Marcus Aurelius became emperor in 161. Four years later, troops returning from the east brought back a disease that would strike the empire in waves; today it is usually taken to have been smallpox. Estimates of the death toll run from five to ten million.
In the same years wars broke out on the Danube with Germanic peoples crossing the frontier. The treasury was empty, partly because of the epidemic itself: fewer farmers, less tax, fewer soldiers.
In 169 his co-emperor Lucius Verus died, almost certainly of the disease. In that same year Marcus had imperial property auctioned publicly in the Forum of Trajan, to pay for the war without raising taxes. Silk robes, jewels, gold plate, his wife's furniture: it all went under the hammer.
He spent most of the remaining eleven years at the front. The Meditations were written there; book two is headed among the Quadi on the river Gran, book three at Carnuntum, in present-day Austria. It is not a book for readers but a series of notes to himself, by a man who has to talk himself round again every morning.
In 175 the revolt of Avidius Cassius was added to it, and in 176 his wife Faustina died. Of his thirteen or fourteen children, five survived.
He died in 180 on the Danube, probably of that same disease. His son Commodus succeeded him and made peace within a few months.
Fifteen unbroken years of crisis, and the power to command everything except that it stop.
The tempting sorting is that an emperor has everything in hand. The reverse is true, and that is precisely why this man of all people wrote the best-known Stoic text. He could move legions and stop not one infection.
The cut he made is sober. The disease, the weather, the frontier peoples and the size of the treasury lay outside him. What did lie with him was whether he would keep turning up: at the front, at the meeting, at the decision nobody wanted to take.
The auction is the sharpest application. He could not remove the cost, but he could choose who bore it, and he began with himself. It was not a symbolic gesture; it genuinely raised money and by tradition it lasted two months.
The Meditations show what it cost. The book is full of exhortations not to complain, and nobody writes such sentences down when it comes easily.
There is an uncomfortable other side to admiring this case. Marcus held out, and the empire endured, but millions died about whom no notes survive. Steadfastness at the top changes little about whether the government itself was any good.
And his own notes are not the report of a man who had mastered it. Whoever reads them straight through sees the same reminders returning year after year. That is honest of him, but it is also a warning: this exercise never ends, not even for the man who wrote the most famous book about it.
Which long-lasting situation in your life asks not for a heroic deed but for a sustainable routine? And what is your version of the evening note?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions