Marcus Aurelius and the Meaning of Public Service

Throughout the history of the Roman Empire, there are several emperors who can reasonably compete for the title of its greatest ruler. Trajan, who was officially granted the title Optimus Princeps, is probably the strongest candidate. Antoninus Pius would certainly deserve a place near the top as well. Augustus, despite the brutality of the road that brought him there, created the political system that would govern the Roman world for centuries, building on the destruction of the Republic accelerated by Julius Caesar.

But out of all the Roman emperors, the one I admire the most is Marcus Aurelius. Not because he was Rome’s greatest emperor. I don’t think he was. Not simply because he was a Stoic philosopher either, even though I obviously appreciate that part, having written about Stoicism before. What makes Marcus particularly interesting to me is his understanding of power. He possessed a degree of authority that almost nobody alive today could imagine, yet he seems to have understood that authority less as a privilege than as an obligation.

There is an old observation that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Marcus Aurelius came remarkably close to possessing absolute political power over the Roman world. He commanded armies, controlled enormous resources and stood at the head of an imperial system in which very few people could meaningfully challenge his authority. Yet much of the Meditations consists of this extraordinarily powerful man reminding himself that he has work to do, that praise is meaningless, that anger must be controlled, that difficult people must be tolerated and that emperors die like everyone else.

Marcus was not morally perfect, and his reign was not politically perfect. But while possessing almost everything the Roman world could give a man, he seems to have spent much of his life trying not to become the kind of person that such power could very easily have made him.

That is what interests me.

Learning Power

Marcus Aurelius was born Marcus Annius Verus in Rome in 121 AD, into a wealthy and politically connected senatorial family. His father died while Marcus was still young, and he grew up close to the highest levels of Roman aristocratic life. Emperor Hadrian reportedly took an early interest in him and nicknamed him Verissimus, playing on the young Marcus’ family name Verus and the Latin word for truth.

Marcus was not originally Hadrian’s direct heir. Hadrian first selected Lucius Aelius Caesar as his successor, but Aelius died before him. Hadrian then adopted Antoninus Pius, on the condition that Antoninus himself adopt Marcus and Lucius Verus. Through a rather complicated piece of Roman succession planning, Marcus found himself on the road toward becoming emperor.

More interesting than the mechanics of the succession are the examples of imperial power he encountered along the way. Hadrian was undoubtedly one of Rome’s most capable emperors. He travelled extensively through the empire, strengthened its frontiers, reorganized parts of its administration and left behind monuments that still shape our image of Rome. But his final years were marked by illness, suspicion and increasingly bitter succession politics, with several prominent Romans suffering as Hadrian’s distrust grew.

Antoninus Pius represented something different. His reign was comparatively peaceful, restrained and administratively stable, and Marcus clearly admired him. In the first book of the Meditations, where Marcus records lessons he learned from the people around him, Antoninus receives one of the longest and warmest descriptions. Marcus praises his patience, willingness to listen, careful examination of problems, lack of vanity and refusal to be controlled by either flattery or anger.

Marcus therefore did not learn leadership exclusively from philosophy. He watched it being practiced. Antoninus demonstrated that possessing enormous authority did not require constantly displaying it. An emperor could listen, deliberate and live without theatrical extravagance. He could be powerful without needing everyone around him to constantly acknowledge that he was powerful. For someone who would later inherit almost unimaginable authority, that was probably one of the most valuable lessons available.

Two Emperors

When Antoninus Pius died in 161, Marcus Aurelius became emperor. But he did something unusual. Instead of ruling alone, Marcus insisted that Lucius Verus share imperial power with him. Rome had never before formally operated with two emperors of equal imperial rank in quite this way, although Marcus remained clearly the senior political figure.

The contrast between them is almost too convenient. Marcus acquired a reputation for discipline, seriousness and philosophy, while Lucius was much more closely associated with luxury and entertainment. It would therefore be easy to turn them into a morality play: Marcus the Stoic philosopher and Lucius the decadent prince. Reality was more complicated. Lucius was not useless, and when war broke out with the Parthian Empire he travelled east while Roman generals conducted a successful campaign against Rome’s great eastern rival. Roman forces retook Armenia, invaded Mesopotamia and eventually captured Ctesiphon.

The armies returned victorious. They also returned carrying disease.

An Empire Under Pressure

The Antonine Plague spread through the Roman world during the 160s, probably carried west by troops returning from the eastern campaigns. Its exact pathogen remains uncertain, although smallpox is generally considered the most likely candidate. Whatever it was, its consequences were severe. The epidemic swept through cities, provinces and armies and returned in waves for years.

At roughly the same time, Rome came under increasing military pressure along the Danube. Germanic and Sarmatian peoples began crossing or attacking the imperial frontier, themselves moving within a much larger and complicated series of pressures beyond Rome’s borders. Among them were the Marcomanni and Quadi, whose wars would dominate much of what remained of Marcus’ reign. This was not simply another distant frontier problem. Hostile forces penetrated northern Italy itself.

For generations, much of the Roman elite had enjoyed the luxury of treating the empire almost as a permanent fact of nature. The frontiers existed somewhere far away, guarded by professional soldiers, while political life continued in Rome. Marcus did not inherit that comfortable empire. He inherited plague, war, financial pressure, manpower shortages and political instability. Lucius Verus died in 169, leaving Marcus as sole emperor, and Marcus would spend years away from Rome near the frontier.

This is where the Meditations becomes far more interesting to me than a collection of isolated Stoic quotations. It is very easy to read Stoicism from a comfortable chair. It is considerably more interesting to read the private notes of a man trying to practice it while governing an empire under pressure. The Meditations were not written as a polished philosophical book intended to advertise the emperor’s wisdom. They were notes Marcus wrote primarily to himself, many of them while away on campaign.

When Marcus reminds himself to get out of bed because he has the work of a human being to perform, this is not a motivational influencer telling an audience to wake up at 5 AM. It is an exhausted emperor reminding himself that being tired does not make his responsibilities disappear.

That difference matters.

The Cost Of Duty

War was expensive. The plague had damaged the population and economy while continuing military pressure required soldiers, equipment and enormous financial resources. According to the ancient biographical tradition, Marcus responded to financial pressure in a remarkable way. Imperial possessions were put up for auction: gold vessels, crystal, jewelry, furniture and expensive clothing belonging to the palace.

As always, we should be careful with stories preserved in ancient imperial biographies. They frequently mix fact, admiration, propaganda, gossip and literary convention, and there is no reason to assume that every item listed in such stories was remembered with perfect accuracy. But the broader reputation attached to Marcus is significant. He was remembered as an emperor willing to reduce the luxuries of the imperial household rather than simply transfer every cost of crisis downward.

That represents an extraordinarily important principle of public service. Governments will sometimes have to ask difficult things from citizens. Taxes have to be raised. Budgets have to be reduced. Wars, disasters, epidemics and economic crises impose costs regardless of whether anyone wants them. But sacrifice becomes considerably less admirable when the person demanding it is conveniently exempt from it. There is a moral difference between a leader saying “you must sacrifice” and saying “we must sacrifice”, while demonstrating that distinction personally.

The emperor did not suddenly become poor because some palace treasures were sold. Marcus remained unimaginably privileged compared with almost everyone he ruled. That is not the point. What matters is the principle that the comfort of the person at the top was not automatically more important than the burden imposed on everyone below him.

The Emperor Who Lost Children

There is another part of Marcus’ life that is easy to overlook when discussing the emperor rather than the man. He and Faustina had a large family, but many of their children died young. Child mortality was common in the ancient world in the statistical sense, but statistics do very little for the parents burying a child. Marcus buried several of his. Some died in infancy. Others survived for years before dying. One of the twins born early in Marcus’ reign, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, died young. His surviving twin would become considerably more famous: Commodus.

Marcus therefore spent much of his life surrounded by the kind of personal loss that Stoicism is sometimes accused of treating too coldly. But Stoicism does not require pretending that grief does not hurt. It asks something considerably harder: that grief does not become permission to abandon reason, character or responsibility.

Marcus continued governing, travelling and fighting wars while writing reminders to himself about mortality, grief, anger, reputation and the temporary nature of almost everything around him. Those passages become much less abstract once you remember who was writing them. Marcus was not imagining loss. He knew it.

Betrayal

Then came Avidius Cassius.

Cassius had been one of Rome’s most successful commanders in the eastern wars and had become enormously powerful in the eastern provinces. In 175, apparently following a false report that Marcus had died, Cassius declared himself emperor. For Marcus this was not another foreign enemy. It was civil war. A Roman commander who had served him had challenged him for the empire.

Roman history offered plenty of examples for what an emperor could do next. Political enemies could be executed. Families could be ruined. Property could be confiscated. Entire networks of supporters could be purged. An emperor had every institutional tool required to turn personal anger into state policy.

Marcus appears to have wanted something else. Cassius was killed by his own men before Marcus could confront him. The ancient sources portray Marcus as regretting that he had lost the opportunity to pardon Cassius personally, and more concretely record him opposing severe reprisals against Cassius’ family and supporters. He discouraged executions, protected members of Cassius’ family and showed considerable restraint toward communities that had supported the rebellion, even if that clemency was not absolute.

We should resist turning ancient accounts into hagiography. Some of the stories about Marcus’ generosity are transmitted through sources that clearly admired him and are not always reliable in their details. But the conduct attributed to him is consistent with an idea that appears repeatedly throughout the Meditations: another person’s wrongdoing does not require you to become like them.

That sounds pleasant in a philosophy book. It becomes considerably more demanding when the person who wronged you has declared himself emperor and started a civil war.

Restraint is easy when you lack the ability to retaliate. Restraint becomes a virtue when retaliation is entirely within your reach.

Not A Saint

This is where any idealized version of Marcus Aurelius needs to stop. He was not a saint. He was a Roman emperor, and that distinction matters.

Rome was a society whose assumptions were in many ways profoundly different from our own. Slavery was embedded throughout its economy and social order. Roman expansion was enforced through military violence. Political equality in anything resembling its modern meaning did not exist. Marcus did not challenge those foundations.

Slavery is perhaps the clearest example. Marcus did not oppose slavery as an institution, and enslaved people remained fundamentally deprived of the status enjoyed by free Romans. At the same time, Roman law during the Antonine period continued developing restrictions on some forms of abuse by masters and mechanisms through which extreme mistreatment could be limited. Those developments matter historically, but they should not be exaggerated into something they were not. Making an unjust institution somewhat less brutal is not the same thing as recognizing the fundamental injustice of the institution itself.

This is also why judging historical figures entirely by whether they arrived at moral conclusions that became widespread many centuries later is rarely very illuminating. Marcus existed within a particular moral universe, just as we do. The more interesting problem is that a person can be thoughtful, disciplined and sincerely committed to virtue while remaining unable to see some of the assumptions their society has taught them to consider normal.

Marcus questioned fame, anger, luxury, revenge and his own importance. He did not seriously question empire.

Christians also suffered during his reign. The most famous example occurred at Lyon in 177, where Christians were imprisoned, tortured and executed. Historians continue to debate Marcus’ personal responsibility. There is no solid evidence that he initiated a new systematic empire-wide persecution through some general edict, and the events at Lyon appear to have developed substantially from local circumstances operating within an existing Roman legal framework. But saying Marcus did not personally design an empire-wide persecution does not make the victims less dead. He was emperor, and the political and legal system that killed them operated under his authority.

Marcus himself also appears to have viewed the Christian willingness to embrace martyrdom with contempt, seeing it as stubbornness rather than philosophical courage. It is an uncomfortable limitation in a man who repeatedly wrote about tolerating the faults of others.

We should not erase these things because we find other aspects of Marcus admirable. Doing so would make studying him considerably less useful. There is very little to learn from turning historical people into monuments and then admiring the monument. His limitations instead remind us of something much more uncomfortable: philosophical reflection does not automatically free anyone from the assumptions of their own age.

That applied to Marcus. It probably applies to us too.

The Failure Of Commodus

And then there is Commodus.

If Marcus Aurelius has become the archetype of the philosopher emperor, Commodus has become almost his perfect opposite. Cruel, erratic, obsessed with spectacle and increasingly detached from the ordinary expectations of imperial government, Commodus eventually presented himself as a new Hercules and personally performed in the arena. His reign ended with his assassination in 192.

Marcus made him heir.

This is difficult to reconcile with the romantic story of the “Five Good Emperors”, according to which wise rulers supposedly selected the best possible successor until Marcus abandoned the system and chose his biological son. That story is too simple. Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius did not possess healthy biological sons whom they deliberately passed over in favour of more talented strangers. Adoption was partly a political solution to a dynastic problem created by circumstance. Roman emperors generally preferred dynastic succession when it was available.

Marcus was therefore behaving far more conventionally than the legend suggests. But conventional does not necessarily mean wise. Whatever political logic surrounded the succession, he failed to leave Rome with a successor capable of maintaining his standard of government. That may be the greatest political failure of his reign.

More importantly, Commodus exposes a weakness in the entire idea of the philosopher king. Imagine Marcus had been perfect. Imagine he had been completely wise, just, restrained and incorruptible. Eventually, he still dies. What happens next?

If a political system functions well only when an unusually virtuous person happens to occupy its highest office, then the system itself remains dangerously fragile. Marcus could attempt to restrain Marcus. Nothing guaranteed that Commodus would restrain Commodus.

This is precisely why the lesson I take from Marcus is not that we need philosopher kings. Modern constitutional government should not depend upon finding another Marcus Aurelius. Institutions should assume that sooner or later someone vain, incompetent, selfish or corrupt will acquire power, and they should be capable of limiting the damage that person can cause.

We should design institutions capable of surviving Commodus while hoping that the people who occupy them aspire to Marcus.

Character matters enormously in government. But good institutions should never require exceptional character simply to avoid catastrophe.

What Marcus Actually Got Right

After all of those qualifications, what remains is the reason Marcus continues to interest me: what he appears to have believed power was for.

The Meditations constantly return to work, responsibility and our obligations toward other people. Human beings, Marcus writes, exist as parts of a larger whole and are naturally made to cooperate. Again and again he reminds himself to perform the task before him, act justly, control anger and tolerate the flaws of those around him.

This is where Stoicism becomes politically interesting. Power, in Marcus’ conception of himself, does not appear primarily as permission. It appears as obligation. Being emperor did not mean that Marcus had reached the top and therefore earned the right to enjoy whatever could be extracted from his position. It meant that he had been assigned a larger part of the work.

That distinction sounds obvious. History suggests otherwise. Political power has always attracted people who enjoy the status associated with governing more than the responsibility of government itself. Titles, ceremonies, privileges, influence, entourages and public recognition can easily transform public office into a form of personal achievement. Campaigns are won. Rivals are defeated. Offices are reached. Power begins to feel like the prize at the end of the contest.

But public office is not a prize. It is a job.

Winning an election, receiving an appointment or inheriting a crown does not settle whether someone deserves authority. It begins the period during which they have to justify what they do with it. Marcus’ record was imperfect, but his willingness to listen to advisers, spend years near military crises, administer government rather than merely enjoy its prestige, exercise restraint after rebellion and accept some personal sacrifice during financial pressure all point toward the same understanding of office.

He seems rarely to have confused possessing power with being entitled to use it for himself.

That may be his greatest political virtue.

Public Service

This is where Marcus Aurelius remains particularly relevant today. Modern democratic politicians obviously operate within a political system completely different from that of a Roman emperor, and that is fortunate. No president, prime minister or minister in a functioning democracy should possess anything remotely comparable to the personal authority available to Marcus Aurelius. Modern political power is divided between institutions, constrained by law, challenged by opposition, scrutinized by journalists and ultimately subject to citizens who can remove governments from office.

But the principle survives the political system: greater authority should bring greater responsibility.

A minister should be more accountable than the ordinary citizen, not less. A senior official should be expected to exercise greater restraint precisely because they possess greater power. Someone asking society to endure sacrifice should demonstrate some willingness to share in it. Leadership should ultimately be measured less by how powerful the leader appears than by what happens to the people and institutions temporarily entrusted to them.

This is something I have touched on before when writing about Thermopylae and the idea of duty. There is something deeply valuable about accepting responsibility for something larger than yourself, particularly when fulfilling that responsibility carries a personal cost. Public service, at its best, should be an institutional expression of that same principle. A person accepts authority not because authority confirms their importance, but because the office gives them responsibilities toward other people.

That also means character alone is not enough. Marcus did not spend his reign contemplating virtue while somebody else governed Rome. He had studied law, rhetoric, administration and philosophy because ruling an empire required knowledge. When military circumstances demanded it, the philosopher went to the frontier.

Duty required competence.

Character without competence can produce admirable failure. Competence without character can produce extremely efficient corruption. Public service requires both.

The Burden Of Power

Perhaps the easiest way to understand Marcus Aurelius is through a contradiction. He was arguably the most powerful man in the Western world, yet much of his private writing consists of reminding himself that he was not particularly important. He tells himself that fame disappears. Emperors die like everyone else. The people praising you will die, the people they praise will die, and eventually the memory of both disappears.

