Meditations I.14

From my ‘brother’ Severus,²⁶ love of family, love of truth, love of justice, and (thanks to him!) to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; and the conception of a state with one law for all, based upon individual equality and freedom of speech, and of a sovranty which prizes above all things the liberty of the subject; and furthermore from him also to set a well-balanced and unvarying value on philosophy; and readiness to do others a kindness, and eager generosity, and optimism, and confidence in the love of friends; and perfect openness in the case of those that came in for his censure; and the absence of any need for his friends to surmise what he did or did not wish, so plain was it.

• 26.See Index II. He was father of the son-in-law of Marcus.

  Haines’s index identifies Severus as probably the father of the Claudius Severus who married one of Marcus’s daughters, and possibly the Peripatetic philosopher Severus whom Capitolinus lists among Marcus’s teachers. The five names Severus introduced to Marcus are figures remembered for opposing tyranny: Cato the Younger and Brutus, opponents of Julius Caesar; Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus, Stoic senators under Nero and Vespasian; and Dion, generally taken to be Dion of Syracuse, opponent of the tyrant Dionysius II, though Haines’s index suggests Dio Chrysostom as the better match.