SOURCE: “The ‘Self’ as ‘Sufferer’,” in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, July, 1992, pp. 265-72.

[In the following essay, Perkins contends that Aurelius's obsession with suffering and death indicates that he never gained the self-mastery he sought.]

The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities.¹ Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological.² In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.”³ The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, the basis of their relationship with the divine; both came to understand their pain as profitable. Aristides' relationship with Asclepius, however, lasted only as long as his illness did. For Ignatius, death did not end transcendent control; he looked forward to a continuing existence with the divine and an enduring earthly community built around sufferers.

It is of particular interest that both these discourses, despite the many differences between their authors' social positions, construct a body facing pain as a subject. This similarity suggests that in the discourse of the second century a new conception of human subjecthood was gaining ground—the subject as sufferer. The emphasis on pain in Ignatius and Aristides ought not to be dismissed as evidence of individual pathology, but recognized as an indication of a discursive project, namely, the construction of a subject centered on pain and suffering.⁴

The emperor Marcus Aurelius, Aristides' contemporary, has left a text that represents a similar subject. The presence of this work strengthens the hypothesis that observes a discursive shift. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius attended to the same topics as Aristides and Ignatius did—suffering and death.⁵ Like them, this discursive focus has also earned him the label “pathological.”⁶ Since this epithet has now been heard so often, one may suspect that if there is pathology, it belongs to the culture rather than to the psychology of any individual.

Recently Robert Newman has explained the popularity of the genre of meditatio in late antiquity: “When personal instead of civic virtue became the chief aim of Stoic philosophy, the meditatio became the chief ethical tool.”⁷ The meditatio form allowed Stoics to prepare themselves for the proper assessment of life's vicissitudes by reflecting on them beforehand. An assessment of external events as well as their own emotions, attachments, and desires was central to the Stoics' system. Stoicism was premised on a belief that a natural order, a logos, permeates the universe and is the universe. The Stoic ideal was to live in conformity with this order, “with Nature,” as it was often put. Stoic morality was, in essence, a “morality of consent.”⁸ The Stoic sapiens was one who recognized the natural order, identified with it, and approved it. Such recognition was possible because of the human intellect (recognized variously by Marcus Aurelius as the nous, a piece of the divine, a daemon).⁹ This intellect allowed Stoics to objectify and distance from themselves all human and earthly distractions and thus to focus on the beauty of the divine world order, on Nature, and to recognize that only virtue—that is, identification with this order—actually matters.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as part of his effort to examine his life and to see things as they really are, as Epictetus had counseled Stoics to do (Diss. 1.1.25). This text was written during what must have been a difficult period, the last years of Marcus Aurelius's life when he was involved in almost continual military campaigns to beat back incursions into Roman territories. During this period, nevertheless, he took the time to write these philosophic exhortations to himself, to rouse his intellect to do its work of seeing things plainly (note his repeated instruction to himself—“always remember”).¹⁰

The Meditations seems to have provided Marcus Aurelius with an aid for approaching the Stoic goal that Apollonius had taught him: “to look to nothing else even for a moment save Reason alone; and to remain ever the same, in the throes of pain, on the loss of a child, during a lingering illness” (Meditations 1.8). Marcus Aurelius's list of troubles parallels those besetting Aristides, but Marcus turned to reason, rather than the transcendent, to master them.

The Meditations emphasized the areas particularly threatening Marcus Aurelius's Stoic equanimity; the text returned repeatedly to anger, the ephemerality of fame, and especially death. The text frequently recalled Marcus to the proper attitude toward death: “Despise not death, but welcome it, for Nature wills it like all else. For dissolution is but one of the processes of Nature” (Meditations 9.3). Marcus quoted Epictetus with approval:

A man while fondly kissing his child, says Epictetus, should whisper in his heart: “Tomorrow peradventure thou wilt die.” Ill-omened words these! Nay, said he, nothing is ill omened that signifies a natural process. Or is it ill-omened also to talk of ears of corn being reaped.

(Meditations 11.34)

Marcus insisted that death is a good: “Death is a release from impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets” (Meditations 6.28).