For most people, that is philosophy. For an emperor, it is political hygiene.

The greatest danger of power may not be that someone wakes up one morning and consciously decides to become corrupt. It may be something much slower. Everyone listens. Everyone waits. Everyone laughs. Everyone moves when you move. People want something from you, and therefore many of them have very little incentive to remind you that you are wrong. Your decisions become news. Your arrival changes a room. Your schedule determines everybody else’s schedule. Eventually, it must become extraordinarily easy to confuse the importance of the office with the importance of the person temporarily occupying it.

The Meditations suggest that Marcus understood this danger and, more importantly, understood that he was not somehow immune to it. His repeated warnings against vanity, anger, luxury, resentment and the pursuit of reputation make little sense if we imagine him as a man who had permanently defeated those temptations. People do not normally spend years reminding themselves to resist something that poses no danger to them.

“I am rising to the work of a human being.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

He was disciplining himself.

That is why I find the Meditations more interesting as the private notes of an emperor than as the collection of inspirational quotations they sometimes become today. They are not the thoughts of a man congratulating himself for being wise. They are the thoughts of a man repeatedly warning himself not to become the kind of person his position made it extremely easy to become.

The fact that he needed those reminders makes them more useful, not less.

Duty Before Greatness

Marcus Aurelius died in 180 while still campaigning along the Danube frontier. He was fifty-eight years old. He had spent almost two decades as emperor, much of them dealing with problems he had not created and could not simply wish away: war, disease, financial pressure, political instability, death and betrayal. His reign did not solve Rome’s long-term problems. Commodus followed him, and the political stability associated with the Antonine period would not survive much longer.

He was not the Optimus Princeps. He did not conquer the greatest territory, create the longest-lasting institutions or leave Rome with a worthy successor. If Roman emperors are ranked purely by political achievement, there are perfectly reasonable arguments for placing others above him.

But greatness can also be measured by what someone does with the power available to them.

Restraint matters more when you can punish. Humility matters more when everyone praises you. Frugality matters more when luxury is unlimited. Clemency matters more when revenge is available. Duty matters more when nobody can easily force you to perform it.

Marcus had virtually everything the Roman world could give a man. He had enormous wealth at his disposal. He commanded armies capable of destroying kingdoms. Governors, senators and generals depended upon his favour. His image appeared throughout an empire stretching from Britain to Egypt and from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. There were very few material pleasures that could realistically have been denied to him and very few Romans capable of telling him no.

And yet the work for which he is now most famous is not a celebration of his victories or a monument to his own greatness. It is a collection of private notes in which he repeatedly tells himself to get out of bed, control his temper, ignore praise, accept mortality, tolerate difficult people and perform the work in front of him.

There is something almost absurdly human about that.

We should not want modern politicians to possess anything resembling the power of a Roman emperor, and thankfully our institutions are designed precisely to prevent that concentration of authority. But institutions cannot make character irrelevant. A constitution can restrict what someone is allowed to do with power. It cannot force them to understand why they wanted that power in the first place.

Public office should not be a reward for having won an election, recognition of someone’s personal importance, a platform for vanity or an opportunity to convert political influence into private advantage. It is authority temporarily entrusted to someone for the benefit of others. Most people who enter public life are not corrupt, and many make genuine sacrifices to perform their roles well. But when someone uses public office primarily to enrich themselves, reward friends, protect personal interests or accumulate status, the failure goes deeper than ordinary hypocrisy. They have reversed the relationship at the foundation of public service.

The office does not exist to serve the person holding it. The person holds the office in order to serve everyone else.

That failure should perhaps embarrass us even more today than it would have two thousand years ago. A modern public servant operates under institutions explicitly built around the idea that political authority exists for the public. To use that authority principally for oneself is therefore not merely a personal moral failure. It is a rejection of the purpose of the office itself.

Marcus Aurelius did not always live according to the standard he set for himself. Nobody does. What I find valuable is that extraordinary power did not seem to make him believe the standard should become easier.

It made it harder.

In the privacy of his own thoughts, the question Marcus kept returning to was remarkably simple: What is my duty now?

Two thousand years later, particularly for anyone entrusted with the power to govern others, I cannot think of many better questions.