Who Carried This Book
This book has been carried into some of the hardest places human beings have ever had to stand. Not admired from a shelf: carried, the way you carry a tool you expect to need. What follows are six of the people who carried it. They had almost nothing in common: different centuries, different languages, different battles. But they shared one thing: when the worst of their lives came for them, this was the book they reached for.
The essay itself is in the book. These are its openings, and the way to the documents behind each.
Frederick the Great
Frederick came to Marcus Aurelius early, and on paper he never left him. In the Antimachiavel, published the year he took the throne, he told Europe that if Caesar Borgia was the model of the Machiavellians, his own was Marcus Aurelius. He kept saying it. In his poem on the art of war he held up a Titus, a Marcus, a Trajan as the general’s pattern, and in a verse letter to his friend Marshal Keith he called Marcus the example of mankind, my hero, my model. That was the public Frederick. The private one took longer to convince. In his thirties he found the Meditations a little Stoic for his taste, refreshing to the spirit all the same, and when his dog Biche died in the winter of 1751 he found it no help at all. In the last days of 1751 he wrote to his sister that he was reading the emperor to fortify his soul, and had found a consoler more afflicted than himself, a man who treated people as if they had no animal part and no feelings, and that he had gone back to Epicurus. Nature, he told her two years later, did not make us of bronze but of flesh, so that we should feel. He was a king, a flutist, a wit, a friend of Voltaire. He admired the book. He did not yet believe it.
The evidence
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill came to Marcus as a critic, and stayed as a witness. In 1859, in the second chapter of On Liberty, arguing that no one’s certainty can license silencing anyone, he needed the hardest case he could find: a man so wise and so good that if even he could be wrong about what to suppress, nobody could be trusted with the power. He chose the emperor. Marcus, he wrote, was the absolute monarch of the civilized world and kept through his whole life not only an unblemished justice but the tenderest heart. His writings were the highest ethical product of the ancient mind. He was a better Christian, in all but the dogmatic sense of the word, than almost any Christian sovereign who had reigned since. And this man persecuted Christianity.
The evidence
Theodore Roosevelt
Before the Amazon nearly killed him, Theodore Roosevelt had lost the one thing he could not stand to lose. Not his health. Not his fortune. His purpose. In 1912 he ran to take back the presidency, certain the country still needed him, and he was beaten, badly, publicly, by a man he thought his lesser. He had split his own party to do it. He was fifty-four, heavier than the cowboy-president of legend, and for the first time in a life of ferocious motion he had nowhere to put the energy. He had governed an empire. Now he governed nothing.
The evidence
James Mattis
They called him the Warrior Monk, and both halves were earned.
The evidence
Wen Jiabao
The others carried it into war. Wen Jiabao carried it into government, which, for a man responsible for a fifth of the human race, was its own kind of front line.
The evidence
William Alexander Percy
The others on this list conquered things. William Alexander Percy mostly watched things end.
The evidence