Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was born into the Roman nobility, lost his father in childhood, and caught the eye of the emperor Hadrian, who at seventeen placed him in the line of succession. He received the best rhetorical education but in his twenties turned to philosophy; his teacher Rusticus lent him the Discourses of Epictetus, and he never put them down. In 161 he became emperor jointly with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus, Rome's first pair of co-rulers.

His reign was a chain of disasters: war with Parthia in the east, a great plague brought home by the army, Germanic invasions along the Danube, a general's rebellion, and the early deaths of his wife and several children. He spent most of his life at the front, and the Meditations were written there in snatches, in Greek, in twelve books, without a title and never meant for publication.

The book is one man's repeated admonitions to himself: remember that all things change, that you will soon be forgotten, that others' wrongdoing cannot harm you, that you have duties. It has no system, only an exercise endlessly renewed: bring attention back to the present, to what is in your power, to the whole of which you are a part. He died in an army camp near Vienna; his son Commodus succeeded him, and the age of good emperors ended.