Massimo Pigliucci

So he was one of the so-called five good emperors.

Marcos had a difficult time as an emperor.

He did not want to be an emperor.

He was really not that interested.

In the meditations, at some point, he says, you can live a good life anywhere.

If you have to be in a palace, then you can have a good life even in a palace, which tells you that he wasn't exactly.

And he did not have an easy reign, unlike the others, especially his predecessor, Antoninus Pius.

Because during Marcus's reign, a number of things happened.

Two frontier wars.

There was an attack on the frontiers of the empire in the east by the Parthians, and from the north, from a number of German tribes, chiefly the Marcomanni.

It had to deal with an internal rebellion by one of his lieutenants, who declared himself emperor.

Rome was hit by a devastating flood of the Tiber River that destroyed half of the city.

A huge earthquake demolished the city of Smyrna in modern Western Turkey, and the emperor also had to deal with that.

So he had his hands full.

And what he did throughout was to do his best in order to apply his Stoic philosophy to the situation.

So here's a case where we literally have an emperor philosopher or a philosopher king, as Plato would put it.

We have somebody who is not only interested in philosophy for its own sake, but he actually is determined to use philosophy as a way of life and therefore as a framework to make decisions both personal and political.

And that really did make a difference.

Arguably, that's one of the things that made him a great emperor.

You can think of the entire meditations as a series of evening meditations, but the exercise is also described briefly in Epictetus and more length in Seneca.