094 - Revolt and Meditations

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 94, Revolt and Meditations. As winter turned to spring in 175 AD, Marcus Aurelius was at the height of his power and prestige. When he became emperor fourteen years earlier, there were very reasonable doubts about his ability to handle major crises. Having never set foot outside of Italy or inside a legionary camp, there was no begrudging those who saw the fragile, intellectual Marcus ascend to the throne in 161 and figured a stiff breeze would blow his whole regime right over. But since then, the empire had been drowned, starved, plagued, and sucked into two major wars, one in the east against Parthia and one in the north against a forever shifting host of German tribes. Not only had frail Marcus not been blown over by this gale-force wind, but he had risen to meet each and every challenge with the perfect mix of steady confidence and genuine ability.

With such a capable leader leading so capably, it is no wonder that in 175, just after Marcus was putting the finishing touches on his brilliant northern campaigns, the eastern empire rose up in revolt. Wait, what? Let's go over that again, good emperor, triumphant general, effective administrator, revolt. Something doesn't add up. To escape from this apparent political non-sequitur, we need to take a look at the empire's situation as the spring of 175 dawned from another perspective, and then also remember that when the revolt in question finally breaks out, it was probably the result of a simple miscommunication.

You see, not everyone was super jazzed about Marcus' adventures along the Danube. I didn't do much soldier counting last week, but during the first phase of the Marcomannic Wars, Marcus had lost something like 10% of the 100,000-140,000 men he had assembled to fight the Germans. True, only a fraction of that number were actually battle casualties, with the rest succumbing to plague, but that only reinforced the point. The empire was being ravaged by smallpox, the provinces were slowly depopulating, there was not enough hands to work the fields, and what grain was being harvested was being sent to the front to feed the troops. Was now really the best time to be putting our foot down with the Germans? Was this really the best use of the empire's resources? These questions were answered, at least in the east, with a resounding no. Whether their outlook was overly parochial is a question for another time, so for now, let us simply note that, seeing only sacrifice without benefit, the citizens of the east were becoming progressively more hostile towards Marcus Aurelius and his pointless war in the frozen north.

In 172, protesting the excessive tax burden, an insurrection broke out in Egypt that was efficiently put down by none other than Navidius Cassius, who, in just a little while, will find himself harnessing that same angry energy in his own bid for power. Back in Rome, the senate was generally supportive of Marcus' policies, but there was a growing faction of senators who secretly opposed the imperial regime. Of these dissenting nobles, there were roughly two overlapping camps. One was clustered around the extended family of Lucius Verus, who felt they were being shut out from their rightful seat at the table now that Lucius was dead. After all, wasn't it Lucius' father who wise Hadrian had elevated first? And now, we're not getting any of the good appointments, any of the plum jobs? Much as the early years of the Principate had been defined by the struggle between the Julio and Claudian wings of the imperial family, so too was there now an undercurrent of tension between Lucius' Kaonei and Marcus' Aenei families.

The other camp was a collection of senators who saw an empire in crisis, and Marcus' obsession with waging war along the Danube only making things worse. Like the citizens of the east, they too pointed to the plagues and the famines and the depopulation, but unlike the eastern parochial grievances, these senators saw the big picture and did not like what they saw. In 171, in a sign of things to come, Moorish raiders attacked the practically un-garrisoned Iberian peninsula and sent the Spanish provinces spinning into chaos. Rich, fertile, and peaceful, an attack on Hispania was an attack on the very heart of the empire, and though Marcus sent one of his better generals to oversee the expulsion of the North African invaders, the emperor himself seemed to look upon the crisis as being of minor import compared to his work in Germania. A number of senators profoundly disagreed with this ordering of priorities, and not just because they owned extensive property on the peninsula, which, yeah, they did, but also because they looked at Marcus expending 140,000 men in defense of some frozen patch of dank forest while Spain burned, and couldn't help but wonder what on earth the emperor was thinking.

But it was not just the trouble in Spain that gave them pause, it was also the fact that the natives of Britannia took Marcus' almost single-minded focus on the German question as a sign that they ought to, once again, attempt to expel the Romans from their island. So the east was being worked to death, the west was dealing with uprisings and invasions on multiple fronts, and all the while, the Antonine plague continued to take its toll. And where was the emperor? Creating uncivilized rabble in the north by day, and composing esoteric philosophy in his tent by night.

