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Was He Quite Ordinary? Mary
Beard London Review of Books Marcus Aurelius: Warrior,
Philosopher, Emperor by
Frank McLynn In 1815, Cardinal Angelo Mai made
an extraordinary discovery in the Ambrosian Library
in Milan. He spotted that a book containing the records of the First Church
Council of Chalcedon in ad 451 had been made out of reused parchment. The
earlier writing on each sheet had been erased (washing with milk and oat-bran
was the common method), and the minutes of the Church Council copied on top.
As often in reused documents of this kind, the original text had begun to
show through the later writing, and was in part legible. It turned out that the recycled
sheets had come from a very mixed bag of books. There was a single page of Juvenal’s Satires, part of Pliny’s speech in
praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of
St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were
faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the
second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who
reigned from 161 to 180. The majority of the letters in the palimpsest were
between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius himself, both
before and after he had ascended to the throne. Unlike the passages from
Juvenal and Pliny, these were entirely new discoveries. By an almost suspicious
coincidence, when Mai moved to the Vatican Library a few years later, he
found another volume of the same proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon –
with more of Fronto’s correspondence detectable
under the later text. Altogether, these palimpsests had preserved more than
200 letters – some 80 of them written by Marcus Aurelius. Not only did this
count as the third great collection of private letters to have survived from
classical antiquity, after those of Cicero and Pliny, it also promised
insights into the private world of one of the most renowned Roman rulers: the
philosopher-emperor and author of the philosophical Meditations;
persecutor of Christians; conqueror of the Germans (in campaigns immortalised on his column in Rome); and father of the
monstrous emperor Commodus. For many thinkers of the 19th century – from
Darwin to Nietzsche – Marcus was an intellectual hero. Even Bill Clinton
claimed (according to Frank McLynn in his new
biography) ‘to have read and reread’ the Meditations during his
presidency. For most people now, Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the elderly
emperor smothered by young Commodus on campaign on the German frontier at the
start of the movie Gladiator. The rest of the story of the
discovery of these letters is less heroic. The text proved almost impossible
to read in many places – a problem made worse by Mai’s interventions.
Sharp-eyed maybe, but no scientist, Mai applied chemicals to the Ambrosian parchment in order to make the underlying text
easier to decipher. In fact, the effect was almost completely to obliterate
it. But even what was legible hardly matched up to expectations. For a start,
whoever had collected the letters (surely not Fronto
himself) had paid little attention to chronology, so that the exact, or even
relative, dates of many were hard to fathom. But, more to the point, most
19th-century scholars had expected more elevated subject matter in these
letters between the prince (later emperor) and his distinguished tutor in
rhetoric. When Fronto wasn’t indulging in
scholastic disputes about rhetorical theory, or the meaning and usage of
obscure Latin words (what was the most appropriate term for ‘removing a
stain’, maculam eluere,
abluere or elavere?),
he was complaining about his physical ailments: ‘I have been seized with a
dreadful pain in my neck, but my foot is better’, ‘I’m fine except that I can
hardly walk because of a pain in the toes of my left foot’, ‘I’ve been seized
with a terrible pain in the groin – all the pain from my back and pelvis has
concentrated there’, and so on, and on. But even more disconcerting were
the open expressions of love, longing and desire found throughout the letters.
‘I love the gods who care for you, I love life because of you, I love letters
with you . . . I gorge myself on love for
you,’ as Fronto signed off one letter to his pupil.
Or, as Marcus put it, at the end of what is probably one of the earliest
letters in the collection, written when he was about 18, ‘Farewell, breath of
my life. Should I not burn with love for you when you have written to me as
you have. What am I to do? I can’t stop. Last year, at the very same time and
the very same place, I found that I was burning with longing for my mother.
This year the longing is set alight by you.’ It is hardly surprising,
perhaps, that Amy Richlin recently argued – in Marcus
Aurelius in Love (2006) – that, whether or not they were physical lovers,
there was a marked erotic dimension in the relationship between tutor and
imperial pupil. Not something that Mai had been expecting, or hoping, to find
when he came upon the precious correspondence. McLynn will have none of this. In fact, in his account of
Marcus’ life, Fronto is a tedious hypochondriac,
whose malign influence his pupil was eager to escape – and indeed already had
escaped by the mid-140s, when he was in his early twenties, more than 15
years before he became emperor. Perhaps, he writes, ‘Marcus had learned all
he needed from Fronto; perhaps he had begun to tire
of the older man’s pedantic ways; and, probably most of all, he was by now
bored with rhetoric and wanted to switch full time to philosophy.’ On this
view, many of the later letters in the collection are nothing more than
attempts by Fronto to wheedle his way back into
Marcus’ affections. Sometimes this is by fawning: in one letter, for example,
he claims that his relationship with Marcus was more important to him than
holding the consulship, and proceeds to compare their friendship to that of
Achilles and Patroclus. Sometimes it is by playing
for sympathy – hence all the complaints about ill-health. This did not cut
much ice, McLynn believes, with Marcus himself, but
it has worked with modern scholars, who have been convinced by this
correspondence that there was a particularly close relationship between Fronto and his pupil. What, then, of the erotic language
of the letters? McLynn sees no need to suppose
anything directly sexual here at all. This is merely the idiom of the second
century, reflecting a world unlike our own (he claims), in which it was
possible for two men to ‘express love without sexuality’. Or – though this
seems a significantly different point – ‘Marcus and Fronto
used the word “love” in a ludic way . . . it was a kind of
elaborate charade or game, in its way part of the very rhetorical hyperbole
that Fronto was supposed to be teaching his pupil.’ It is, of course, impossible now –
as it no doubt always was – to know what, if anything,
went on between Fronto and Marcus when the lights
were out. McLynn is right to say that we cannot
move directly from a loving linguistic idiom to sexual practice (the same is
true when we try to decode the sentimentality of 19th-century women’s
letters). And the fact, as we have seen, that Marcus compares his longing for
Fronto to his longing for his mother does not
instantly suggest sexual desire. That said, McLynn consistently plays down the aggressively eroticised tone of the correspondence, as well as the
implications of Fronto’s comparing of his own
relationship with his pupil to that of Achilles with Patroclus.
