodies make room for other bodies that are doomed to perish, so the souls that after the end of existence are released into the air … are transformed into the seminal reason of the universe and make room for other souls. … You have existed as a part; you will disappear into that which produced you. … Nature also wills this. … After this pass the small space of time in agreement with nature and end your journey with contentment, just as an olive when it is ripe falls, blessing the nature that produced it and thanking the tree on which it grew.
Commodus
When the guard officer asked the dying Marcus Aurelius what the password should be, he replied: “Go to the rising sun; my sun is setting.” The rising sun was then nineteen years old, a strong, showy youth without moral restraint and free from moral beliefs and fear. More was expected of Commodus than that he should continue the policy of carrying the war to victory or death; but Commodus offered the enemy immediate peace. The enemy was to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube, surrender most of its weapons, return all prisoners and Roman soldiers, pay an annual tribute in grain to Rome, and supply 13,000 of its soldiers to join the Roman legions. All Rome except its common people condemned Commodus; anger rose among his commanders that he had let the trapped game escape to fight another day. Nevertheless, during Commodus’s reign the tribes along the banks and valleys of the Danube caused no further trouble.
The young ruler, though not a coward, had seen enough of war and was weary of it; he needed peace to enjoy Rome. As soon as he returned to the capital he mocked the Senate and burdened the common people with unprecedented gifts — he gave every citizen 725 denarii. Finding no field for his abundant energy in politics, he hunted wild beasts on the imperial estates and displayed such skill with sword, arrow, and bow that he decided to exhibit it in public. For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiatorial school; he drove in chariot races and fought animals and men in the arena. It is assumed that those who faced him took care to let him win; but he did not mind fighting unaided and before breakfast with a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, a feat that brought no special credit to an emperor. He became so perfect an archer that with a hundred arrows in one show he killed a hundred tigers. He would wait until a leopard leaped upon a condemned criminal, then kill the animal with a single arrow and leave the man unharmed to die again. He had had his exploits recorded in the “Daily Acts”; and he insisted on receiving a salary from the public treasury for each of the thousand times he fought as a gladiator in the arena.
The historians on whom we must rely in this matter, like Tacitus, wrote from the viewpoint and traditions of an offended aristocracy; we cannot know how far the marvels they relate are history and how far revenge. We are sure that Commodus drank, gambled, wasted public money, kept a harem of 300 women and 300 witnesses, and was interested in occasionally changing his own sex or at least doing so by wearing women’s clothes in public. Stories of unbelievable cruelty are told of him. Commodus had ordered one of the devotees of Bellona to cut off one of his arms as a sign of piety; he forced some women devotees of Isis to beat their breasts with pine cones until they died; he killed people indiscriminately with his Herculean club; he collected lame men and shot them one by one with bow and arrow. … One of his mistresses, Marcia, was apparently a Christian. It is said that for her sake he pardoned some Christians who had been condemned to the Sardinian mines. Marcia’s affection for him shows that in this man, described as more bestial than any beast, there must have been something lovable that history has not recorded.
Like his predecessors he was driven to the wildest kinds of violence by fear of being murdered. His aunt Lucilla plotted to kill him: he discovered it, ordered his aunt executed, and with reason or on suspicion of participation in the plot killed so many high officials that soon few remained who had held office in Marcus Aurelius’s time.
Informers, who had almost vanished for a century, became active again and popular. A new terror seized Rome. After appointing Perennis governor, he gave him the reins of government and (as tradition has it) abandoned himself to sexual debauchery. Perennis governed well but cruelly. He organized a terror of his own and put all his opponents to death. The emperor, suspecting that Perennis was plotting to depose him, like Tiberius handing Sejanus over to the Senate, handed Perennis over to the Senate, and the Senate repeated the act of revenge as in Tiberius’s time. Cleander, who had formerly been a slave, succeeded Perennis (185) and surpassed him in corruption and cruelty; every office and post could be bought for a suitable bribe, every verdict issued by a court could be overturned. On his orders senators and knights were killed on charges of treason or petty criticism. In 191 the people besieged the villa where Commodus was staying and demanded Cleander’s death. The emperor granted their wish. Laetus, Cleander’s successor after three years of rule, decided that his hour had come. One day by chance he saw the list of criminals that included the names of his supporters and friends and the name of Marcia. On the last day of 192 Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison, and as the poison gradually took effect a wrestler whom Commodus kept for wrestling choked him in the bath. At his death he was a youth of thirty-one.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami