If anybody still recalls in our highly materialistic and individualistic age, Stoicism is the ancient philosophy that holds that the wise man should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submissive to natural law. One of its most memorable advocates—yet an unlikely one—was Marcus Aurelius, the last of the “five good emperors” of the Roman Empire. This follower of the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king wrote
Meditations, a private self-examination and set of moral exercises anchored on Stoicism, even as he waged brutal wars on three fronts against invaders that seriously threatened the stability and existence of the Roman Empire.
In a new biography,
Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Da Capo, 720 pages), Frank McLynn makes a sweeping, highly readable account of Marcus Aurelius and his imperial reign (161-180 A.D.) but is highly critical of the philosophy of Stoicism itself. Emily Colette Wilkinson, who reviewed the biography for the InCharacter.org website, finds this hostile attitude of the biographer towards his subject “curious.” Indeed, McLynn has no love lost even for this famous line from Meditations: “Remain ever the same, in the throes of pain, on the loss of a child, during a lingering illness.” McLynn and many modern readers, Wilkinson points out, believe that the Stoic creed is “inhuman, even monstrous.”
“This authorial frankness certainly makes for entertaining reading,” Wilkinson argues. “Many a scholarly pose of objectivity belies an unprofessed agenda and it’s to McLynn’s credit that he lets his readers know exactly what he thinks about Stoicism (little of it good)… Putting aside the charm of [his] curmudgeonly bombast, though, McLynn’s hostility to the animating intellectual ethos of his subject’s life seems something of a failure.”
The book’s open animosity to its subject aside, Wilkinson says that McLynn’s
Marcus Aurelius offers a masterfully woven tapestry of the world and worldly concerns of a man determined to live somewhat apart from the world he ruled. “But,” she adds, “to hear the man himself, the Stoic philosopher, to fall into the rhythms of his thought and learn the art of self-discourse from him, is a deeper pleasure. Marcus Aurelius may be dust and ashes, but he is, in spite of his modest Stoic guess, still a living name and a living mind.”
Read Emily Wilkinson’s review of Marcus Aurelius: A Life in InCharacter.org now!Read Emily Wilson’s review, "Stoicism and Us," in The New Republic now!ABOUT THE BIOGRAPHER:Francis James McLynn, who writes as Frank McLynn, is a British author, biographer, historian, and journalist. He is noted for his critically acclaimed biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Jung, Richard Francis Burton, and Henry Morton Stanley. McLynn was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, and the University of London and, before becoming a full-time writer, was Alistair Horne Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, visiting professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Strathclyde, and professorial fellow at Goldsmiths College London.
ABOUT THE BOOK REVIEWERS:Emily Wilkinson is a writer and critic based in Pasadena, California.
Emily R. Wilson, a British classicist, is currently associate professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a regular book reviewer for
The Times Literary Supplement.
