Marcus Aurelius
121–180 AD · Rome
the most powerful man alive, writing himself a private warning
Marcus Aurelius was adopted into the imperial succession as a boy and spent his life doing a job he had not chosen. His nineteen years as emperor were consumed by war on the Danube frontier and by the Antonine plague, which killed a proportion of the empire that no one has ever counted properly.
The Meditations were not written for us. They are private notes in Greek, made largely on campaign, with no title, no argument and no reader in mind — a man repeatedly reminding himself that power is temporary, that other people's faults are not worth his anger, and that he will shortly be dead and forgotten. That the least self-important book ever written by a ruler survives at all is an accident.
Two things sit uncomfortably beside it. Christians were persecuted during his reign, including the killings at Lyon in 177, and whatever his personal role, they happened under his authority. And he broke with the practice that had produced four capable emperors by leaving the empire to his own son, Commodus, whose rule was a disaster. The philosopher who wrote so well about duty made the one dynastic decision he might have avoided.