 |
| Young Marcus |
Marcus' father Verus died when he was three years old and in
accordance with the custom for young aristocrats of the day he was brought up
for his first few years in the company of nurses seeing very little of his
mother Lucilla. He was adopted by his paternal grandfather Marcus Annius Verus
with whom he seemed to get on well and spent his early youth in the family home
on the Caelian Hill in Rome. He was tutored at home and it is here that we get the
first glimpses of what kind of influences must have started to play a part in
his philosophical education and perhaps his moral and intellectual development
as well.
Education at that time was a tuition based system and
influenced by Greek pedagogy with an emphasis at the higher levels on rhetoric
and philosophy. Those headed for a public or senatorial career would have
focussed more on a rhetoric and oratory training, trips to Greece in order to pursue
philosophy pure were also available for the higher class youths but this was surely more a mark of culture than any solid career skill. Even the training in rhetoric was supplementary rather than essential to a public career (outside of the law
courts) and we must remember that there were no degrees or qualifications in
the way that we understand them today that were required for entry to the career
ladder in Rome. Marcus would have been qualified for that already by birth and
thus the education at home he received would have been more the result of a
personally tailored choice of his guardians. At least at first; I would like to
think that like teens of any era, Marcus would have gone through his rebellious
phases or have fallen victim to the fads and fashions of aristocratic youth.
Most tutors were either Greek slaves or Freedmen. The Greeks seemed to have been the
go-to-guys for all things educational and during this era in Roman history
Greek style education and letters were enjoying a renaissance in the form of
the Second Sophistic.
The Second Sophistic is a literary-historical term roughly
covering the period from the reign of Nero (remember him from our Petronius
discussions?) to about 230 CE and includes amongst others none other than the
famed rhetor and philosopher Herodes Atticus (101-177 CE), whom Antoninus Pius
brought over to Rome to act as personal tutor to his sons, Marcus and Lucius
Verus (later to be co-emperor at Marcus request upon his accession).
 |
| Herodes Atticus |
Herodes as was to be expected had a strong leaning towards
Greek learning and Homeric culture, something which stood in contrast (and
later opposition it appears) with the Roman Stoically leaning Fronto, another
teacher and mentor of the young Marcus who had a more traditional Roman and
Latin philological bias. Herodes was appointed as tutor in about 140 and
already by the late 130s, Marcus seemed to have been quite taken by the image
at least of the Greek philosopher, inspired by his painting master Diognetus
who encouraged him to take up the rough woollen cloak, perhaps like the leather
jacket of the day, possibly studded with the name of Socrates on the back! The
boy even took this admiration to a practical level, sleeping on the floor
wrapped in his simple homespun garb, until his mother convinced him that a bed
was a more fitting place to rest his noble limbs! It has to be noted here that both
tutors from either side of the Greece-Rome spectrum were at best highly
suspicious of pure or hardcore actual philosophy, both being highly skilled orators and of a more
practical approach to what one could do with Greek or Roman learning in the spheres of statecraft or diplomacy. Fronto
warned Marcus against too much or even too little philosophy as dangerous and
misleading, looking down on his later philosophical sessions with Apollonius of
Chalcedon; Herodes aggressively declaimed against the Stoics and similar
philosophers as foolish and doomed to
living a ‘sluggish and enervated life’. In the end it seems that Marcus ignored
both of them and continued to be fascinated by the maxims of the Stoics (such
as Epictetus) and the philosophers, albeit on a sort of enthusiastic amateur
level.
Another early teacher, Alexander of Cotiaeum, apparently one
of the greatest Homeric scholars of the day, had a strong influence on his literary
styling and could be the inspiration for several Homeric quotations that can be
found in the Meditations. So even before Herodes appears on the scene,
Marcus has already indicated his penchant for the Greeks in general and philosophy in
particular. The illustrious Athenian rhetor can only have deepened this
admiration in something of a lifelong love affair that at times clashed with
the later demands of Imperial duty. We must also remember that the Meditations is written in koine Greek -
possibly we have here the later emperor Marcus expressing his inner thoughts in
a language he felt most fitted to the purpose of self-enquiry.
Marcus takes up the toga virilis in 136 and embarks on his
further education in oratory and rhetoric but even here, the tutors seem to be
weighted heavily on the Greek side; he was taught by Aninus Macer, Caninius
Celer and Herodes Atticus, all Greeks. On the Roman side he was taught Latin by
Fronto. Perhaps we should not read too much into this since as I have observed
earlier, tutors were predominantly Greek slaves or freedmen and it would
logically follow in many if not all aristocratic Roman parent’s minds that the
much admired Greek culture and letters would naturally be best taught by Greeks
themselves.
 |
| An even younger Marcus |
Fronto and Marcus seemed to have been particularly close,
even Greek style lovers as some scholars have suggested. It’s difficult to
judge since a lot of the effusive and at times florid language in the
correspondence is common to a lot of letters in antiquity and may be just that,
the convention of florid declaration of great admiration for an illustrious
pupil or master - however the jury is always out and the converse could be
quite possible. The discovery of the correspondence itself is in itself a
miraculous case of serendipity and another reason to disapprove intensely of
the wilful philistinism of the early church elders! It was discovered by chance
as a palimpsest on a holding in the Ambrosian Library in Milan in 1815 by
Cardinal Angelo Mai. He noticed that a book containing notes of the first
Church Council Meeting of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 had been written on
recycled parchment - faintly discernible beneath the early Christian doctrinal
musings was the entire correspondence between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius; together
with his later discovery of another volume of notes which had used the rest of
the original parchment ; a find of over 200 letters...80 written by Marcus
himself!
Finally, the deepest influence on the young man may well have been Quintus Junius
Rusticus (100-170), philosophical lineage descendant of Seneca and a truer
torch bearer of Stoicism than Fronto. Marcus has this to say of him in his
Meditations (i.15):
‘From Rusticus I
received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline;
and from him I learned not to be led astray to sophistic imitation, nor to
writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little exhortatory orations,
nor to showing myself off as a man who practices much discipline, or engages in
benevolent acts from a desire for ostentation’’
 |
| Quintus Junius Rusticus |
So from an early age Marcus steeped himself in Greek
philosophy and despite the warnings of his tutors, two of the most famous
orators of the day, he continued to display a life-long admiration of his woollen
cloaked heroes, using the literary skills of those self-same tutors to
eloquently muse on such teachings in the body of his communings with himself -
his meditations.
Euge and Vale!