Enter Ovidius Cassius. Now as I've mentioned once or twice, Ovidius Cassius probably did not mean to lead a revolt. The hero of the Parthian War had been on friendly terms with the imperial family for years, and in particular, maintained a correspondence with the Empress Faustina. During the winter of 174-175, it seems that Marcus' health had deteriorated to the point that Faustina was openly expressing concern to Cassius about the delicate issue of succession. Commodus, both her and Marcus' first choice to be heir, was not yet a man, and if Marcus died, the empire could be sucked into a civil war. The details of all this are sketchy, as the correspondence between the two was burned after Cassius' death, but it seems like Faustina may have offered her hand in marriage to Cassius in exchange for Cassius protecting Commodus' eventual claim to the throne. It also seems that Cassius may have missed the if Marcus died part of the sentence, and, perhaps spurred on by other rumors, took the note to read that the emperor was dead and Faustina was urging him to claim the throne.

In the spring of 175 then, Cassius allowed himself to be proclaimed Imperator by the Syrian legions, an oath that was quickly seconded by the Egyptian and Palestinian garrisons. But the tide of sedition stopped short in Cappadocia, where Martius Verus, Cassius' old comrade from the Parthian wars, refused to sign on. Instead, he dispatched a message to Marcus, warning him that the east was in revolt. As I said at the end of last week, the emperor was forced to drop what he was doing, make peace with the Azeges before they learned that Rome was divided, and then head east to confront the rebellion. Coming to terms with the surprise nomads, he packed up the imperial entourage, along with Faustina and Commodus, both of whom were living in the camp with him at the time, and made with all haste for Syria.

To the delight of conspiracy theorists who believe that Faustina and Cassius were not the victims of some innocent miscommunication, and were instead actively plotting behind Marcus' back, Faustina became sick while the caravan passed through Cappadocia, and, succumbing to the illness, suddenly died in mid-175. As with all imperial deaths, it was suspected that Marcus had done her in for conspiring against him, or that she had committed suicide, knowing that all the sordid details of her plot were about to come out. But no one has ever been able to show that her relationship with Marcus involved anything but unwavering support, or that her death was anything more than a sad tragedy for the emperor, yet another sad tragedy, and a life full of them.

Cassius' revolt lasted three months and six days. Though he was eventually alerted to the fact that the emperor was, you know, alive, Cassius decided to persist, probably reckoning that the die was already cast. In any event, he knew that there was untapped discontent among the nobility that might just rally enough of them to his cause that he could salvage the situation. But the private haters in the senate, unorganized and likely unknown even to each other, were not going to stick their necks out for the Syrian general, and before Marcus could stop them, the senate declared Cassius an enemy of the state. Had he been able to, the emperor would have killed the resolution, as he was looking forward to generously pardoning his old friend Cassius for the mistake he had made. But the declaration was made, and soon after, one of Cassius' own centurions patriotically assassinated the rogue general and sent his head to Marcus. The emperor, robbed of his chance to demonstrate his magnanimity, refused to view the remains, and ordered the head buried with honors.

Though the revolt fizzled out as quickly as it had arisen, Marcus continued his march east. Cassius' rebellion had not emerged from nothing. Clearly, the eastern provinces were feeling put out and put upon, so the emperor wisely decided to dole out a little imperial TLC. But along with the carrots he planned to sprinkle across the east, Marcus also broke out one big stick. He made a point of bypassing Antioch as he made his way through Syria. This intentional snubbing of the city that had been the first to support Cassius was made permanent by Marcus' declaration that all games were indefinitely cancelled in the city. The gladiator-fighting and chariot-racing mad citizens of Antioch had to suffer through six years without a sports spectacle of any kind until Commodus lifted the injunction after Marcus' death.

Which, I suppose, makes this as good a time as any to formally introduce Lucius Aurelius Commodus, who was by his father's side during all of this and who would remain with the emperor for the duration of Marcus' life. As I said last week, he had been born a twin in 161, but lost his brother three years later to childhood disease. Initially, he had taken a backseat to a younger brother named Marcus Aeneas Verus, who had been born in 162 and was pretty clearly the emperor's favorite. But when the younger Marcus died in 169 after failing to recover from a dangerous surgery, Commodus was left as the emperor's only surviving son, and thus became the heir apparent.