Long before the second century, this Homeric pair had become a well
recognised symbol for male homoeroticism. The problem with McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius is not just how he
chooses to tell the story of Fronto and Marcus,
which is only one element in his vast study of the reign. Apart from the many
digressions that help him fill these pages (a whole chapter on the reign of
Commodus, an eight-page summary of Rome’s relations with Parthia from the
first century BC, and another 15 on the Germans) he has some big claims to
make about Marcus Aurelius’ place in the wider history of the Roman Empire.
Like many others, Gibbon among them, McLynn has
considerable admiration for the moral stature and personal integrity of the
emperor himself. Yet, for all those virtues, he sees the reign as the
beginning of the end of the glory days of Roman imperial power – thanks to a
combination of the poisoned legacy of the paranoid emperor Hadrian, the
ambivalent political and military successes of Marcus himself, and a
devastating plague, which may on McLynn’s generous
estimates have wiped out up to 18 million people across the Roman world,
including the emperor himself (despite the Gladiator version of his
death). He was in other words a decent, thoughtful man ‘caught up in the
whirlwind of history’ – the Jan Christian Smuts of his generation, as one,
rather forced, comparison in McLynn’s final chapter
presents him. There may be something in this
(though there are rather too many ‘whirlwinds of history’ rushing through this
book for my taste). But the real problem is that, as in his discussion of Fronto and Marcus, McLynn is
throughout reluctant to share with his readers the curious fragility of the
evidence on which his own version of Marcus Aurelius’ life and achievements
is based. So, unlike Richlin, he chooses not to
explain the strange history of the Fronto letters
or to remark on the gaps in the correspondence and the reasons that may lie
behind them. When he uses the letters to reconstruct the major events of the
reign, or even just the shifting fortunes of Marcus and Fronto
themselves, he does not stop to point out that the dates of many of them are
either unknown or disputed – that you cannot, for very obvious reasons,
simply string them together into a narrative. It is surely the job of all
biographers to explain what lies behind their own reconstruction of their
subject’s life: biography is always as much about how we know as what. But in
the case of ancient biography, and those curious pockets of ‘evidence’ through
which we hope occasionally to glimpse the lives of the Greeks and Romans, it
is even more important to make clear the processes by which the ancient life
story has been reconstructed. This is what McLynn,
in his apparently confident account, repeatedly fails to do. The truth is that the life of
Marcus is, on the face of it, better documented than that of most other Roman
emperors, never mind the rest of the ordinary Roman population, who are
almost entirely lost to us. Yet most of that documentation is, in its own
way, as puzzling and difficult to interpret as the correspondence with Fronto. There is, to be sure, an ancient biography on
which to draw – a short life story of Marcus in the series known as the Historia Augusta. This is a compilation of
biographies of Roman emperors, and a few also-rans and usurpers, from the
early second-century Hadrian (who first fingered Marcus as a potential
successor to the throne, despite his having only remote links by birth to the
ruling dynasty) to some short-lived rulers of the 280s. It purports to be
written by a team of six historians at the very end of the third century,
though it is now acknowledged to be the work of just one man writing at least
a century later. The reason for this pretence
remains a mystery, but there is no doubt that most of the biographies it
contains have very little claim to strict historical accuracy, even if they
vividly reflect some of the obsessions of Roman imperial culture – from the
conventions of elite dining to the murderous tendencies of the nastier
autocrats. This is the source, for example, of the anecdote about that
extraordinary third-century emperor Elagabalus, who is supposed to have
killed his dinner-guests with kindness – literally. He let so many rose
petals fall from the ceiling of his imperial dining-room that his guests were
suffocated. The earlier biographies in this
series are, admittedly, rather less flamboyant than the later ones. Marcus
Aurelius is painted as a noble philosopher without any of the extreme vices
of his successors. Yet for McLynn to pass over his
own reliance on this source with only the most gentle of health warnings (‘I
have found it reliable enough for the reign of Marcus Aurelius’ – how does he
know?) is in effect to shrug off responsibility for his own narrative. But at the very centre of the modern image of Marcus Aurelius are his Meditations
– the personal, disconnected, philosophical musings that have been largely
responsible for his reputation as a philosopher-emperor, conquering the
Germans (or persecuting the Christians) by day, while puzzling over ethical
conundrums by night and consigning his thoughts to paper and posterity. It is
from this source that McLynn has constructed his
own view of Marcus’ character as slightly priggish and internally conflicted
– while at the same time a man of duty and ‘supreme integrity’. But by
careful selection (for no one except an academic philosopher could possibly
read the original from start to finish) the Meditations have also
launched Marcus Aurelius into wider modern fame, as the bestselling father of
self-help guides, popular psychology and ‘spiritual teaching’. The secret of
this success is not simply the folk wisdom that generous translation can
construct out of Marcus’ thorny Greek, which he chose over his native Latin
for writing these philosophical thoughts. ‘Not becoming like your enemy is
the best revenge,’ for example, is a decidedly more memorable version of the
original: ‘The noblest form of retribution is not to become an imitation.’
