Wars and Battles

Fought against the Parthian Empire after its king Vologeses IV invaded Roman territory in 161, and conducted nominally under the command of Lucius Verus. Its generals, among them Avidius Cassius, captured Ctesiphon and Seleucia before peace was made in 166; the returning armies are traditionally held to have brought the plague that then spread through the empire.

Marcus refers to Verus twice: in his thanks that it was his lot “to have such a brother” (I.17), and at VIII.37, where the Greek names him (“the urn of her lord,” in Haines’s English). Haines’s footnote to I.17 cites the triumph the two emperors celebrated together in 166, at which, Capitolinus records, Verus shared his victory titles with Marcus.

A series of campaigns against Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the middle Danube, chiefly the Marcomanni, the Quadi, and the Sarmatian Iazyges. The wars began with invasions across the frontier in the late 160s, reached as far as Aquileia in northern Italy, and kept Marcus on the Danube for most of the 170s, until his death there in 180.

The headings “Written among the Quadi on the Gran,” at the end of Book I, and “Written at Carnuntum,” at the end of Book II, place the writing of at least the early books in camp. At X.10 Marcus turns his philosophy on his own campaigns: one man prides himself “on catching a hare, another on netting a sprat, another on taking wild boars, another bears, another Sarmatians. Are not these brigands, if thou test their principles?” The soldier storming the breach at VII.7 may draw on the same setting. Haines’s footnotes connect several further passages to the war: the prophet on the fig tree during its preparations and the “Rain Miracle” of the campaign against the Quadi (I.6); the Column of Marcus Aurelius, whose reliefs show Marcus “taking Sarmatians” (X.10); Alexander the Platonist, summoned to Pannonia as Marcus’s Greek secretary (I.12); and Faustina’s presence with Marcus on campaign (I.17).

An engagement against the Quadi in the Marcomannic Wars, which Haines dates to 174, noting that Domaszewski placed it in 171. In the abridged text of Cassius Dio, a Roman force surrounded by the Quadi and near collapse from heat and thirst was relieved by a sudden downpour, while hail and thunderbolts fell on the enemy, and Marcus was saluted imperator for the seventh time. Dio credited the rain to Arnuphis, an Egyptian magician in Marcus’s company, who invoked Mercury as god of the air. Dio’s abridger Xiphilinus rejects this and credits the prayers of Christian soldiers of a legion from Melitene, which Marcus, he says, then named the “Thundering” Legion; Eusebius’s Church History (5.5) tells the same story on the authority of the Christian writer Apollinaris, and reports Tertullian’s claim that a letter of Marcus credited the Christians’ prayers. The 4th-century Greek orator Themistius credits the rain to Marcus’s own prayer.

The Meditations does not mention the battle. Haines’s footnote at I.6, where Marcus thanks Diognetus for teaching him not to believe “miracle-mongers and wizards,” cites Xiphilinus’s account of it. In his Index of Proper Names Haines writes that the Quadi “nearly repeated the exploit of Arminius” there, the German chieftain who destroyed three Roman legions under Varus in AD 9, and his appendix of Marcus’s sayings gives Themistius’s version of the prayer: “With this hand, wherewith I have taken away no life, have I implored Thee and besought the Giver of life.”

Avidius Cassius, a general of the Parthian War who had come to hold command over the eastern provinces, proclaimed himself emperor in 175 on a rumour of Marcus’s death, and was killed by his own soldiers.

Haines cites the historian Dio’s version of Marcus’s speech on the revolt, in which Marcus hopes to be able to pardon Cassius, beside the passages on forgiving wrongdoers (V.6, VII.22). At IX.42, on faithlessness and ingratitude, Haines writes that he “cannot help thinking” the section was written at the time of the rebellion.

Alexander’s campaigns carried Macedonian power from Greece through the Persian Empire to Egypt, Central Asia, and the Indus.

Alexander is Marcus’s standard figure for conquest measured against death and philosophy. He “utterly destroyed whole cities” and yet “departed this life” (III.3); death reduced him and his muleteer to the same condition (VI.24); set beside Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates, he stands for “a world of slavery” (VIII.3); and with his father Philip he is one of those who “played the tragedy-hero,” whom Marcus declines to copy (IX.29). Haines’s footnote at X.10 adds Quintus Curtius’s account of the Scythian envoys who rebuked Alexander for making war on peoples who had done him no wrong.

Julius Caesar’s war against Pompey and the senatorial party began with his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC, turned on his victory at Pharsalus in 48, and ended with the defeat of the last Pompeian forces in Africa and Spain. Cato the Younger took his own life at Utica in 46 rather than surrender to Caesar; Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins in 44, died after defeat at Philippi in 42.

“Pompeius and Gaius Caesar” appear with Alexander as the great destroyers of cities (III.3, VIII.3), while Cato and Brutus are among the figures, remembered for opposing tyranny, whom Severus taught Marcus to know (I.14). Haines quotes Lucan’s epic of the war, the Pharsalia (XI.7).

The war between Athens and Sparta and their allies, which ended in Athens’s defeat and the brief rule of the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BC). Socrates served as an Athenian hoplite, at Potidaea (432) and in the retreat from Delium (424).

VII.66 asks what sort of soul Socrates had, citing his endurance of nights in the frost, which Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium describes from the campaign at Potidaea; his refusal of the Thirty’s order to arrest Leon of Salamis; and his carrying his head high, which Alcibiades describes from the retreat from Delium.

Rome’s three wars with Carthage: the first (264–241 BC), fought chiefly over Sicily; the second (218–201), Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, ended by Scipio Africanus’s victory at Zama in 202; and the third (149–146), which ended with the destruction of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus.

The wars are never named. They enter only through “Scipio and Cato” in IV.33’s list of once-celebrated names now fading from memory. Marcus does not say which Scipio he means, and Haines’s Index of Proper Names tentatively identifies the Cato as Cato the Censor, remembered for urging the destruction of Carthage.

After Nero’s death in 68, four men held power in succession during 69: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian. Otho, emperor for three months, took his own life after his army’s defeat at the first battle of Bedriacum in northern Italy. Haines names Otho, with Petronius and Epicurus, among those who counted pleasure a good and pain an evil yet met death with contempt (XII.34).

Oliver Cromwell’s victory over the Scottish army at Dunbar on 3 September 1650. At II.2 Marcus tells himself “thou art an old man,” and Haines sets beside it the letter Cromwell, then 51, wrote from Dunbar after the battle: “I grow an old man.”

The siege of Khartoum in the Sudan by the forces of the Mahdi, which ended with the city’s fall and the death of its commander, General Charles Gordon, in January 1885. At IX.3 Marcus writes, “Tarry not, O Death, lest peradventure I too forget myself,” and Haines quotes Gordon, “who was a reader of Marcus,” writing from Khartoum in a despairing echo of the line.