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Was He Quite Ordinary?

Mary Beard
Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor by Frank McLynn
Bodley Head, 684 pp, 20.00, March 2009, ISBN 978 0 224 07292 2
In 1815, Cardinal Angelo Mai made an extraordinary discovery in the Ambrosian Library in
Milan. He spotted that a book containing the records of the First Church Council of
Chalcedon in ad 451 had been made out of reused parchment. The earlier writing on each
sheet had been erased (washing with milk and oat-bran was the common method), and the
minutes of the Church Council copied on top. As often in reused documents of this kind, the
original text had begun to show through the later writing, and was in part legible.
It turned out that the recycled sheets had come from a very mixed bag of books. There was a
single page of Juvenals Satires, part of Plinys speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and
some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of
the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of
the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor
Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from 161 to 180. The majority of the letters in the palimpsest
were between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius himself, both before and after he had ascended to
the throne. Unlike the passages from Juvenal and Pliny, these were entirely new discoveries.
By an almost suspicious coincidence, when Mai moved to the Vatican Library a few years
later, he found another volume of the same proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon with
more of Frontos correspondence detectable under the later text. Altogether, these
palimpsests had preserved more than 200 letters some 80 of them written by Marcus
Aurelius. Not only did this count as the third great collection of private letters to have
survived from classical antiquity, after those of Cicero and Pliny, it also promised insights
into the private world of one of the most renowned Roman rulers: the philosopher-emperor
and author of the philosophical Meditations; persecutor of Christians; conqueror of the
Germans (in campaigns immortalised on his column in Rome); and father of the monstrous
emperor Commodus. For many thinkers of the 19th century from Darwin to Nietzsche
Marcus was an intellectual hero. Even Bill Clinton claimed (according to Frank McLynn in his
new biography) to have read and reread the Meditations during his presidency. For most
people now, Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the elderly emperor smothered by young
Commodus on campaign on the German frontier at the start of the movie Gladiator.
The rest of the story of the discovery of these letters is less heroic. The text proved almost
impossible to read in many places a problem made worse by Mais interventions. Sharp-
eyed maybe, but no scientist, Mai applied chemicals to the Ambrosian parchment in order to
make the underlying text easier to decipher. In fact, the effect was almost completely to
obliterate it. But even what was legible hardly matched up to expectations. For a start,
whoever had collected the letters (surely not Fronto himself) had paid little attention to
chronology, so that the exact, or even relative, dates of many were hard to fathom. But, more
to the point, most 19th-century scholars had expected more elevated subject matter in these
letters between the prince (later emperor) and his distinguished tutor in rhetoric. When
Fronto wasnt indulging in scholastic disputes about rhetorical theory, or the meaning and
usage of obscure Latin words (what was the most appropriate term for removing a stain,
maculam eluere, abluere or elavere?), he was complaining about his physical ailments: I
have been seized with a dreadful pain in my neck, but my foot is better, Im fine except that I
can hardly walk because of a pain in the toes of my left foot, Ive been seized with a terrible
pain in the groin all the pain from my back and pelvis has concentrated there, and so on,
and on.
But even more disconcerting were the open expressions of love, longing and desire found
throughout the letters. I love the gods who care for you, I love life because of you, I love
letters with you . . . I gorge myself on love for you, as Fronto signed off one letter to his pupil.
Or, as Marcus put it, at the end of what is probably one of the earliest letters in the collection,
written when he was about 18, Farewell, breath of my life. Should I not burn with love for you
when you have written to me as you have. What am I to do? I cant stop. Last year, at the very
same time and the very same place, I found that I was burning with longing for my mother.
This year the longing is set alight by you. It is hardly surprising, perhaps, that Amy Richlin
recently argued in Marcus Aurelius in Love (2006) that, whether or not they were
physical lovers, there was a marked erotic dimension in the relationship between tutor and
imperial pupil. Not something that Mai had been expecting, or hoping, to find when he came
upon the precious correspondence.
McLynn will have none of this. In fact, in his account of Marcus life, Fronto is a tedious
hypochondriac, whose malign influence his pupil was eager to escape and indeed already
had escaped by the mid-140s, when he was in his early twenties, more than 15 years before he
became emperor. Perhaps, he writes, Marcus had learned all he needed from Fronto;
perhaps he had begun to tire of the older mans pedantic ways; and, probably most of all, he
was by now bored with rhetoric and wanted to switch full time to philosophy. On this view,
many of the later letters in the collection are nothing more than attempts by Fronto to
wheedle his way back into Marcus affections. Sometimes this is by fawning: in one letter, for
example, he claims that his relationship with Marcus was more important to him than
holding the consulship, and proceeds to compare their friendship to that of Achilles and
Patroclus. Sometimes it is by playing for sympathy hence all the complaints about ill-
health. This did not cut much ice, McLynn believes, with Marcus himself, but it has worked
with modern scholars, who have been convinced by this correspondence that there was a
particularly close relationship between Fronto and his pupil.
