20 Things You Didn’t Know About Marcus Aurelius
One of the pleasures of re-reading a book, re-watching a film, re-visiting a place, is that you always discover something new. The Stoics were fond of the idea — which comes from Heraclitus — that we never step in the same river twice. I have found this to be true when it comes to Marcus Aurelius, a man I have written about and studied now for nearly a decade and a half. Each time I read his writing, each time I talk about him, each time I visit a museum or place he lived, I understand him a little differently. I think about him differently. He speaks to me a little differently.
He teaches me something new.
It is amazing Meditations, year after year and read after read, feels both incredibly timely and incredibly timeless (there’s a reason the book has endured now for almost twenty centuries). It’s amazing that a person so famous — known to millions in his own lifetime and subject to countless books and articles and movies — could still be giving off new secrets, but indeed that’s what he’s doing.
In today’s post, I thought I would share some of the ones I have discovered, things you probably don’t know about one of the greatest thinkers, philosophers, and leaders who ever lived.
-He lived through a pandemic. Not just through a pandemic, but they named it after him! The Antonine Plague…
