Marcus Aurelius

One Long Emergency

Marcus was picked for the succession as a boy by the emperor before him and raised toward it, becoming emperor in 161. His reign was one long emergency: war on the Parthian frontier, then war on the Danube that lasted most of the rest of his life, and the Antonine plague, which may have killed a tenth of the empire. He governed through it with an attention to process that his contemporaries found almost eccentric. The private notebook we call the Meditations was written in camp during those campaigns and is the only surviving document in which a Roman emperor argues with himself about how to behave.

Died Where the Sources Disagree

He died in 180, during the same Danube war, at Vindobona or Sirmium — the sources disagree — probably of plague, aged fifty-eight. He had spent almost his entire reign in the field. The Roman historian Cassius Dio reports that when the guard came for the nightly watchword, he sent them to Commodus, his son, instead: "Go to the rising sun; I am setting."