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Rome’s wicked emperor, Nero, had been dead a hundred years when there came to the throne a new emperor named Marcus Aurelius. He was just as good as Nero was bad. Many people think he was one of the noblest and greatest men who ever lived.
At this time most of the Romans had very little religion of any sort. They were not Christians, but neither did they put much faith in their own gods—Jupiter and Juno and the rest. They honored them because they had been brought up to honor them and because they thought that if they didn’t honor them, they might have bad luck. So they took no chances.
But instead of believing in such gods, many other Romans followed the teachings of some wise man, or philosopher, and tried to obey the rules that he had made.
About 300 B.C. a Greek philosopher named Zeno had taught a philosophy called Stoicism. His ideas became popular, and a century later they spread to Rome. Many Romans liked Stoicism because it taught good behavior, wisdom, and strength to suffer hardship and pain. Seneca, the teacher whom Nero killed, became a Stoic and wrote about Stoicism.
A hundred years later, along came the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was a Stoic, too, and he needed to be, for he had a hard and difficult life. He wrote down his thoughts, now called his Meditations . He didn’t intend to have his thoughts published; he just wrote them down to remind himself how he ought to think and behave.
Here are some of the ideas that Marcus Aurelius believed in:
Marcus Aurelius was a good Stoic. He followed his own rules, and he always did what he thought was his duty. He was kind to people, was good to the poor, and managed to get rid of much of the cruelty and brutality in the gladiators’ shows.
Even today, people—thousands of them—read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations . Some of his sayings sound almost as though they come from the Bible. Even today, too, people who bear pain and hardship without a murmur are described as stoic.
One of Marcus Aurelius’s rules was “Forgive your enemies.” Though Marcus Aurelius was not a Christian, nevertheless he was more moral in the way he acted than some of the later emperors who were Christians!
Like many people who are very good themselves, Marcus Aurelius was unable to bring up his son to be good. Commodus, his son, was just as bad as his father was good. When the son grew up and was able to choose for himself and do as he pleased, he forgot all about doing his duty and behaving well and obeying the laws of God. Instead, Commodus’s one thought was pleasure, and the worst kind of pleasure at that. Commodus forgot his father’s ideas about being kind to others and treating them like brothers. He thought only of giving himself a good time.
Commodus was an athlete and had beautiful muscles and a handsome figure, of which he was so proud that he had a statue made of himself. The statue showed him as the strong and muscular god Hercules. Commodus made the people worship him as if he were this god. Just to show off his muscles and his muscular ability, he himself took part in prizefights. He poisoned or killed anyone who found fault with or criticized him. He led a wild and dissipated life, but at last he met the end that he deserved. Many attempts to kill him failed, but finally he was strangled to death by a wrestler.
Pleasure! For Commodus, pleasure meant feasting too much and drinking too much and going to wild all-night parties. But there are other kinds of pleasure, good kinds, and Commodus had nothing to do with them.
About the same time as Zeno, there lived another Greek wise man, or philosopher, named Epicurus. His ideas, too, became popular in Rome, and thousands followed his teachings. The Epicureans—the followers of Epicurus — thought that the highest good was pleasure, but the pleasure must be of the right kind .
Here are a few of the pleasures that the Epicureans considered good:
• Being honest and truthful
• Calmness
Any pleasure that causes pain, thought the Epicureans, is not really a pleasure—not at all. How much happier Commodus would have been if he had followed the ideas of Epicurus instead of his own wild, selfish ideas!