By EMILY COLETTE WILKINSON [In Character] – Between the hyper-intellectual abstractions of university philosophers and the calculating, materialistic schemes of self-help gurus, lies another philosophy. This is the philosophy of the ancients, of Marcus Aurelius. It is a practice that intends to help individuals answer life’s great metaphysical questions in both material and spiritual terms: What is my place is the world, the cosmos? What is the purpose of existence? How do I live a good life? What is happiness and how do I achieve it?

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.

Continued at In Character | More Chronicle & Notices.