What, then, of the erotic language of the letters? McLynn sees no need to suppose anything
directly sexual here at all. This is merely the idiom of the second century, reflecting a world
unlike our own (he claims), in which it was possible for two men to express love without
sexuality. Or though this seems a significantly different point Marcus and Fronto used
the word love in a ludic way . . . it was a kind of elaborate charade or game, in its way part of
the very rhetorical hyperbole that Fronto was supposed to be teaching his pupil.
It is, of course, impossible now as it no doubt always was to know what, if anything, went
on between Fronto and Marcus when the lights were out. McLynn is right to say that we
cannot move directly from a loving linguistic idiom to sexual practice (the same is true when
we try to decode the sentimentality of 19th-century womens letters). And the fact, as we have
seen, that Marcus compares his longing for Fronto to his longing for his mother does not
instantly suggest sexual desire. That said, McLynn consistently plays down the aggressively
eroticised tone of the correspondence, as well as the implications of Frontos comparing of his
own relationship with his pupil to that of Achilles with Patroclus. Long before the second
century, this Homeric pair had become a well recognised symbol for male homoeroticism.
The problem with McLynns Marcus Aurelius is not just how he chooses to tell the story of
Fronto and Marcus, which is only one element in his vast study of the reign. Apart from the
many digressions that help him fill these pages (a whole chapter on the reign of Commodus,
an eight-page summary of Romes relations with Parthia from the first century BC, and
another 15 on the Germans) he has some big claims to make about Marcus Aurelius place in
the wider history of the Roman Empire. Like many others, Gibbon among them, McLynn has
considerable admiration for the moral stature and personal integrity of the emperor himself.
Yet, for all those virtues, he sees the reign as the beginning of the end of the glory days of
Roman imperial power thanks to a combination of the poisoned legacy of the paranoid
emperor Hadrian, the ambivalent political and military successes of Marcus himself, and a
devastating plague, which may on McLynns generous estimates have wiped out up to 18
million people across the Roman world, including the emperor himself (despite the Gladiator
version of his death). He was in other words a decent, thoughtful man caught up in the
whirlwind of history the Jan Christian Smuts of his generation, as one, rather forced,
comparison in McLynns final chapter presents him.
There may be something in this (though there are rather too many whirlwinds of history
rushing through this book for my taste). But the real problem is that, as in his discussion of
Fronto and Marcus, McLynn is throughout reluctant to share with his readers the curious
fragility of the evidence on which his own version of Marcus Aurelius life and achievements
is based. So, unlike Richlin, he chooses not to explain the strange history of the Fronto letters
or to remark on the gaps in the correspondence and the reasons that may lie behind them.
When he uses the letters to reconstruct the major events of the reign, or even just the shifting
fortunes of Marcus and Fronto themselves, he does not stop to point out that the dates of
many of them are either unknown or disputed that you cannot, for very obvious reasons,
simply string them together into a narrative.
It is surely the job of all biographers to explain what lies behind their own reconstruction of
their subjects life: biography is always as much about how we know as what. But in the case
of ancient biography, and those curious pockets of evidence through which we hope
occasionally to glimpse the lives of the Greeks and Romans, it is even more important to
make clear the processes by which the ancient life story has been reconstructed. This is what
McLynn, in his apparently confident account, repeatedly fails to do.
The truth is that the life of Marcus is, on the face of it, better documented than that of most
other Roman emperors, never mind the rest of the ordinary Roman population, who are
almost entirely lost to us. Yet most of that documentation is, in its own way, as puzzling and
difficult to interpret as the correspondence with Fronto. There is, to be sure, an ancient
biography on which to draw a short life story of Marcus in the series known as the Historia
Augusta. This is a compilation of biographies of Roman emperors, and a few also-rans and
usurpers, from the early second-century Hadrian (who first fingered Marcus as a potential
successor to the throne, despite his having only remote links by birth to the ruling dynasty) to
some short-lived rulers of the 280s. It purports to be written by a team of six historians at the
very end of the third century, though it is now acknowledged to be the work of just one man
writing at least a century later. The reason for this pretence remains a mystery, but there is no
doubt that most of the biographies it contains have very little claim to strict historical
accuracy, even if they vividly reflect some of the obsessions of Roman imperial culture from
the conventions of elite dining to the murderous tendencies of the nastier autocrats. This is
the source, for example, of the anecdote about that extraordinary third-century emperor
Elagabalus, who is supposed to have killed his dinner-guests with kindness literally. He let
so many rose petals fall from the ceiling of his imperial dining-room that his guests were
suffocated.
The earlier biographies in this series are, admittedly, rather less flamboyant than the later
ones. Marcus Aurelius is painted as a noble philosopher without any of the extreme vices of
his successors. Yet for McLynn to pass over his own reliance on this source with only the most
gentle of health warnings (I have found it reliable enough for the reign of Marcus Aurelius
how does he know?) is in effect to shrug off responsibility for his own narrative.
