In Rome there stood more than twenty bronze equestrian statues of emperors and generals. One is left.
The rest were melted down. Bronze was valuable, and in the centuries after the empire fell the statues were turned into church bells, coins, cannon and door fittings. What stood there was judged by what it weighed.
The statue of Marcus Aurelius survived through a misunderstanding. He was taken for Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and statues of Christian emperors you spared.
The philosopher who wrote that fame amounts to nothing and that whoever is praised now will soon be forgotten owes his one surviving statue, then, to a confusion of names.
The statue stood for centuries at the Lateran. In 1538 Pope Paul III had it moved to the Capitoline, where Michelangelo designed the square around it; it stands exactly at the centre, and the design was made for that statue.
Traces of the original gilding are still visible on the bronze. Since a restoration in the nineteen eighties the original stands indoors in the Capitoline Museums and a copy on the square, again to keep it from being lost.
The Meditations, written never to be published, are also still here. Both things left of Marcus, then, survive against his own expectation.
What remains of you is decided by people you never met, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
The tempting sorting is that there is a lesson in the fact that his statue of all statues survived. There is none; that is exactly the point.
What remains of a person lies entirely in the other box, and this story supplies the proof. Not his virtue, not his book and not his reign saved that statue, but the fact that somebody got the name wrong. There is no justice in what time preserves.
Marcus knew that and wrote it down repeatedly. Whoever is praised now is soon forgotten; whoever worries about remembrance worries about something he will not be present for.
What did lie with him was how he governed and what he noted down. That the statue and the book both happened to survive changes nothing about that, and it would have changed nothing had both been melted down.
There is something too pleasant in this lesson, and that is reason to distrust it. We read this story precisely because the statue survived; the dozens of emperors who were melted down have no case.
And dismissing legacy entirely as not yours goes too far in one respect. What you leave to people you know, to work others carry on, to children: that is genuinely influenced by what you do, even if chance decides the rest. Indifference about the distant future is sensible; indifference about tomorrow is something else.
Where are you working on a legacy you do not control? And what would you do today if you knew nobody would remember it?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions