60 Fun Facts About Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was the last of which line of Roman rulers?

The Five Good Emperors. The four before him had no surviving sons, so each adopted his successor; Marcus ended the run by handing the empire to his own son, Commodus.

Marcus Aurelius is remembered as a practitioner of which school of philosophy?

Stoicism. As a boy he took up the philosopher's rough cloak and slept on the ground, until his mother talked him into using a bed.

What does Ta eis heauton, the traditional title of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, literally mean?

Things to himself. Marcus probably gave his notes no title at all: this one is first recorded around 900, and the name Meditations dates from a 17th-century edition.

Which famous text shares the Meditations' Koine Greek?

The New Testament. Koine was the shared Greek of the eastern empire, and Rome's elite prized the language for learning: the young Marcus had three Greek masters of oratory to one Latin one.

The first book of the Meditations is a list of what?

Thanks. He credits those who shaped him one by one, down to the great-grandfather who saw that he had good teachers at home and taught him such things are worth the money.

In which city did Marcus Aurelius fund salaried teaching chairs in philosophy during his eastern tour of 176?

Athens. Cassius Dio says he set up the posts for the benefit of the whole world, and he used the same visit to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The second book of the Meditations was written at which Roman legionary base on the Danube?

Carnuntum. Marcus ran his northern war from the base for about three years, and in 193 the legion stationed there proclaimed its governor, Septimius Severus, emperor.

Marcus Aurelius was born on which of Rome's hills?

Caelian. He grew up in his mother's villa there, and when adoption made him an imperial heir in his teens he is said to have moved out with regret, listing the evils of power.

Marcus Aurelius's paternal family, the Annii Veri, came to Rome from a small town in which modern country?

Spain. His great-grandfather left a town near Córdoba to become a Roman senator, the same road the emperor Trajan's family had taken from the same province.

Marcus Aurelius's mother inherited a fortune built partly on which business?

Brickworks. Rome was in a building boom and her family's kilns outside the city fed it, part of an inheritance counted among the largest fortunes of the day.

In a much-quoted passage of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius argues himself out of staying where?

In his warm bed. Book 5 opens with him telling himself he was not made to huddle under the blankets, since even the ants, spiders and bees get up and do their work.

As a boy Marcus Aurelius joined the Salii, priests who carried sacred shields for which god?

Mars. When the priests tossed their crowns at the god's banquet couch, the boy's is said to have landed on the god's brow, later read as an omen that he would rule.

In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius deflates his own imperial purple robe as mere sheep's wool dyed with what?

Shellfish blood. It is his exercise in seeing things stripped of glamour: in the same passage a prized vintage is only grape juice and a roast is the dead body of a pig.

Which emperor adopted Antoninus Pius in 138 on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius?

Hadrian. His first choice of heir had just died, so the ailing emperor settled the succession two steps ahead, and one of the two boys he named was the one he had nicknamed Verissimus, 'most true'.

Marcus's tutors included Herodes Atticus and which orator, whose letters to Marcus survive?

Cornelius Fronto. The letters were lost for centuries until 1815, when a scholar in Milan found them under the text of a parchment that had been scraped and reused.

Whom did Marcus Aurelius marry in 145?

Faustina, Antoninus's daughter. She had first been promised to another boy and Marcus to that boy's sister; once Antoninus was emperor he cancelled both betrothals and matched the cousins.

The widowed Marcus Aurelius reportedly took a concubine to spare his children what?

A stepmother. His ancient biography says the woman he had once been engaged to angled to marry him, and he chose the daughter of one of his late wife's stewards as a companion instead.

What honorary title did the army give Faustina, who accompanied Marcus on his northern campaigns?

Mater Castrorum in Latin; she was deified after dying at the military camp of Halala in 175.

With whom did Marcus Aurelius share the throne on his accession in 161?

Lucius Verus. The Senate meant to confirm Marcus alone, but he refused to take office unless his adoptive brother got equal powers, giving Rome two emperors at once for the first time.

Which eastern power attacked Rome's client kingdom of Armenia in 161, starting Marcus Aurelius's first war?

The Parthian Empire. Its king wiped out a Roman legion in Armenia and pushed on into Syria, so Marcus sent his co-emperor east to take command while he stayed in Rome.

The Antonine Plague, which struck the empire from about 165, is thought by most scholars to have been what?

Smallpox. The diagnosis rests on one doctor's notes of fever and a blistering rash, so it is not certain; what the accounts agree on is that troops brought it home from the eastern war.

The Antonine Plague is also named after which physician who described it?