Much is made in the histories that Commodus' character, or lack thereof, was evident from early on, but since these biographies were written well after his assassination in 192, we can probably suspect that the accounts of Commodus' early years are to some degree mere literary foreshadowing. Once Commodus was left as the only surviving son, there was never any question that Marcus planned for the boy to succeed him. The emperor even had a policy of marrying his daughters off to men of far lower status than one might expect an imperial princess to command, so that Commodus would have no rivals within the family. The best of Marcus' sons-in-law was Claudius Pompeianus, whom Marcus had married to Lucius Verus' widow Lucilla. But Pompeianus too was of lowly origin, and he had risen to his high rank in the army by Marcus' favor alone, and was disdained by most of the nobility, including Faustina, who had been furiously opposed to the wedding.

Commodus received the same world-class, home-tutored education Marcus had received, but with one key difference. While Marcus had been kept away from the army, Commodus accompanied Marcus on campaign from at least 172 on, and became, much like Caligula before him, a beloved mascot of sorts for the rank-and-file soldiers. Cementing the relationship between heir and army, a relationship Marcus himself had literally been forced to pay for, the emperor had Commodus don the toga of manhood in July 175 in a legionary camp along the Danube, rather than back home in Rome, as would have been customary. At fourteen, Commodus was on the leading edge of when it was appropriate to don the toga of Aurelius, which usually happened sometime between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, but Cassius' revolt upped the timetable. Marcus had to be sure that whatever happened, his chosen heir would be literally man enough to succeed him.

Though the immediate crisis ended with Cassius' assassination and the revolt petering out, the fact that Commodus was now a man would go a long way towards suppressing future insurrection. After all, the whole premise of Cassius' revolt was that, should Marcus die, a dangerous power vacuum would open up that the child Commodus would have been unable to fill. But Commodus the man, hopefully, was a different story. Father and son wintered in Alexandria, and then spent 176 making their way back to Rome. The settlement with the various German tribes seemed to be holding, and for the first time in a long time, Rome had no enemies to fight, so the emperor was free to return home.

Both on his way to and returning from the east, Marcus initiated a number of reforms that he hoped would help nullify the causes of all the various troubles that had been plaguing the empire, up to and including the revolt of Ovidius Cassius. First, his settlement with the Azeges, forced on him by circumstance, actually turned out to be a positive development, as Marcus dispatched 8,000 Azegi horsemen to Britain to help quell the native uprising there. At the same time, he collected an auxiliary force of some 20,000 allied Germans, that is tribes whose peace terms with Rome had involved the pledging of troops, and ordered them to Syria, where they would set up shop and watch over not only the border, but the locals as well. The emperor also declared that henceforth, no senator would be allowed governorship of his home province, as Cassius had been with Syria, and which was definitely part of the reason why he had felt so confident in his little power grab.

The thrust of all of these initiatives is clear. The shuffling of regional forces would have had the effect of not only depleting the ranks of potentially rebellious natives, but also simultaneously putting them in charge of other natives to whom they had no affinity and no reason to support, and within whom the imported soldiers would find no support. And with the leadership brought in from yet another region, Marcus would be effectively alienating everyone from everyone else. In due time, he planned to recruit soldiers from the east and ship them up to the Danube to complete his circle of soldier-citizen leadership alienation and prevent future unifications of interest that led to things like Cassius' revolt.

The imperial caravan made its way to Rome by way of Greece and Athens, where both emperor and heir were inducted into the Eleusinian Mysteries, an act of particular significance as it demonstrated that some degree of normalcy was returning to the Middle Empire, and that despite the destruction of its ancient temple, the mystery religion par excellence was still going strong. Marcus and Commodus remained in Athens for a time, enjoying one of the empire's great cultural centers, and while there, Marcus decided to echo Hadrian's push to rejuvenate the city, but instead of sponsoring architectural projects, he endowed four philosophy chairs, one each for the four major schools, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, the latter of which obviously being the most near and dear to Marcus' heart.

As I mentioned last week, when Marcus was not out fighting in the field or in his tent resolving all the administrative and legal disputes that poured onto his desk, the emperor took time out to write a sort of philosophical diary as part of his daily quest to crack the underlying code of existence. The result, which we call the Meditations, but which technically has no proper name, does not read as a narrative, but rather as a series of short thoughts that express ideas independently of one another regarding whatever Marcus happened to be thinking about at the time. This can make the Meditations difficult to read straight through, but it is a style that lends itself particularly well to quotation, which is why passages from the book show up on magnets and calendars as often as they do in college curriculum, also helping the text to remain eternally relevant, is that Marcus was basically writing a series of reminders for himself as he strove to live virtuously. When you remove Marcus from the equation and read it yourself, what you get is a series of injunctions reminding you how to live virtuously. I think to varying degrees we are all always trying to improve ourselves, and here is this nice little collection of utterances telling you exactly how you should act. It's probably a bit morbid in places, like when he tells you that when you kiss your child goodnight, you should remind yourself that they may be dead in the morning, but as self-help manuals go, you could do a lot worse than the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