The frequent repetition of this lesson, however, betrays Marcus Aurelius's difficulty in learning it.¹¹ He dwelt, for example, on the irony that physicians, astrologers, and philosophers, all of whom dealt professionally with the avoidance of death's pangs, died despite their professional interest (Meditations 4.48). He rehearsed in several guises the monotonous catenation of death: “One closed a friend's eyes and was then himself laid out, and the friend who closed his, he too was laid out—and all this in a few short years” (Meditations 4.48). At another point, he recollected that all legendary figures were now alike in death; he ended a list of the illustrious dead with the names of Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus (Meditations 4.33). R. B. Rutherford has commented: “The next term in the series is unspoken but obvious.”¹² His own death seems to have been constantly on his mind, and he repeatedly offered himself proof for the naturalness of death:

Pass then through this tiny span of time in accordance with Nature, and come to journey's end with good grace, just as an olive falls when it is fully ripe, praising the earth that bore it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.

(Meditations 4.48)

Rutherford noted that “no subject in the Meditations is treated with such fascination, such endless variation” as death.¹³

The effect of this repeated textual attention to death, however, is not a sense of the author's peaceful acceptance, but rather a feeling that death held a smothering omnipresence for him. Marcus Aurelius insisted repeatedly that the knowledge that one conformed with nature provided an anodyne for the brevity of life; he wrote, for example, “All that thy seasons bring, O Nature, is fruit for me” (Meditations 4.23). His continual return to the topic, however, seems akin to probing an aching tooth with the tongue to see if it still hurts. He found that it still did. It was a central tenet of Hellenistic philosophy that reason could master the pain of life's vicissitudes and the melancholy of death. But Marcus Aurelius's text suggests that in the discursive climate of the second century even the reason of the emperor, supported by every material and social benefit, was barely adequate to the task.

Marcus Aurelius's rejection of the body in the Meditations only exacerbates the sense of melancholy pervading his work.¹⁴ His contempt for the body has often been said to be more Platonic than Stoic.¹⁵ As Epictetus had, Marcus Aurelius saw the body as nothing but a corpse (Meditations 4.41). He counseled himself, “as one already dying disdain the flesh: it is naught but gore and bones and a network compact of nerves and veins and arteries” (Meditations 2.2). He pictured the body after death, which was just a bagful of stink and filthy gore (Meditations 8.37). His sketch of bathing—usually held as one of the chief pleasures of ancient life—conveyed the depth of his disgust: “As the process of bathing appears to you—oil, sweat, muck, greasy water, all that is disgusting—such is every part of life and all material things in it” (Meditations 8.24). Indeed, Marcus Aurelius seemed disgusted by all bodily activities. He asked rhetorically “What kind of men they are—eating, sleeping, copulating, excreting and so on” (Meditations 10.19). All of life's material treasures when seen aright were also contemptible in his eyes:

Seeds of decay in the underlying material of everything—water, dust, bones, reek. Again, marble but nodules of earth, and gold and silver but dross, garments merely hair-turfs, and purple only blood. And so with everything else.

(Meditations 9.36)

It is not possible to read much joy in such descriptions. Rather, Marcus Aurelius sketched a life that made departure easy. The implied lesson in many of his vignettes is whether death can be so terrible if such is life:

All that we prize so highly in our lives is empty and rotten and paltry and we but as puppies snapping at each other, as quarrelsome children now laughing and anon in tears. But faith and modesty and justice and truth.

(Meditations 5.33)

The abstractions listed in this quotation named the virtues that supposedly made life bearable. Life in the aggregate otherwise had little to recommend it:

An empty pageant, a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a tussel of spearsmen; a bone flung among a pack of curs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, laden and labouring; mice, scared and scampering away; little marionettes, dancing and jerking on their strings.

(Meditations 7.3)¹⁶

Marcus Aurelius was devoted to his philosophic code; his text leaves no doubt of that. He believed that “everything that befalls justly befalls” (Meditations 4.10), but his difficulty in maintaining this code is evident in the repetitions of the text itself. The impression that remains with his reader is the sheer joylessness with which he held the Stoic belief that in the last analysis nothing but reason mattered. Pain and death are not unnatural and therefore not evil (Meditations 6.13). This austere answer must serve, Marcus Aurelius insisted. He did puzzle, however, over what happens after death. The intellect was divine, but this did not necessarily imply immortality. John Rist has pointed out that Marcus Aurelius examined a number of approaches to this topic, considering the possibilities of extinction, reassimilation into the logos, or being scattered into atoms (Meditations 6.24), but that he tended toward extinction (Meditations 8.5) with the possibility that the soul might exist for some limited period (Meditations 4.21).¹⁷

Although on the surface, Marcus Aurelius's text is quite different from those of Aristides and Ignatius, it is very much the same in one sense. All three texts constructed a subject focused on suffering and death. The discursive response to death and pain of the Meditations was situated in the mainstream of the Hellenic philosophic tradition; Marcus Aurelius's self-mastery entailed the submission of his desires, fears, and emotions to the domination of his reason. Within this model, an individual's reason scanned the body only to reject the body's fears and desires as either unreal or unimportant. The Meditations do not share the resolution offered by the other two texts, namely, to turn the body over to the divine. Perhaps it is this difference, the turn away from the body, that contributes to the sense of the impersonal nature of this text, even though it was addressed “To Himself.”