But at the very centre of the modern image of Marcus Aurelius are his Meditations the
personal, disconnected, philosophical musings that have been largely responsible for his
reputation as a philosopher-emperor, conquering the Germans (or persecuting the
Christians) by day, while puzzling over ethical conundrums by night and consigning his
thoughts to paper and posterity. It is from this source that McLynn has constructed his own
view of Marcus character as slightly priggish and internally conflicted while at the same
time a man of duty and supreme integrity. But by careful selection (for no one except an
academic philosopher could possibly read the original from start to finish) the Meditations
have also launched Marcus Aurelius into wider modern fame, as the bestselling father of self-
help guides, popular psychology and spiritual teaching. The secret of this success is not
simply the folk wisdom that generous translation can construct out of Marcus thorny Greek,
which he chose over his native Latin for writing these philosophical thoughts. Not becoming
like your enemy is the best revenge, for example, is a decidedly more memorable version of
the original: The noblest form of retribution is not to become an imitation. (Not only more
obscure than its modern version, this is probably a reference to a passage of Plato, which
argues the reverse an academic allusion about as far from folk wisdom as you could get.)
But part of the contemporary appeal also lies in the feeling that the Meditations offer us a
rare glimpse into the personal dilemmas of the man in charge of the Roman Empire. Here we
see straight through to the mental processes of the man at the very top of the Roman world.
Hence their appeal to the likes of Clinton. And hence the propaganda value in claiming to be
reading them: I too am struggling, so the message runs, with the ethics of world leadership.
Again, it is more complicated. We now read Marcus Meditations as a coherent work
organised in 12 separate books, further subdivided into separate sections, under an overall
title. All these features are modern, and combine to give us the impression that we are dealing
with a private introspective work of literature, somewhere on the spectrum between
Augustines Confessions, the theological theorising of Pascals Penses and an 18th-century
commonplace book. In fact, we have no information on the origin and purpose of the work at
all. We do not know what it was originally called (or if, indeed, it was ever intended by its
author to be the kind of thing that would have a title). We do not know when or in what
circumstances it was written. Some references in the text seem to imply an elderly author and
the idea has grown up that some of it at least was written on the long nights of the German
campaign. (This idea is supported by the subtitles of two of the books, Written among the
Quadi on the River Gran, Written in Carnuntum though these are more likely to be the
bright idea of some medieval copyist than geographic references inserted by Marcus himself.)
We have no clue who chose to put it into public circulation, or why. The first reference we
have to it is from the 360s, when it appears to be going under the name Admonitions.
If a text like this were to be discovered today in the sands of Egypt, not tied to the name of an
emperor, we would almost certainly interpret it as a set of fairly routine philosophical
exercises the kind of thing that a philosophically trained member of the Roman elite would
compose to keep himself in good intellectual shape. Although we often choose to read it in a
narrowly personal way, much of the material draws on a fairly standard repertoire of ancient
philosophical theory. So for example, On death: either dispersal, if we are composed of
atoms; or if we are a living unity, either extinction or a change of abode (VII, 32). Even A
kings lot: to do good and be damned (VII, 36) is not a reflection on monarchy from the
coalface, but a quotation on the perils of autocracy by the philosopher Antisthenes. When
McLynn chooses (as many have before him) to scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus
inner conflicts, he might as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of
a modern philosophy undergraduate.
Even more crucial is the question of typicality. The really big problem in understanding the
Roman world is not the lack of evidence (there is enough to keep most scholars going for
more than a lifetime), but not knowing how typical or representative that evidence might be.
Hence the problem of pinning down the relationship between Fronto and Marcus. If we had
more examples of letters between Romans and their tutors, we would have a better idea
whether this particular correspondence looked unusual. The nearest parallel I know to such
strikingly eroticised language comes from the letters between Cicero and his slave Tiro but
there have been questions about the precise nature of that relationship too.
In the case of philosophy, its true that Marcus was hailed by Roman writers themselves as
the philosopher-emperor, as if that was an unusual combination. And this has predictably
led to a modern emphasis on the mixed messages of Marcus reign, from his image as the
relentless conqueror of the Germans to the reflective, introspective, ethical thinker (or as
McLynns subtitle has it, Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor). But we have plenty of evidence
that other Roman emperors were thoroughly philosophically trained: Hadrian, for example,
or even the first emperor Augustus, who wrote his own Exhortations to Philosophy, now lost.
There seems to me a fair chance that, though the Meditations is a rare survival, works like it
might well have been found on the desk (and from the pen) of many a Roman ruler. What,
after all, would Augustus Exhortations have looked like, if that had survived? And what
difference would it make to how we told the story of his reign?
To put this another way: might we not get further in understanding Marcus Aurelius and his
reign by not treating him as a rare hybrid? With his desire for military glory, his disastrous
succession plans, his wayward wife, and his spare-time interest in philosophy, might he not
actually be rather ordinary by the standard of Roman emperors?
Vol. 31 No. 14 23 July 2009 Mary Beard Was He Quite Ordinary?
pages 8-9 | 3286 words
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2014 ^ Top