Meditations I.12

From Alexander the Platonist,²³ not to say to anyone often or without necessity, nor write in a letter, I am too busy, nor in this fashion constantly plead urgent affairs as an excuse for evading the obligations entailed upon us by our relations towards those around us.

• 23.See Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists ii. 5, p. 247, Kayser’s edition. He was summoned by Marcus to Pannonia about 174 and made his Greek secretary.

  Alexander was a sophist nicknamed Peloplaton, “Clay Plato.” As Greek secretary (ab epistulis Graecis) he handled the emperor’s correspondence in Greek; Pannonia was the Roman province on the middle Danube where Marcus spent much of the Marcomannic Wars.