What Marcus Aurelius learned from each person

Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 until his death in 180. He kept a book of notes “for his own use.” We know it as the Meditations; its true title is unknown.

He opened it not with ideas, but with people. Book 1 goes through the people who shaped him, one by one, and what he learned from each. Sixteen people, then the gods.

The list, in his words

1. His grandfather Verus. Good morals and the government of my temper.
2. His father’s memory. Modesty and a manly character.
3. His mother. Simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.
4. His great-grandfather. To have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.
5. His tutor. Endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands.
6. Diognetus. Not to busy myself about trifling things.
7. Rusticus. The impression that my character required improvement and discipline.
8. Apollonius. Freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose.
9. Sextus. The idea of living conformably to nature.
10. Alexander the grammarian. To refrain from fault-finding.
11. Fronto. What envy and duplicity and hypocrisy are in a tyrant.
12. Alexander the Platonist. Not frequently nor without necessity to say to any one… that I have no leisure.
13. Catulus. Not to be indifferent when a friend finds fault.
14. His brother Severus. To love my kin, and to love truth, and to love justice.
15. Maximus. Cheerfulness in all circumstances, as well as in illness.
16. His adoptive father, Antoninus Pius. Mildness of temper, and unchangeable resolution in the things which he had determined after due deliberation.
17. The gods. Good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good.

Who some of them were

• Rusticus was “a Stoic philosopher.” Marcus writes, “I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus,” and that he learned from him “to write my letters with simplicity.”
• Fronto “was a rhetorician, and in great favor with Marcus.”
• Sextus of Chaeronea was “a grandson of Plutarch, or nephew, as some say.”
• Antoninus Pius, his adoptive father and the emperor before him, gets the longest section by far. One line from it: “He was most ready to give without envy to those who possessed any particular faculty.”

Where he wrote it

Book 1 ends with a place, not a lesson: “Among the Quadi at the Granua.” The work was written, in his translator’s words, “during one of M. Antoninus’ campaigns against the Quadi,” a people beyond the Danube.

To write your own Book 1

1. List the people who shaped you: family, teachers, friends, and people you know only from their books.
2. Next to each name, write one thing you learned from them, in a single line.
3. Add what you were given without earning it, as he did with the gods.

Quotes from Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, translated by George Long (Project Gutenberg). The notes on Rusticus, Fronto and Sextus are Long’s.