The Sources

The notes to the essays, as printed in the book. Every quotation, date, and attribution in the essays is answered here with the source and, where it could be challenged, the volume and page, so that anyone can retrace it.

A few of the essays take a side, lean on a quotation, or state something a reader might find a competing view on. Those notes are gathered here, off the page in the essays themselves, and set down for anyone who wants them.

Preface

Punctuation. That the earliest Greek texts ran the words together and carried almost no punctuation is standard; see Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, on scriptio continua and the late arrival of the question mark. Byzantine copyists added marks of their own, which is why the preface says nearly every pause was placed by an editor, not every one.

A Note on Marcus

Gibbon’s verdict. The judgment that Marcus’s age was the happiest the human race had known is Gibbon’s, from the third chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). He meant the whole span of the “five good emperors,” from Nerva to Marcus, not Marcus’s reign alone, and his estimate of the era has been admired and contested ever since.

The plague. The disease that swept the empire from 165 is usually called smallpox, inferred from Galen’s account of the symptoms; measles has also been proposed, and no certain diagnosis is possible at this distance. Estimates of the dead range widely: commonly five to ten million, by some reckonings more. They are informed guesses, not counts.

Thirteen children. The sources give no clean tally; the count is usually put at thirteen or fourteen, of whom about five reached adulthood. This edition says at least thirteen, which is as firm as the record allows.

Faustina. The rumors of her unfaithfulness come chiefly from the Historia Augusta, a late source fond of scandal and frequently unreliable. Many modern historians treat them as political invention, and what Marcus wrote of her carries no such doubt. This edition follows the skeptical reading.

Where he died. The text places his death at a camp near Vindobona, modern Vienna; some set it instead at Sirmium, in present-day Serbia. The ancient notices disagree: Aurelius Victor names Vindobona, Tertullian Sirmium, and the question has never been settled. Modern scholarship leaves it open.

The river and the camp. The second book is placed on the Granua and the third at Carnuntum, following the modern reading of the manuscript subscriptions. In the manuscripts those notes stand at the close of Book One and the head of Book Three; editors now generally take them as titles to Books Two and Three rather than colophons to the books they sit beside. Farquharson calls them “now generally thought to be titles to Book ii and Book iii,” and Hays heads the books the same way. The older placement, Granua to Book One, Carnuntum to Book Two, remains common, which is why the choice is recorded here.

The army. Marcus raised two new legions, the Second and Third Italica, in 165, bringing the total to thirty, the number Trajan had also reached; Septimius Severus later held thirty-three, and the civil wars of the first century BC put far more under arms. The count is Cassius Dio’s, Roman History 55.23–24. The essay’s “as large as any Rome had yet kept under arms” is as far as the record allows.

One in four. The empire’s population around 164 is usually put near sixty million, following Bruce Frier’s chapter on demography in the Cambridge Ancient History, volume XI (2000); estimates of world population around the year 200 run from roughly one hundred ninety to two hundred fifty million, depending on the reckoning. That makes the fraction somewhere between a quarter and a third. The essay keeps the lower figure.

Faustina’s death. Dio adds a second explanation to the gout the ancient sources give: that she died to avoid being convicted of her compact with Cassius, Roman History 72.29. It is gossip, and he reports it as such, but it is the gossip a reader may meet elsewhere.

The first printed edition, date. Xylander’s dedication is dated from Heidelberg in October 1558, and Conrad Gesner wrote that he gave the book to be printed that year; the volume is usually catalogued as 1558, sometimes 1559, and Leopold’s own preface gives both years. The essays say 1558 or 1559 for that reason.

On Stoicism

Zeno’s shipwreck. The story that Zeno turned to philosophy after losing a fortune at sea comes from Diogenes Laertius, writing some five centuries later; like much in that source, it may be tidied in the telling. It is given here because it is what the tradition hands down, not because it can be proved.

A Note on the Translation

Leopold. The facts of his life are from the Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland, the Dutch national biographical dictionary maintained by the Huygens Institute: the Erasmiaans Gymnasium from 1891 to 1924, studies on Spinoza in 1902 and 1905, Stoïsche wijsheid, translations from Epictetus, in 1904, and Uit den tuin van Epicurus in 1910. His preface to the Oxford text is signed at Rotterdam in March 1907. What he did with the Vatican manuscript he says himself in that preface: he had it photographed and collated it afresh.

Casaubon’s English. The passage printed follows the spelling of the Everyman’s Library edition of Casaubon (Dent, 1906), introduced by W. H. D. Rouse, which modernized the 1634 text. The words are Casaubon’s; the spelling is the Everyman editor’s.

