Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in 121 CE, raised by tutors who steeped him in Stoic philosophy, adopted by the emperor Antoninus Pius in 138, and became co-emperor in 161 CE on Antoninus's death. He ruled for nineteen years through plague, financial crisis, and the longest sustained foreign wars Rome had fought in centuries. From 169 onwards the Marcomannic Wars on the Danube frontier kept him in the field for most of the rest of his life. In a leather-bound journal kept on those campaigns — never intended for publication — he wrote (in Greek) what we now call the : short paragraphs of Stoic self-correction reminding himself to bear with the difficult, to accept what he could not change, to remember that he too would soon be dust. He died of plague at the camp at Vindobona (modern Vienna) in 180 CE at fifty-eight. His son Commodus succeeded him and was — in the view of Edward Gibbon and most subsequent historians — the catastrophe that ended the Antonine golden age and opened the empire's long crisis. The is one of the most translated and reprinted books in human history.
All Figures
Roman Emperor · Stoic Philosopher
Marcus Aurelius
121 CE – 180 CE
The last of Rome's 'Five Good Emperors' — a Stoic philosopher-king who fought a frontier war for the last decade of his life and wrote a private journal of moral self-correction that has never gone out of print.
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