Life is full of coincidences!! After more than a decade I made a resolution this year. As I was thinking about it yesterday, I took a print out of Meditations to hand it out to a youngster. I wish, I read it when I was 17 but at-least now I find solace in watching a kid read it. Anyways, after I came home, I read this awesome review of the new biography of Marcus Aurelius by Frank McLynn. I cannot begin it explain the importance this book (Meditations). If Marcus can write and think with splendor and serenity at the time when barbarians were thriving, we can do much better than that. But for starters we have to learn and imbibe a thing or two into our lives from his philosophy.
"Marcus Aurelius' contribution to this philosophy has come to be known simply as the Meditations, though the title Marcus gave the work-more a private collection of self-examinations and moral exercises than a systematic philosophy or spiritual autobiography intended for publication-was "The matters addressed to himself." And it is as much a model of moral self-examination as a demonstration of Stoic principles. The work's subtitles suggest that Marcus wrote some portion of the text during Rome's Marcommanic wars, a long, brutal series of military campaigns prompted by the invasions of barbarian German tribes on the northern boarders of the Roman Empire during the 160's.
These wars occupied most of the last two decades of Marcus' reign as emperor (160's and 170's), but to read the Meditations, you would not imagine them to be the writings of a man encamped in barbarian lands in the midst of war, nor of a man commanding the largest army ever assembled on the frontier of the Roman empire, nor of a man whose empire and army were in the grip of the Antonine plague (believed now to have been smallpox or measles, possibly both), that lasted from 165-180 and killed, by some estimates as many as 18 million people, including, in 180, Marcus himself (notwithstanding Ridley Scott's fanciful version of Marcus Aurelius' death in Gladiator-smothered by his son, the psychotic future emperor Commodus). The Meditations' lack of political or worldly anguish and anxiety is a mark of the philosophy they profess: Stoicism.
As McLynn explains, our modern conception of Stoicism consists mainly in colloquial expressions such as "be a man," "take what's coming to you," "roll with the punches," and "make the best of it." Such expressions communicate the Stoic insistence on acceptance and steadfastness in the face of whatever life presents, no matter how calamitous. One of the most famous lines from the Meditations is, "Remain ever the same, in the throes of pain, on the loss of a child, during a lingering illness" and many modern readers, including McLynn, find the Stoic creed-that virtue is the only good and the source of happiness and that we should train ourselves to rise above emotional, physical, and material concerns-inhuman, even monstrous. "
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