Born the 26th of April, 121 CE, Marcus Annius Catilius Severus would live fifty-nine years, and die Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, the fourteenth Emperor of the Romans, while on a campaign of the Marcomannic Wars, March 17th, 180 CE. Suspended outside of space and time, I have the opportunity to conduct a short interview with the man whose diary is one of the more widely read works of ancient philosophy in history.
J: You never saw yourself as a particularly gifted thinker, true?
M: When it came to mental prowess, nature did not endow me favorably. I was never mentally swift, my memory never prodigious, my gifts in understanding wisdom and applying it never considerable. If I found success in letters, in thought and deed, it was through diligence, and a love for knowledge greater than my natural ability to wield it. And to say so is probably to over-credit my account.
J: Well, maybe. You’re saying you were never precocious, or what we might call gifted, but no one can say you’re not accomplished. Tell me about your early education.
M: I was singled out for potential Imperial ascendance in early life by Emperor Hadrian, who adopted two different men by way of singling me out; first, my intended adoptive father, then the husband of my aunt Faustina, who became my adoptive father and married me to his daughter, my cousin. This was not unusual; though sons technically automatically inherit from Imperial fathers, my son will be only the second in Imperial history to do so. Adoption is far more common, preferred as a way to make succession a matter of personal volition rather than the whim of nature. It is against my nature to offer severe personal criticisms, but Emperor Hadrian was a complex man and difficult to understand*, and I cannot say what made him pick me out of the crowd. It is not something my personal acumen distinguished me for. Hadrian made me an Equestrian at the age of six, and it was not long after that he secured for me entry into the ranks of the Salii—priests of Mars. I applied myself with vigor to the role, though, and did my best to serve as an example of piety and correctness. It was not long before I rose through the ranks and even took on the role of dismissing veterans and confirming initiates.
J: This earned you a certain amount of censure.
M: Yes. The kinds of gossipers and hangers-on that would continue to try my patience for the rest of my life—such as the social circles around my stepmother—made mock of me, and called me prig, fastidious, prudish, over-serious. Foolishness along those lines. Small-minded people, who I should know better than to heed, but whose opinions have always plagued me nevertheless. All that I tried to do out of humility, for the common good, in the name of justice—a target for mockery and ribaldry. Being made a quaestor well before the requisite age of twenty-four only exacerbated the trend, for I will insist on taking my duties seriously, even if the rabble insists on calling me humorless.
J: In your diary—speaking with you now, my familiarity with it feels a little too personal—but, in your diary, you often admonish yourself for paying too much heed to your critics. But your biographer and contemporaries praise you for your steadfastness and unswerving nature. What I mean is that this kind of criticism bothered you, but you did not let it affect your labors or change your personality. Tell me more about your education, and how that might have set that kind of steady course for your life.
M: My grandfather, Catilius Severus, elected not to send me into public schooling, but took upon himself the expense of hiring and keeping private tutors. For this I am indebted to him, as I feel that this education suited my temperament and enabled me to adopt forms of discipline which would help me master myself and retain the outward appearance of that mastery throughout my life. Public education had suffered terribly at the hands of the decadent effects of those who saw education as a means to an end, and the teaching of philosophy and rhetoric had fallen by the wayside. My education was concentrated on these things; my tutors were Greeks and they—my painting master, Diognetus, in particular—influenced me early on to avoid taking sides in the chariot-races, cockfighting, spurious wordplay—distractions and vices, in short—and to sleep on the ground or a camp-bed with a cloak as my only covering.
J: A far cry from the habit of the average Roman of your age and class.
M: My mother even persuaded me to put a stop to it, yes. Things like this—giving in to her like that, though she was an admirable, compelling woman—bother me to no end about myself. I feel always short of the mark, always too affected by my surroundings, by the words of those who set themselves in opposition to me, by my own physical ailments. I will say that it is not enough either to earn the admiration of others, of those who would praise me for what they see as my steadfastness or any other fine quality. It would be equally unfit of me to let their praise affect me and take pleasure in their high opinion of me and of my works. I know that I can do better, that emotion holds too much sway over my character.
J: Could it be that you take your failures—real and perceived—too much to heart?
M: If anything, not enough.
J: I think it’s commendable to aim for a discipline that aims to improve on the tendency to be “too human”, but do you ever think that the standard you set for yourself might verge on the inhuman?
M: I like that, “too human”. No. Perhaps if I had the opportunity, as I would have wished, to live a life of pure philosophy, but as Emperor, I could be superhuman twice over and still, it would not suffice. I had to be superhuman, or at least better than I was, and failed. Rome is too human as well, and for all my efforts, she did not prosper under my reign. Wars, corruption, self-serving men—I could not stem their deleterious effects. For all that I tried to apply judiciousness in my administration, for all that I personally did in the application of justice—
J: You spent an astonishing amount of time and effort on the practice of law and in dispensing judgment, and contemporary legal thinkers commend you widely for your efforts.
M: It served its purpose per each individual instance, but it did not make Rome better. It did not make the Senate nobler or more disposed to prudence, less self-serving and given to backbiting and conspicuous flaunting of wealth; perhaps I even coddled them, for want of distancing myself from the ways of tyrant, which I abhor. But neither could I make the changes in the law that I would have liked to, and my setting of precedence did not carry the necessary weight.
J: Maybe no man, not even the emperor, had the power to do that, or ever could. We’ll talk about it again in a little bit. Returning to your youth: you had some health problems even then, but you loved wrestling, boxing, hunting.