Galen. He slipped out of Rome as the epidemic closed in, only to be summoned to the emperors' army camp in northern Italy two years later, and he ended up as court physician.

In one Roman tale, the Antonine Plague escaped when a soldier cut open what in Apollo's temple?

A golden casket. The story, set in Babylonia, has a deadly vapour rise out of it and follow the army home, province by province, all the way to Rome.

Envoys claiming to represent 'Andun', Chinese for Marcus Aurelius's name Antoninus, reached which dynasty's court in 166?

Han. Chinese annals say the visitors brought ivory, rhinoceros horn and turtle shell, and add that tribute so ordinary aroused suspicion.

The Marcomanni, who crossed the Danube in 166 and began Marcus Aurelius's northern wars, came from where?

Bohemia. Within a few years they and their allies were over the Alps, destroying the town of Opitergium and besieging Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic.

The Historia Augusta says Marcus Aurelius planned two new provinces beyond the Danube: Marcomannia and which other?

Sarmatia. His biographer says a general's revolt in the East pulled him away just as he was ready to annex the land, and that he died a year short of finishing the job.

Marcus Aurelius paid for his northern wars by publicly auctioning what?

Palace treasures. Gold goblets and his wife's gold-embroidered silks went under the hammer in Trajan's Forum, and once the war was won he offered buyers their money back.

Which general was proclaimed emperor in 175 after a false report of Marcus Aurelius's death?

Avidius Cassius. His 'dream of empire' lasted three months and six days before one of his own centurions killed him, and Marcus refused to look at the severed head and had it buried.

What reportedly saved Marcus Aurelius's army from dying of thirst?

A rainstorm. Pagan writers credited the emperor's prayers or an Egyptian magician in his retinue, Christians claimed it for their own soldiers' prayers, and the scene is carved on his column.

One ancient tradition says Marcus Aurelius died in 180 at a legionary camp on the site of which modern capital?

Vienna. The camp was Vindobona, though another ancient writer names Sirmium in modern Serbia; Cassius Dio claimed the emperor's doctors hastened his end to please Commodus.

Before Commodus, who was the only biological son to succeed his father as Roman emperor?

Titus. He followed his father Vespasian in 79, and no emperor after him had a son alive to inherit until Marcus, which is why adoption settled the throne for most of a century.

Cassius Dio wrote that under Commodus, Rome descended from a kingdom of gold to one of what?

Iron and rust. Dio saw the change at first hand as a senator under Commodus, and says he once chewed the laurel leaves of his wreath to keep from laughing at the emperor in the arena.

Before Commodus and his twin were born in 161, their mother is said to have dreamed of giving birth to two what?

Serpents. In the dream one was fiercer than the other; the twin brother died at about four, and the survivor grew up to be the emperor Commodus.

Who strangled Commodus on the last night of 192, after an attempt to poison him had failed?

The wrestler Narcissus. He was the emperor's own training partner for the arena, and the plotters sent him in when Commodus vomited up the poison his mistress had served.

The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius survived the Middle Ages because it was mistaken for whom?

Constantine the Great. Medieval Romans called it the horse of Constantine, and that Christian label kept it out of the furnaces that swallowed more than twenty other bronze horsemen in the city.

Which Renaissance artist redesigned Rome's Capitoline Hill around the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and designed its pedestal?

Michelangelo. He set the statue at the centre of a star-patterned oval pavement, a view of the square that Italy later stamped on its 50-cent euro coin.

Which figure did Pope Sixtus V place atop the Column of Marcus Aurelius in 1589?

Saint Paul. Shortly before, the same pope had crowned Trajan's Column with Saint Peter, so Rome's two pagan victory columns ended up carrying the two apostles in place of their emperors.

Marcus Aurelius is often called a 'philosopher king', an ideal set out by which ancient thinker?

Plato. His ancient biography says Plato's line that states prosper when philosophers rule, or rulers take up philosophy, was always on his lips.

The family of Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius's adoptive father, came from Nemausus in Gaul, known today as which city?

Nîmes. His grandfather backed Vespasian's bid for the throne and rose from the Gallic town to two consulships; two generations later the family supplied an emperor of its own.

In a famous passage of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius tells himself each morning to expect which sort of people?

The meddling and ungrateful. He adds the arrogant, deceitful and envious to the list, then reminds himself that they act from ignorance and cannot harm him, so he has no cause for anger.

Which Prussian king held up Marcus Aurelius as his model ruler?