(Not only more obscure than its modern version, this is probably a reference
to a passage of Plato, which argues the reverse – an academic allusion about
as far from ‘folk wisdom’ as you could get.) But part of the contemporary
appeal also lies in the feeling that the Meditations offer us a rare
glimpse into the personal dilemmas of the man in charge of the Roman Empire.
Here we see straight through to the mental processes of the man at the very
top of the Roman world. Hence their appeal to the likes of Clinton. And hence
the propaganda value in claiming to be reading them: I too am struggling, so
the message runs, with the ethics of world leadership. Again, it is more complicated. We
now read Marcus’ Meditations as a coherent work organised
in 12 separate books, further subdivided into separate sections, under an
overall title. All these features are modern, and combine to give us the
impression that we are dealing with a private introspective work of
literature, somewhere on the spectrum between Augustine’s Confessions,
the theological theorising of Pascal’s Pensées and an 18th-century commonplace book. In
fact, we have no information on the origin and purpose of the work at all. We
do not know what it was originally called (or if, indeed, it was ever
intended by its author to be the kind of thing that would have a title). We
do not know when or in what circumstances it was written. Some references in
the text seem to imply an elderly author and the idea has grown up that some
of it at least was written on the long nights of the German campaign. (This
idea is supported by the subtitles of two of the books, ‘Written among the Quadi on the River Gran’, ‘Written in Carnuntum’
– though these are more likely to be the bright idea of some medieval copyist
than geographic references inserted by Marcus himself.) We have no clue who
chose to put it into public circulation, or why. The first reference we have
to it is from the 360s, when it appears to be going under the name Admonitions. If a text like this were to be
discovered today in the sands of Egypt, not tied to the name of an emperor,
we would almost certainly interpret it as a set of fairly routine
philosophical exercises – the kind of thing that a philosophically trained
member of the Roman elite would compose to keep himself in good intellectual
shape. Although we often choose to read it in a narrowly personal way, much
of the material draws on a fairly standard repertoire of ancient
philosophical theory. So for example, ‘On death: either dispersal, if we are
composed of atoms; or if we are a living unity, either extinction or a change
of abode’ (VII, 32). Even ‘A king’s lot: to do good
and be damned’ (VII, 36) is not a reflection on monarchy from the coalface,
but a quotation on the perils of autocracy by the philosopher Antisthenes.
When McLynn chooses (as many have before him) to
scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus’ inner conflicts, he might
as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of a
modern philosophy undergraduate. Even more crucial is the question
of typicality. The really big problem in understanding the Roman world is not
the lack of evidence (there is enough to keep most scholars going for more
than a lifetime), but not knowing how typical or representative that evidence
might be. Hence the problem of pinning down the relationship between Fronto and Marcus. If we had more examples of letters
between Romans and their tutors, we would have a better idea whether this
particular correspondence looked unusual. The nearest parallel I know to such
strikingly eroticised language comes from the
letters between Cicero and his slave Tiro – but
there have been questions about the precise nature of that relationship too. In the case of philosophy, it’s
true that Marcus was hailed by Roman writers themselves as ‘the
philosopher-emperor’, as if that was an unusual combination. And this has
predictably led to a modern emphasis on the mixed messages of Marcus’ reign,
from his image as the relentless conqueror of the Germans to the reflective,
introspective, ethical thinker (or as McLynn’s
subtitle has it, ‘Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor’). But we have plenty of
evidence that other Roman emperors were thoroughly philosophically trained:
Hadrian, for example, or even the first emperor Augustus, who wrote his own Exhortations
to Philosophy, now lost. There seems to me a fair chance that, though the
Meditations is a rare survival, works like it might well have been
found on the desk (and from the pen) of many a Roman ruler. What, after all,
would Augustus’ Exhortations have looked like, if that had survived?
And what difference would it make to how we told the story of his reign? To put this another way: might we
not get further in understanding Marcus Aurelius and his reign by not
treating him as a rare hybrid? With his desire for military glory, his
disastrous succession plans, his wayward wife, and his spare-time interest in
philosophy, might he not actually be rather ordinary by the standard of Roman
emperors? |