When everything gets boiled down, Marcus is essentially rephrasing a few basic themes over and over again in dozens of different ways, like when a police officer asks a suspect the same question over and over again in different ways in order to get them to trip up over their story. Marcus is basically trying to trip up his own head so that the really real truth can be revealed. But what is that truth? Who knows, but it certainly doesn't resemble in any way the universe as we perceive it. For Marcus, most of what we see and hear is either an illusion, like time or the apparent division of objects, or it is an objective fact that we emotionally misinterpret, like our negative posture towards death or our irrational attachment to glory.

For the Stoics, this latter bit was of the utmost importance. They were always going on about representations, in an attempt to address how and why the human mind fails to properly grapple with all the sensory data that is thrown its way. Marcus returns to this theme over and over again. Since for the Stoics, good means only living virtuously, and evil means only the absence of virtue, everything that doesn't fit into one of those two categories is of null value. Marcus cautions against getting involved with grief over the death of a loved one, or anger over the injustice of some crime, because these emotions stem from a fundamental misrepresentation within our own heads. We are not assigning the proper value to those events. Did you act as virtuously as you could have before the sad or mad event occurred? If the answer is yes, then your grief and anger are groundless. The universe unfolds itself, and we are mere witnesses. It was meant to be, and there is nothing you could or should have done about it. If you did not act virtuously, then your passions should not be directed at the end result, but on your own failure to perform the most noble actions possible.

Now obviously there is a tension here between fate and free will that neither Marcus nor his fellow Stoics was ever able to work out. Marcus returns often to a few basic tenets, the universe is one unified force, time is an illusion, all that will happen has already happened and will happen again, our destinies are set from birth, etc. etc. But on the other hand, he also dwells on the fact that we are supposed to choose to live virtuously and make further choices to conform our lives to the will of nature, which implies that we could make different choices and live at odds with the will of nature. But if all existence is a single, simultaneously occurring event, then where does free will enter the picture? Is that before or after everything that happens already happened?

Turning away from philosophy to a bit of poetic metaphor, what I think Marcus is trying to say is that the universe is like a musical chord, and we are each individual notes. We can either choose to pluck ourselves in harmony with that chord, or we can plug away on some discordant Bb. In Marcus' conception, the perfect fifth is good, and the only path to true happiness. That errant Bb, though, is evil. But philosophically, the logic of this metaphor becomes incoherent when you try to assert both fatalism and free will at the same time. That being said, there is a great deal to admire in Marcus' little nuggets of wisdom. Like, how much greater are the consequences of anger than the causes of it? Yeah, I think about that almost every day. Or never let the future disturb you, you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. I take some comfort in that. And how about, the object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. Yeah, preach on, brother. Or remember that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act in life. Yes, I promise not to just mindlessly go through the motions. Or finally, do not act as if you are going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good. Okay, I'll try.

The manuscript of the Meditations, originally written in Greek for the Emperor's Eyes alone, somehow managed to get copied, and was then published at some point in the years after Marcus' death. However, I have not been able to track down exactly how this happened, so if anyone out there has any information on this, by all means, let me know. From there, if I had to speculate, I'd say that it probably wound up in the Imperial Archives or one of the many private collections, and from there, transferred to the libraries of the Catholic Church, where the wisdom of Marcus was read, but more or less lay dormant for a thousand years, before being picked up by Renaissance scholars who were looking to find truth in places other than the Bible. Since then, this little book of sayings has been lauded by scholars not only for its insights into the human condition, but also because it is one of the first examples of honest personal, philosophic reflection. John Stuart Mill, for example, went so far as to compare it to the Sermon on the Mount.

Ironically, the continued publication and citation of the Meditations keeps Marcus Aurelius as one of the most identifiable of all Roman figures. This, for a man who looked so disdainfully on the vainglorious quest for posthumous fame, and who constantly reminded himself, how many who once rose to fame are now consigned to oblivion, and how many who sang their fame are long disappeared.

Next week, we'll close the book on the living Marcus Aurelius, and try to note without too much sarcasm that the reason why we know so much about his life and times is that, in a vainglorious quest for posthumous fame, he ordered a magnificent triumphal column built to record his exploits for all time.