Earlier texts from Marcus Aurelius's hand display a different self-representation. A number of the emperor's early letters survive among the correspondence of Fronto,¹⁸ an eminent orator and rhetorician as well as Marcus Aurelius's tutor. These letters reveal a young man, serious, devoted to his studies, and openly loving to his teacher and family. They also show that at this point he shared the kind of fixed attention to the body seen in Aristides' work.

The correspondence between Fronto and Marcus has been labeled hypochondriacal,¹⁹ but I would suggest that this mistakes the function of the body in the letters. Discussion of body symptoms comprises the entire text of some of the letters. By discussing their bodies Marcus Aurelius and Fronto signaled the personal nature of their communication. They communicated their affection by opening their bodies to each other. We again see how the body functioned as a privileged medium for talking about the self. Many of the letters of Marcus Aurelius and Fronto focused quite narrowly on the body in pain. One short letter from Fronto reads in its entirety:

I have been troubled, my Lord, in the night with widespread pains in my shoulder and elbow and knee and ankle. In fact, I have not been able to convey this news to you in my own writing.²⁰

One of Marcus Aurelius's letters shared a similar focus. The whole letter, except for its valediction, reads:

This is how I have passed the last few days. My sister was seized suddenly with such pain in the privy parts that it was dreadful to see her. Moreover, my mother, in the flurry of the moment, inadvertently ran her side against the corner of the wall, causing us as well as herself great pain by the accident. For myself, when I went to lie down I came upon a scorpion in my bed; however I was in time to kill it before lying down upon it. If you are better, that is a consolation. My mother feels easier now, thank the gods.²¹

In this correspondence, talking about the personal and talking about the body at risk seem to have become conflated.

In another exchange, Marcus Aurelius frightened Fronto, who believed that the symptoms being enumerated belonged to Marcus and was relieved when he learned they were really Marcus Aurelius's daughter's (reflecting an attitude not unlike Aristides' attitude regarding the slave children). Marcus Aurelius's letter began:

Thank the gods we seem to have some hopes of recovery. The diarrhea is stopped, the feverish attacks got rid of; the emaciation is extreme, and there is still some cough. You understand, of course, that I am telling you about our little Faustina.²²

For the young Marcus Aurelius, the body and its workings, even its excretions, caused little if any contempt. What happened to make the author of the Meditations disgusted to such an extent at bodily functions? One can only suggest age, experience, and a rigorous turn to philosophy. In another letter, Marcus described his desire to live a life that was more completely informed by higher principles: “Time and time again does your pupil blush and is angry with himself, for that twenty-five years old as I am, my soul has drunk nothing of nobler doctrines and purer principles.”²³ Marcus Aurelius went to the traditional philosophical wells to drink his nobler doctrines; through these, he was taught to master his self and his body under the direction of his reason. His Meditations shows that he had taken his lessons to heart and portray his determined retreat from a sense of his “self” as a body experiencing the pain of being.

Marcus Aurelius, buttressed by every material and political advantage, maintained his adherence to traditional modes of self-mastery. The history of the following centuries, however, suggests that many would abandon the answers that Hellenic philosophy offered or would graft them onto new stocks. My contention is that the kind of subjecthood forged in the texts I have examined in this article would provide the basis for the new political, social, and religious unities that would follow. From many different perspectives, the discourse of the early empire had begun to represent the human subject as a body in pain, focused on suffering and death. Despite the various particularities seen in the writings of Aelius Aristides, Ignatius of Antioch, and Marcus Aurelius, each author represented a subjectt focused on his own suffering body and approaching death. Two of the texts depicted a response to this “self” that involved relinquishing control and regulation to the divine. The Meditations, however, represented the more traditional reliance on self-mastery. Although written by an emperor who was in better health than Aelius Aristides and not under sentence of death as Ignatius of Antioch was, this text is, nevertheless, the least joyful of the three.

Notes

1. … See André Jean Festugière's valuable study, Personal Religion Among the Greeks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). Festugière offers Aristides as a “remarkable example of personal religion” (p. 98) and does not belong to the category of those scholars offended by Aristides.

