The Military Metaphor in Marcus Aurelius
Soldiering as a Philosophy of Life in Stoicism
In one of the most famous passages of The Meditations, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius writes that everything physical is as transient as a stream rushing past us, everything belonging to the mind is as insubstantial as vapour and deceptive as smoke or mist, and that…
…life is warfare, and a sojourn in foreign land. — Meditations, 2.17
Only one thing can save us from all this confusion: philosophy, the love of wisdom.
Marcus was literally engaged in warfare, in a foreign land, when he wrote this.
He goes on to say many striking things about the philosophy he followed, called Stoicism. However, scholars have been struck by the oddness of this apparent allusion to his own situation, in a book that’s notoriously vague about time and place.
Indeed, Marcus was literally engaged in warfare, in a foreign land, when he wrote this. Nearby in the text we find the rubric “At Carnuntum”, the name of the Roman legionary fortress in Upper Pannonia where Marcus had stationed himself during the early stages of the First Marcomannic War. (Today Carnuntum is in Austria, near Vienna.)
