Meditations I.17

From the Gods, to have good grandfathers,⁴⁰ good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good companions, kinsmen, friends—nearly all of them; and that I fell into no trespass against any of them, and yet I had a disposition that way inclined, such as might have led me into something of the sort,⁴¹ had it so chanced; but by the grace of God there was no such coincidence of circumstances as was likely to put me to the test.

And that I was not brought up any longer with my grandfather’s⁴² concubine, and that I kept unstained the flower of my youth; and that I did not make trial of my manhood before the due time, but even postponed it.

That I was subordinated to a ruler and a father capable of ridding me of all conceit, and of bringing me to recognize that it is possible to live in a Court and yet do without body-guards and gorgeous garments and linkmen and statues and the like pomp; and that it is in such a man’s power to reduce himself very nearly to the condition of a private individual and yet not on this account to be more paltry or more remiss in dealing with what the interests of the state require to be done in imperial fashion.

That it was my lot to have such a brother,⁴³ capable by his character of stimulating me to watchful care over myself, and at the same time delighting me by his deference⁴⁴ and affection: that my children have not been devoid of intelligence nor physically deformed. That I did not make more progress in rhetoric⁴⁵ and poetry⁴⁶ and my other studies, in which I should perhaps have been engrossed, had I felt myself making good way in them. That I lost no time in promoting my tutors to such posts of honour⁴⁷ as they seemed to desire, and that I did not put them off with the hope that I would do this later on since they were still young. That I got to know Apollonius, Rusticus, Maximus.

That I had clear and frequent conceptions as to the true meaning of a life according to Nature,⁴⁸ so that as far as the Gods were concerned and their blessings and assistance and intention, there was nothing to prevent me from beginning at once to live in accordance with Nature, though I still come short of this ideal by my own fault, and by not attending to the reminders, nay, almost the instructions, of the Gods.

That my body holds out so long in such a life as mine⁴⁹; that I did not touch Benedicta or Theodotus, but that even afterwards, when I did give way to amatory passions, I was cured of them; that, though often offended with Rusticus, I never went so far as to do anything for which I should have been sorry; that my mother,⁵⁰ though she was to die young, yet spent her last years with me.

That as often as I had the inclination to help anyone, who was in pecuniary distress or needing any other assistance, I was never told that there was no money available for the purpose; and that I was never under any similar need of accepting help from another. That I have been blessed with a wife so docile,⁵¹ so affectionate, so unaffected;⁵² that I had no lack of suitable tutors for my children.

That by the agency of dreams⁵³ I was given antidotes both of other kinds and against the spitting of blood and vertigo; and there is that response also at Caieta, “as thou shalt use it.” And that, when I had set my heart on philosophy, I did not fall into the hands of a sophist, nor sat down at the author’s desk, or became a solver of syllogisms, nor busied myself with physical phenomena. For all the above the Gods as helpers and good fortune need. Written among the Quadi on the Gran.⁵⁴

• 40.That is, M. Annius Verus, three times consul (Dio’s Roman History 69. 21, § 1) and urban prefect (Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus i. 2), who died 138, and P. Calvisius Tullus, suffect consul 109. See Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus i. 3; Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, iii. 2.

  Publius Calvisius Tullus was Marcus’s maternal grandfather, the father of Domitia Lucilla; the paternal grandfather, Annius Verus, is the “Grandfather Verus” of I.1. A suffect consul was one appointed to replace an ordinary consul partway through the year.

• 41.Compare i. 17, § 6; xi. 18, § 4.
• 42.Compare ix. 21. After his father’s death Marcus was brought up at his grandfather’s house (Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus i. 7). Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus (v. 3) says he migrated de maternis hortis much against his will to the imperial palace when adopted by Hadrian. It is possible but not likely that “grandfather” here means Hadrian.

  Capitolinus’s de maternis hortis, “from his mother’s gardens,” refers to the family estate where Marcus had been living. Strictly, the adoption was by Antoninus Pius, at Hadrian’s direction, in 138.

