Donald Robertson

And she seems to have surrounded herself with a kind of intellectual circle, a kind of salon of which she is the center.

And so Marcus grew up

in a sense in a school or among a circle of leading intellectuals.

Herodes Atticus

who's another crazy guy, colorful figure.

He's the most famous sophist of the period.

He lived for a while in the same household as Marcus's mother, so he's a close family friend.

He later becomes Marcus's Greek rhetoric tutor.

So Marcus's mother is mingling, is maybe family friends with or grew up alongside the most famous Greek orator and sophist of the period.

She seems to be familiar with Rusticus.

Marcus mentions that Rusticus wrote a letter.

Maybe she chose Rusticus to be Marcus's tutor.

There's another really obscure clue in the meditations that I didn't notice until I was working on this.

Another biography mentions it.

Marcus in passing mentions a guy called Domitius.

who we don't know anything about, who he said heaped praise on his, he was very generous in heaping praise on his philosophy tutor.

And the tutor that he mentions is a guy called Athanadotus, who is known to be a Stoic.

teacher.

So there's a guy who really loves stoic teachers and his name is the masculine version of Domitia, which is Marcus's mother's family name.

So he may have been an uncle or some other relative of Marcus's mother.