Meditations — who's who

The first long meditation in Book Six is Marcus's tribute to Antoninus — a portrait of how to govern with calm decency. Antoninus had taken Marcus into his household and raised him as his heir, and Marcus modelled the rest of his life on the man's quiet steadiness. "Everything he did was thought through carefully, as if he had time to spare." Marcus's idea of how to be emperor came almost entirely from Antoninus.

One of Marcus's most important teachers. Rusticus introduced him to Epictetus's Discourses, lent him his own copy, and seems to have been a model of Stoic life lived inside Roman politics. Marcus thanks him in Book One for, among other things, "not being put off by trifles" and "writing letters in plain language."

Fronto taught Marcus rhetoric and remained a friend through Marcus's reign. Their letters survive (separately from the Meditations) and are warm, sometimes slightly worried about the young Marcus's growing seriousness. Marcus thanks him in Book One for showing him "how envy and duplicity and hypocrisy are the marks of tyranny."

Marcus thanks his mother for "her religious devotion, her generosity, her inability not just to do wrong but even to think it" — and for her "plain way of living, far from the habits of the rich." She seems to have been the formative moral influence of his early life.

From his grandfather, Marcus says, he learned courtesy — the small, steady kindnesses that make a household livable. The opening line of the Meditations.

The Stoic philosopher whose work shaped Marcus most. Born a slave in Rome, freed in his thirties, exiled by Domitian, taught for the rest of his life in Greece. His lectures (the Discourses) survive only because his student Arrian wrote them down. Marcus owns a copy and refers to its arguments throughout — the dichotomy of control, the discipline of assent, the inner citadel.

Marcus does not name Seneca often, but he reads him. Seneca was Nero's tutor, a Roman senator and playwright as well as a philosopher; like Marcus, he was a Stoic operating at the highest level of imperial politics. Seneca's letters (Epistulae morales) cover much of the same ground as the Meditations and were, almost certainly, on Marcus's bookshelves.

The third head of the Stoic school in Athens, called by the ancients "the second founder." Chrysippus did not survive in his own writings, but his arguments — about the soul, about logic, about the cosmos as one rational whole — are everywhere in Marcus. When Marcus argues that the universe is a single ordered system, he is arguing what Chrysippus argued.

The pre-Socratic philosopher whose famous claim — you cannot step in the same river twice — Marcus quotes again and again. Heraclitus's vision of the cosmos as flux, as everything in motion, becomes one of Marcus's central images. When he reminds himself that "time is a river," he is borrowing Heraclitus's metaphor.

"Begin the day by telling yourself: today I will meet the meddler, the ingrate, the bully, the cheat, the envious." Book Two opens with this list. Marcus is not naming people; he is rehearsing the kinds of person he will inevitably encounter and reminding himself in advance not to be surprised. By the time the actual ingrate shows up at court, Marcus has already met him in his head.

Marcus repeatedly reminds himself that praise and blame from other people are equally outside his control. The slanderer — the man who has decided to dislike you and is busy persuading others to — is a recurring figure. Marcus's response is consistent: it is just a sound; he doesn't know me; what is being said does not change what I am.