M: Yes, I did. Much as in pursuits of the mind, I was able, even, through strenuous effort and discipline, able to make the most of my limited gifts, but my body and the physical temper with which I have lived tend to pain and paucity, and I shamefully had to give way to my natural frailties. Perhaps the stresses of high office exacerbated the problem. My physician, Galen, whose skills and wisdom have rightly become legendary, made prescriptions for me over the years, but he could not change the essentialities: I am a night owl, where most of my countrymen are early birds; I tend to problems of the stomach, which releases blood that I must spit, and my poor appetite prevents me from attending sufficiently to my diet; and I suffer from pains in the joints and throughout the body which it is difficult to find relief from.
J: Yet it doesn’t seem to have dulled your mind or prevented you from doing your duty.
M: Indeed, the mind must master the body. Pain is part of living, part of having a body. Suffering is to be expected and accepted. It should not serve as an excuse to shirk one’s duty, to hold back from what is best in us and allow ourselves to be prevented from reaching our fullest potential. If we think of pain as natural, and do not shrink from it, and of suffering as well, we are able to take it in our stride.
J: So, pain and suffering don’t prevent us from living our best lives.
M: On the contrary, they are part of our best lives. Their place in our lives is like our place in the universe: what seems evil or outrageous or misallocated only seems so from a narrow perspective, blinkered and fettered by too much closeness. When seen from above, when granted perspective, good and evil vanishes, the more so a good and evil based on shrinking from pain and pursuing pleasure. A person that seems evil is part of a greater design, which integrates that person into a larger perfection. Nothing is wasted in nature.
J: Elaborate on that point.
M: You can see it in flesh, in stone, in dust, in all that is and all that perishes. Everything disintegrates only to come together again in a new form. Everything that makes us up, our bones and organs, will pass away and become something else. Something to remember, if one is needled by impatience with passing time or annoying people—that all passes in an instant, and change is the great constant in nature.
J: Circling back around to your talent as a thinker. I know you wrote your thoughts to yourself, without the intention of publishing them widely. Tell me a little about the actual purpose.
M: My papers were an exercise. A way to work out my feelings and translate the work of the writers and thinkers that came before me, and the lessons of my tutors, into a simple reflection or admonition that I could use in that moment. The process was helpful.
J: I think that element of them, their simplicity, the aim of condensing received wisdom, and the sense of processing, is something the reader can undergo with you. You regretted not being able to practice philosophy, yet your Meditations have influenced philosophy and the works and lives of thinkers and doers for centuries. You don’t have to say anything about it, I know there’s not much to say that wouldn’t ring badly in our ears.
M: Thank you.
J: Now, I’m going to say some things about the Roman Empire, and I’d like to have your thoughts and feelings about my statements and their implications. So: The Roman Empire can be understood as an empire of conquest, and its economy largely definable as a command economy; that is, weak in market and trade, focused overwhelmingly on land, and dependent on slave labor. This dependence hinders technological development; despite Roman advances in engineering and municipal construction and planning, farming technology remained largely unchanged for essentially the duration of the republic and empire. From my perspective and that of my contemporaries, it is a weak economy, and there is much to mark it as an “underdeveloped” state. A huge population—maybe as much as one million, two hundred thousand people, and almost all of them poor, many slaves. Yet, the senatorial class, which of course you were born to, are some of the wealthiest individuals in the history of the world, possessing almost all the wealth in Rome and many properties each—and there were roughly six hundred of you. The scale of this kind of fiscal and social stratification is almost unique in world history. Does this strike you as just or right?
M: I have said already that nature is what determines the fitness of things and their place in the world. I may resent my class for their personal qualities, I may wish that their extravagance and consumption could be corralled, and I certainly rue any cruelty from master to slave—but nature determines birth, and we must operate in the station we were born to. To refuse is to defy nature and to defy your own nature. But I worked towards manumission, wherever I could, whenever the cases presented themselves, and I tried to select upstanding men as city councilors. As for the economy, I wish I could have done more. I tried to ameliorate certain things where I could…revaluing the currency, adding silver weight to the sesterce…But to change everything, the dependence on slaves, the agrarian values of the people, the culture…and of course, the wars had to be paid for, if they were to be fought, and because of all the rest, they had to be fought. I had to lighten the sesterce again. To be the emperor was not to rule a household or master oneself. It was to ride on the back of a beast so vast that your efforts to steer could only ever be suggestions, a beast which needed you atop its back, needed the reins, but was in truth ruled by its appetites. It did not know what was best for it. Worse emperors than I went mad trying to have the power their names indicated, or used to fear to try to get it, but it amounted to the same—sometimes the empire prospered in certain ways under the madmen. They called me a philosopher, but the plagues, the dissolution of our borders, the gap between the wealthy and the poor, the corruption, the wars, the cacophony; it all corroded away at our world, and I could not put a stop to it. All I could do was rule as I saw fit and try to be as virtuous and judicious as my role allowed. I would rather it had gone to other men. Antoninus Pius, who ruled before me for many years, was a better man than I, a model I always remembered in reverence, could not help but hand me an empire beset with difficulties which fell to me, and my son—who I ruled with for three years, trying to prepare him—was not the man I hoped he would be. But such is life, and it falls to us to bear its pains and disappointments with equanimity. Rome was not what you and I, bound by our limitations and frustrations, might have wished it to be, but it was as the universe intended. Some people exist as examples, or stories, that others might learn from them what happens when one is rash, or a brute, or suffers from some other form of intemperance or evil. And it is they who suffer most from it. So it may be for nations as well. Perhaps we all live as stepping-stones.
J: Thank you. That was illuminating. I think that’s all the time I have. And I want to thank you again for talking with me.
M: It is always good to have an opportunity to speak honestly and plainly.
