MARCUS AURELIUS

born April 26, AD 121, Rome died March 17, 180, Vindobona , or Sirmium, Pannonia in full Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, original name (until AD 161) Marcus Annius Verus Roman emperor (AD 161180), best known for his Meditations on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius has symbolized for many generations in the West the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. Additional reading Ancient sources. Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Vita M. Antonini philosophi, the standard and reasonably reliable life from the set of late Latin biographies of emperors; Dio Cassius, book lxxi, which survives only in Byzantine excerpts; Fronto, Epistulae, which presents the correspondence (of which it is important to use the modern edition by M.P.J. Van den Hout, 1954); Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, v, 1the account of the martyrs of Lyon; and A.S.L. Farquharson (ed.), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, 2 vol. (1944), the full annotated edition. Modern biographies. Farquharson's edition contains a brief biography (vol. 1, pp. 256268); the fullest treatment (in German) is by P. von Rohden and H. von Arnim in Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopdie, vol. 1, pp. 22792309 (1894), still fundamental in spite of its date. Anthony Birley, Marcus Aurelius (1966), is a more recent biography in English; A.S.L. Farquharson also produced a wider-ranging study: Marcus Aurelius: His Life and His World, ed. by D.A. Rees (1951). The general history of the principate by Albino Garzetti, L'impero da Tiberio agli Antonini (1960), places Marcus' reign in its historical setting and contains a useful bibliography. G.R. Stanton, Marcus Aurelius, Emperor and Philosopher, Historia, 18:570587 (1969), well represents a skeptical current in points of view about Marcus. Chronological problems. For more detail on the controversial problems of the chronology of the reign, see the papers of C.H. Dodd in Numismatic Chronicle, 11:209350 (1911), 13:162199, 276321 (1913), and 14:3491 (1914); W. Zwikker, Studien zur Markussule (1941); and J. Morris, The Dating of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15:3347 (1952).