• 43.L. Verus, whose character was more of a warning than an example, as Lucian’s Nigrinus 19 calls Rome for its wickedness γυμνάσιον ἀρετῆς; see Epictetus’s Discourses, iii. 20, § 11. Marcus seems to have been genuinely fond of him; see Fronto’s letter to Verus, ii. 1; letter to Marcus as Caesar, ii. 17; and compare Aristides, Panegyric at Cyzicus § 425 (Jebb).

  Lucius Verus was Marcus’s adoptive brother and co-emperor from 161 to 169. Lucian’s Nigrinus 19 calls Rome gymnasion aretēs, “a training-ground for virtue,” because of its temptations, and Epictetus iii. 20 makes a similar point; the two Fronto letters and Aristides’ Panegyric at Cyzicus, cited by section in Jebb’s edition, are Haines’s evidence for Marcus’s affection for Verus.

• 44.Capitolinus’s Life of Verus viii. 5.

  Capitolinus’s example of that deference: at the triumph the two emperors celebrated together, Verus shared with Marcus the titles that had been granted to him.

• 45.See i. 7.
• 46.I. 7. Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, i. 8; letter to Marcus as Emperor, i. 2 (Naber’s edition p. 96); On Eloquence 3 (Naber’s edition p. 150).
• 47.For example, Rusticus, consul for the second time in 162, and urban prefect; Proculus, see Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus ii. 5.

  Rusticus is the teacher of I.7. Capitolinus names Eutychius Proculus of Sicca among Marcus’s teachers of Latin grammar and says Marcus advanced him to a proconsulship.

• 48.See i. 9.
• 49.Dio’s Roman History 71. 36, § 3.

  The historian Cassius Dio says that Marcus “was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign.”

• 50.Domitia Lucilla, daughter of P. Calvisius Tullus. She died in 156, aged about 50. For her see above i. 3; viii. 25; Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, iv. 6; Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus vi. 9. Her head appears on a coin of Nicaea in Bithynia.

  Domitia Lucilla was Marcus’s mother, praised earlier at I.3; VIII.25 lists her among the dead in one of Marcus’s catalogues of mortality. The year of her death is not firmly attested.

• 51.Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, v. 11.
• 52.Compare Fronto’s letter to Pius, 2, near the end, for Pius’ opinion of his daughter. The coiffure of the younger Faustina as seen on coins is much simpler than that of her mother. She was with Marcus in Pannonia for a time at least.

  The younger Faustina, daughter of Antoninus Pius, was Marcus’s wife.

• 53.Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, iii. 9, and below, ix. 27. Marcus himself became a dream-giver after his death; see Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xviii. 7. Dreams were the recognised method by which the God of healing communicated his prescriptions. Belief in them was universal, and shared by the atheist Pliny, the sceptic Lucian, Aristides the devotee, Galen the scientist, Dio the historian and man of affairs. It is not unknown to Christians. Yet there have been found writers to gird at Marcus for his “superstitious” belief in dreams!

  Capitolinus xviii. 7 records that after his death people claimed Marcus had foretold many things to them in dreams, which is Haines’s “dream-giver”; IX.27 is Marcus’s remark that the gods aid people “by dreams and oracles.” The god of healing is Asclepius, whose patients slept in his temples to receive prescriptions in dreams. Of the figures Haines lists, Pliny is Pliny the Elder, author of the Natural History; Galen was the leading physician of the age and attended Marcus; and Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales is an extended record of his own dream-cures.

• 54.These words may be intended either to conclude the first book or, more likely, head the second. In the former case, as Gataker points out, τάδε would have been usual, not τά.

  The line, “Written among the Quadi on the Gran,” is a place-heading; Haines gives the river its German name, Gran, where the Greek has Granoua (Granua), the modern Hron, a northern tributary of the Danube in Slovakia. The Quadi were a Germanic people living north of the middle Danube, in what is now Slovakia and Moravia, and one of Rome’s principal opponents in the Marcomannic Wars (c. 166–180), which Marcus directed in person from the frontier for most of the 170s. Book II ends, in Haines’s text, with a similar heading, “Written at Carnuntum,” the Roman legionary base on the Danube in Pannonia. Haines’s footnote concerns which book the line belongs to: Thomas Gataker, the English scholar whose 1652 edition of the Meditations included a Latin translation and commentary, noted that a closing subscription would normally read tade, “these things,” rather than the bare article ta.