The Debts

Verus, three times consul. Marcus’s grandfather is given here as consul three times: a suffect consulship in 97, ordinary consulships in 121 and 126, following the Oxford Classical Dictionary and modern prosopography. The Historia Augusta in one place counts only his “second” consulship, which is why older accounts say twice. (Rusticus, named later in the same book, was separately consul twice, in 133 and 162.)

Sextus of Chaeronea. The Historia Augusta calls him Plutarch’s nephew; the Suda and some modern scholars make him a grandson. The essay follows the older source.

His Life in Time

The ancient sources. The nickname Verissimus and the philosopher’s cloak at twelve are from the Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus 1 and 2. The four chairs at Athens rest on two witnesses: Dio, 72.31, says Marcus endowed salaried teachers in every branch of learning; Lucian, in The Eunuch, names the four philosophical schools. The burning of Cassius’s letters unread is Dio, 72.29, and Ammianus Marcellinus, 21.16. The last words, to the tribune asking for the watchword, are Dio, 72.34. The Marcomanni before Aquileia are Ammianus, 29.6; Lucian’s Alexander describes the war more generally; the last foreign army in Italy before them was the Cimbri, destroyed in 101 BC, about two hundred seventy years earlier.

The first journey north. Marcus and Verus left Rome for Aquileia in 168 and wintered there; Verus died on the road back early in 169: Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus 14.

The rain. The storm that saved a Roman column in the country of the Quadi is told by Dio, 72.8–10, and in the Life of Marcus 24, and is carved on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The ancient sources divide the credit: Dio gives it to an Egyptian magician, the Christian writers to the prayers of a Christian legion, the column to the rain god at the emperor’s prayer. Most modern scholars date it to 172; some to 174.

Beyond the river. The winter camp of eight hundred and fifty-five men of the Second Legion at Laugaricio is recorded in the inscription cut into the castle rock at Trenčín, Slovakia, CIL III 13439; the career inscription of their commander, Marcus Valerius Maximianus, found at Diana Veteranorum in Algeria, fixes the winter to 179–180.

Fronto’s Letters

Dates. The dates in the headnotes follow the chronology in C. R. Haines’s Loeb edition of Fronto, two volumes, 1919 and 1920. Haines’s dates have since been revised by Edward Champlin in 1974 and by van den Hout’s commentary of 1999; the headnotes keep Haines’s, as ranges, for convenience. Gaps in the manuscript are marked with an ellipsis where they fall. The letter on eloquence is a long treatise, of which only the heart is printed here. Fronto’s five lost children are his own count, in the letter on the death of his grandson.

The English. The translations are revised from Haines and have been smoothed for the modern ear, as the note before the letters says. Haines died in 1935, and his volumes are in the public domain in Canada and the United States.

How This Book Survived

The first printed edition. The Zurich edition of 1558 or 1559 was edited — and given the Latin translation that carried it into European libraries — by the scholar Wilhelm Xylander; the printing itself was Andreas Gesner’s, at the prompting of his cousin Conrad Gesner. The Greek manuscript Xylander worked from, sent down from the old Palatine library at Heidelberg, was lost soon after and has never reappeared, which is why the modern text leans so heavily on the surviving Vatican witness.

The palimpsest. Angelo Mai published the Fronto letters from the Ambrosian palimpsest in Milan in 1815; the overwriting is the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon; a second part of the same codex, in the Vatican, followed in 1823. The account here follows Haines’s introduction.

Who Carried This Book

Frederick’s words. Every quotation and paraphrase is from the Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand, the Preuss edition (Berlin, 1846–1856), in the digital edition of the Universität Trier. “Mine is Marcus Aurelius” is the Antimachiavel, volume VIII, page 91. The general’s pattern is the poem on the art of war, volume X, pages 261–262; the epistle to Marshal Keith, volume X, pages 235–236. The letter to his sister Wilhelmine of the twenty-ninth of December 1751 is volume XXVII, part 1, page 231, and “not of bronze but of flesh” is the letter of the twentieth of December 1753, page 269. The letters to Henri de Catt of the twenty-fourth of November 1761 and the seventeenth and twenty-sixth of July 1762 are volume XXIV, pages 12–17; the poem Le Stoïcien, of the fifteenth of November 1761, is volume XII, and its sending to Voltaire in December 1766 is volume XXIII. The letter to d’Alembert of the sixteenth of May 1776 is volume XXV, page 48. Voltaire’s letter from Ferney of January 1775, ending with Marcus-Aurelius-Julian-Frederick, is volume XXIII, pages 344–346. The one remark not read in the original, that the book was “a little Stoic,” is the letter of the thirteenth of October 1748 in Gustav Berthold Volz’s edition of the correspondence with Wilhelmine, volume II (1926), cited from Harry Nehls, “Mon héros, mon modèle,” Berlinische Monatsschrift, August 1999. Le Stoïcien itself never names Marcus; the description of it as the emperor’s reflections put into verse is Frederick’s own, in his letter to Voltaire of December 1766. Nehls dates the consolation letter to 1752; Preuss prints it under 1751, and the book follows Preuss.

