Meditations

THE TWELFTH BOOK

This second portion of Book Twelve shifts from the formal Stoic meditations themselves to a deeply personal coda: the surviving correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and his former tutor, the rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto, together with editorial notes that anchor the work in its textual history.

The section opens with a striking vignette contrasting contemporary Roman soldiers with the stern discipline of earlier commanders. The cavalry of Marcus’s day, it is observed, were more groomed than armed; some had plucked the hair from their arms and legs, a recognized mark of effeminacy. Laelianus Pontius, a strict disciplinarian, crushed their cuirasses with his fingertips and found feather-stuffed cushions beneath their saddles. Most could barely mount a horse, much less hurl a lance with force. Dice, sleep, and wine filled the camp. The passage implicitly asks by what discipline such men could be reformed, summoning the standards of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, and Metellus as worthy models.

From military satire the section turns to the warm personal letters between master and pupil. Marcus reproaches Fronto for not seeking a reunion at court; Fronto responds with affectionate observations of Marcus’s daughter, who resembled both her parents, and later of the imperial “chicks,” one holding white bread “like a little prince,” the other common bread “like a true philosopher’s son.” Marcus’s letters show him solicitous for his delicate daughters, relieved when little Faustina returns from serious illness, and increasingly tender toward his aging teacher as infirmities mount.

The emotional climax is Fronto’s response to the death of his grandson in Germany during the wars against the Catti. After recounting the loss of five children, each “born to one already bereaved,” Fronto offers reflections on death, “more to be rejoiced at than bewailed,” and protests against Providence with a dignified summary of his life: no avarice, no treachery, friendship preserved, learning preferred to wealth, truth spoken, ingratitude patiently borne. The cry “woe is me! I have lost my Decianus” closes the letter.

The commentary notes that Marcus mentions Fronto only once in the Meditations, recalling that Fronto taught him “not to expect natural affection from the highly-born.” Whatever Fronto’s doctrine, Marcus found in him genuine affection, and Fronto’s name evokes the man, not rhetorical exercises.

A substantial apparatus of textual notes follows, explaining emendations to Casaubon’s translation and citations of Plutarch, Plato, Euripides, and others, alongside a glossary defining Stoic terms such as Apathia, the ideal of calm in all circumstance, and “middle things,” the Stoic category of indifferents, with biographical notes on figures from Heraclitus to Xenocrates.