Meditations

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius makes only passing reference to his being the emperor of Rome. He once refers to himself as a “ruler” and elsewhere makes cryptic references to his station (19). One notable example is when he cautions himself “not to be Caesarified, or dyed in purple” (51), with the former a reference to those who preceded him in his office (who held the title Caesar), and the latter to the color (purple) reserved for ruling classes. Other passing comments treat his role as one that either presents an obstacle to living the virtues he believes in or an opportunity to manifest his discipline by rejecting its trappings. If he were not famed as the “philosophical emperor,” one could conceivably read Meditations and fail to realize that he served in the highest office of a vast empire.

In part, this may be due to the private nature of his writing. Marcus would hardly need to keep reminding himself that he is the emperor, especially given the intention of his Meditations as a corrective exercise for his own moral improvement. Nevertheless, the inattention he gives to his role is telling of its unimportance to him, which accords with his overall goal to divest things in the material world of their fanciful embellishments and boil them down to their essentials. For him, this seems in part to mean divesting himself of the vanity and entitlement that might be expected of a man in his office.

A question that has been debated about Marcus is, to what extent did he adhere to his own philosophical ideals? To answer this, it is helpful to recall how Stoics frame the concept of freedom and how they did not. Political and legal rights were not their locus of concern; rather, freedom meant liberty from committing moral errors and submitting to impulses. In practice, Stoicism was concerned with how individuals thought about and behaved in their own lives, in whatever role they held in society. Whether one was the emperor or an enslaved member of his household, from a Stoic perspective, both are “free” to exercise their reason and liberate themselves from pain and harm by choosing how they frame their reality. Indeed, a criticism of Stoicism has been that it does not present a framework that encourages interrogation of political and social conditions.

Marcus evokes characteristically Stoic expressions of what it means to be enslaved in several places in his Meditations. In Book 4, he entreats himself to commit “all of his being to the gods” and in this way never to make himself “tyrant or slave to any man” (29). In Book 8, he describes emperors as “slaves to all their ambitions” (72). Later in the same book, he notes that a slave who escapes from his master becomes a “fugitive,” then compares resisting submission to pain or anger as “fugitive” action, in that it refuses to acknowledge the natural order. Across his Meditations, Marcus shows himself struggling to take control of his thoughts, to regulate his actions accordingly, and to seek to align himself with the workings of the divine. In a Stoic sense, he can be said to have strived to live in accordance with his ideals, with respect to what he expected of and owed to himself and what he expected of and owed to his fellow humans and the divine.