Kunersdorf. The numbers and the vow are Frederick’s own, in his note to Finckenstein on the evening of the twelfth of August 1759: “of an army of forty-eight thousand men I have not three thousand,” and “je ne survivrai point à la perte de ma patrie.” The note, and the letter to Prince Henry of the first of September 1759 announcing the “miracle de la maison de Brandebourg,” are in the Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Großen, volume 18 (Berlin, 1891). The rescue by Prittwitz’s hussars is in every account; the snuffbox is a story, and the essay calls it one.

The bust. A copy of the so-called Polignac bust of Marcus Aurelius stands on the upper terrace at Sanssouci, near the pergola of the west wing, and Frederick’s grave is on the same terrace. The bust in his bedroom that guidebooks called Marcus for two centuries is an eighteenth-century imitation of Septimius Severus. Both facts are Nehls’s, published with the help of the Prussian palaces foundation.

Mill. The passage is On Liberty (London, 1859), chapter two, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” in the paragraph that begins “Let us add one more example, the most striking of all.” Every phrase quoted or paraphrased in the essay is from it: “absolute monarch of the whole civilised world,” “the tenderest heart,” “the highest ethical product of the ancient mind,” “a better Christian in all but the dogmatic sense of the word,” “one of the most tragical facts in all history,” and the closing challenge to anyone who thinks himself “a wiser and better man than Marcus Aurelius.” Mill wrote that Marcus “authorised the persecution of Christianity.” Historians now divide on how far the persecutions of his reign, above all at Lyon in 177, were his own doing rather than the working of standing law under provincial governors, and the essay keeps Mill’s verb, persecuted, without saying ordered, for that reason. The notebooks’ one mention of the Christians is at 11.3; its wording is discussed in Notes on the Text.

Roosevelt’s copy. The book is in the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, a National Park Service site, catalogued in the Theodore Roosevelt Center’s digital library as item o284909: George Long’s translation, inscribed by Roosevelt on the eighth of February 1915 as lent to him by Major James Shipton and carried throughout South America, the River of Doubt included. Roosevelt names the lender himself in Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), “Major Shipton of the regulars, our military attaché at Buenos Aires,” who lent him both the Marcus and the Epictetus. That the books did him no good on the river is Kermit Roosevelt’s testimony, in The Long Trail (1921), pages 50 to 53. The “nine other men” letter was written to Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History before the expedition sailed, when the museum objected to the change of route; Chapman printed it in his Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (1933). The morphine and the words at the cot rest on two witnesses: Roosevelt himself, who told the story to the journalist Oscar King Davis, printed in Davis’s Released for Publication (1925), and George Cherrie, whose account gives the line about some of us not finishing the journey. Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt (2005), which this essay follows, draws on both and on Cherrie’s diary.

Mattis at the meeting. Accounts differ on whom Mattis addressed with the line about coming in peace. Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco sets it before a room of Iraqi military officers; Mattis’s own memoir recalls tribal leaders in Fallujah. The words are the same in both, and the essay paraphrases them; the audience is not. This edition follows the former.

Mattis on distance. The words about the tattered copy in his rucksack were spoken to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute on the twenty-fifth of September 2018, when he was Secretary of Defense; the Department of Defense published the transcript. The seven thousand books and the “functionally illiterate” line are from his own account in Call Sign Chaos (2019) and the widely reprinted email of 2003 on reading. The letter to the First Marine Division is from March 2003.

Wen Jiabao. The hundred readings were put to him by Fareed Zakaria in an interview taped in New York on the twenty-third of September 2008 for CNN; Wen did not dispute the figure, and answered that he had read the Meditations on many occasions, quoting from memory the passage on the vanity of fame. The devotion is his; the count is Zakaria’s, and the essay says so. His remark on geology and catastrophe was made in New York the same week, answering questions after his speech to the American friendly organizations on the twenty-third of September; it is reported, not transcribed, and the essay says “he said once” for that reason.

Percy. The quotation is from Lanterns on the Levee (Knopf, 1941), in the Louisiana State University Press edition of 1973, page 313. The ellipsis removes one clause, “which some more gently call the Kingdom of Heaven. However it be called,” and readers who know the passage from Gregory Hays’s introduction to his 2002 translation will find it cut the same way there. Walker Percy’s words about him are from his introduction to the 1973 edition.