Frederick the Great. He wrote to Voltaire in 1777 that Marcus stood so far above other rulers, and even above philosophers, that any comparison with him was presumptuous.

Which 2014 book by Ryan Holiday takes its title from a line in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations?

The Obstacle Is the Way. The line comes from Book 5, where Marcus tells himself the mind can turn any hindrance into fuel, so that whatever blocks the road ends up helping him along it.

Which historian wrote that Marcus Aurelius 'alone of the emperors' proved his learning by 'his blameless character'?

Herodian. Writing about sixty years on, he made Marcus's death the starting point of his history, the standard against which he measured the turbulent reigns that followed.

Who played Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000)?

Richard Harris. His Marcus is murdered by Commodus after naming Maximus as heir; the real emperor had made his son co-ruler three years before he died.

Which actor played Marcus Aurelius in the 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire?

Alec Guinness. The epic earned back under a third of its cost at the American box office, and within months its producer, Samuel Bronston, was bankrupt.

Which daughter of Marcus Aurelius married his co-emperor and was later executed for plotting against her brother Commodus?

Lucilla. Widowed young, she was married against her wishes to an ageing general from Antioch, and after her plot failed Commodus exiled her to Capri and had her killed there.

Medieval accounts suggest that what small figure once crouched beneath the raised hoof of Marcus Aurelius's bronze horse?

A bound barbarian chief. That would make the rider's open hand a gesture of mercy to a beaten enemy, though others read it as an emperor simply addressing his troops.

Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius's adoptive father, may have earned the name Pius by pressing a reluctant Senate to do what?

Deify his predecessor. Senators loathed the late emperor for the death sentences of his last years, and a rival account says the name came from Antoninus sparing the men condemned.

The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was once covered all over in what?

Gilding. Roman folklore holds that when the gold spreads back over horse and rider, the tuft between the horse's ears, nicknamed the owl, will sing to announce the Last Judgment.

Before its move in 1538, where did the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius stand on public view through the Middle Ages?

Beside the Lateran Palace. A tenth-century papal chronicle is the first to place it there, recording that a rebellious city prefect was strung up from the statue by his hair.

Which pope, who first called the Council of Trent, moved Marcus Aurelius's statue to the Capitoline Hill?

Paul III. Prompted by the emperor Charles V's visit, he had Rome's run-down civic hill rebuilt as a showpiece, and the ancient bronze horseman was brought across the city to be its centrepiece.

Which actor played Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, in the 2000 film Gladiator?

Joaquin Phoenix. His Commodus is killed in a duel in the Colosseum; the real one ruled for more than twelve years and died in a palace plot.

The Column of Marcus Aurelius is built from giant stacked drums of which white marble?

Carrara. Each drum was hollowed out before stacking, so the finished shaft hides a spiral staircase lit by small slits cut through the carved scenes.

Romans called the Column of Marcus Aurelius the 'Columna Cochlis' after which creature, a nod to its spirals?

Snail. Latin cochlea meant the animal and, by extension, anything wound like its shell, a fit for a column whose carved frieze spirals up the outside and whose stair winds up the inside.

Which architect, who moved the Vatican obelisk for Sixtus V, restored the Column of Marcus Aurelius in 1589?

Domenico Fontana. His repairs saved the shaft but chiselled away the pedestal's original reliefs, and the inscription he added credits the column to the wrong emperor, Antoninus Pius.

The Column of Marcus Aurelius stands in front of which building in Rome?

Palazzo Chigi. Once the Austro-Hungarian embassy, the palace now houses Italy's prime minister, so the emperor's column looks onto the seat of the Italian government.

Marcus Aurelius's teacher Rusticus lent him the Discourses of which thinker, a former slave?

Epictetus. Rusticus lent Marcus his own copy of the Discourses, and the emperor went on to quote the freed slave by name in the Meditations.

Which fictional killer tells an investigator to "read Marcus Aurelius" and ask of each thing what it is in itself?

Hannibal Lecter. In The Silence of the Lambs he offers Clarice Starling the line as a clue: stop listing the murders and ask what need the killer serves by them.

Which Chinese premier said in 2007 that he had read the Meditations perhaps a hundred times?

Wen Jiabao. On a visit to Singapore he said the book sat by his bed, and quoted its line asking where the once-famous have gone: vanished like a wisp of smoke.

Which actor plays Marcus Aurelius's grandson, the hero of Ridley Scott's Gladiator II (2024)?

Paul Mescal. Ridley Scott had never heard of him until he watched four episodes of Normal People in a row, kept thinking about him and cast him after a short video call.