2. Charles A. Behr (Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales [Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968]) characterizes Aristides as “neurotic” (p. 45) and “pathological” (p. 161). On Ignatius, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” Past and Present 26 (1963) 23. For Marcus Aurelius, see Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (trans. E. W. Dickes; 2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951) 2. 487.

3. R. B. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). For Aristides, see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales; and idem, trans., P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works (Leiden: Brill, 1981-86).

4. Joly's dating of the letters (Le dossier d'Ignace d'Antioche, 114) would make the two chronologically closer and strengthen this point.

5. For an English translation of the Meditations, except where otherwise specified, I have used The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome, Together with his Speeches and Sayings (trans. C. R. Haines; LCL; New York: Putnam's, 1924). See also Anthony Richard Birley, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography (rev. ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); P. A. Brunt, “Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations,” JRomS 64 (1974) 1-20; John M. Rist, “Are You a Stoic? The Case of Marcus Aurelius,” in Ben F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders, eds., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (3 vols.; London: SCM, 1982) 3. 23-45; Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; E. G. Whitehorne, “Was Marcus Aurelius a Hypochondriac?” Latomus 36 (1977) 413-21.

6. Misch, A History of Autobiography, 487.

7. Robert Newman, “Cotidie Meditare: Theory and Practice of the Meditatio in Imperial Stoicism,” ANRW 1.36.3 (1989) 1473-1517.

8. For this phrase, see Festugière, Personal Religion Among the Greeks, 107. See also Elizabeth Asmis, “The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius,” ANRW 1.36.3 (1989) 2228-52.

9. Rist, “Are You a Stoic?” 32.

10. Brunt, “Marcus Aurelius,” 3.

11. Brunt (ibid., appendix 2, pp. 19-20) lists citations for the theme of death. In his helpful study, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Rutherford examines several related themes; he notes that Brunt's list indicates that sixty-two—one out of every eight—chapters of the Meditations are concerned with death (p. 244).

12. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 163.

13. Ibid., 167.

14. On the melancholy of the Meditations, see Birley, Marcus Aurelius, 222. P. A. Brunt (review of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study, by R. B. Rutherford, JRomS 80 [1990] 218-19) rejects the general pessimism of the Meditations; he suggests instead that Marcus Aurelius's sense of his own imperfections was the cause for the gloom. Brunt describes the Meditations as the “only document to tell us what it was like to be a man struggling to live by Stoic principles” (p. 219). This is precisely my point, namely, the new difficulty of living out these precepts.

15. Asmis, “The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius,” 2247.

16. This translation is taken from Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 149.

17. Rist, “Are You a Stoic?” 33; Rutherford, The Mediations of Marcus Aurelius, 248.

18. The text of the correspondence between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius is found in Marcus Cornelius Fronto, Epistulae (ed. M. P. J. van den Hout; Leiden: Brill, 1954). The translation is taken from The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto (trans. C. R. Haines; LCL; 2 vols.; New York: Putnam's, 1919-1920). For the dating of the letters, see Edward Champlin, Fronto and Antonine Rome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) appendix A. See also Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Library of Early Christianity 5; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986) 34, 81-82.

19. Bowersock, Greek Sophists, 72. Whitehorne (“Was Marcus Aurelius a Hypochondriac?”) argues that the letters reflect Fronto's hypochondria rather than that of Marcus Aurelius and gives a list of Fronto's complaints (p. 415 nn. 13-16). According to Whitehorne, fifty-five of Fronto's letters refer to illness; thirty percent of all his letters refer to his own illnesses, while eight percent refer to the illnesses of others. Marcus Aurelius has fifty-four letters that mention illness; of these twenty-seven reply to Fronto's complaints. Twenty percent of the references are to Marcus Aurelius's own health.

20. Fronto Ad M. Caesar 4.9 (LCL, 2. 187).

21. Fronto Ad M. Caesar 5.23 (LCL, 1. 196). Both Bowersock (Greek Sophists, 72) and Whitehorne (“Was Marcus Aurelius a Hypochondriac?” 417-19) discuss this letter.

22. Fronto Ad M. Caesar 4.11 (LCL, 1. 202).

23. Fronto Ad M. Caesar 4.13 (LCL, 1. 217). Edward Champlin (“The Chronology of Fronto,” JRomS 64 [1974] 144) argues that this letter refers to jurisprudence, not philosophy. Birley (Marcus Aurelius, 222) points out, however, that the letter must suggest some “inner crisis” and dissatisfaction with himself, as well as a need for higher things. This letter is dated to 146 CE.