Inside the Final Years of Marcus Aurelius

In the final years of his life, Marcus Aurelius was not a serene philosopher-king calmly contemplating eternal truths. He was a sick, exhausted, and profoundly lonely man who had watched nearly everyone he loved die before him. As Professor William O. Stephens explains in this conversation with Ryan Holiday, the Roman emperor spent his last days on the Danube frontier, wracked by digestive and respiratory ailments, dosed with a morphine-laced compound called theriac by his physician Galen, and writing what would become the Meditations — or as Stephens prefers to call them, the memoranda — in the shadow of his own mortality.

A Life Lived in the Presence of Death

Marcus Aurelius did not encounter death as an abstraction. His father died when he was young. Multiple children died young. His co-emperor Lucius Verus died, likely from the Antonine Plague. His wife Faustina died, probably from the same plague. The plague itself killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million people across the empire. Marcus did not quarantine or isolate himself; he stayed in the field, and the disease followed him everywhere.