Marcus, in fact, has recently been very sick, perhaps even close to death. Aged fifty-four and widely perceived as frail and in poor health, he has long been the subject of gossip at Rome. His wife, Faustina, had traveled back to Rome several months earlier. Rumors say that she was frightened by the possibility of Marcus’s imminent demise and urged Cassius to stake his claim to the throne. Marcus’s only surviving son, Commodus, is thirteen years old and acutely aware that if his father dies or the throne is usurped before he reaches adulthood, his own life will be in grave peril. Faustina had allegedly schemed that by preempting Marcus’s death, Cassius can outmaneuver other pretenders to the throne and perhaps even safeguard the succession of Commodus by marrying her. Others say that Cassius acted on his own initiative, deliberately circulating bogus rumors of Marcus’s death to seize power. Or perhaps he simply acted prematurely, not treasonously, genuinely deceived by false intelligence that declared the emperor dead or dying. The Senate was alarmed, though, and immediately declared Cassius hostis publicus, a public enemy, seizing his assets and those of his family. That has only served to escalate the conflict. Cassius must feel the situation spiraling out of control. He can’t back down; civil war has become inevitable.
Whatever Cassius’s motives, Marcus now finds himself confronting one of the most serious crises of his reign. The emperor has recovered from his latest bout of illness and wastes no time in responding to the sedition. He looks over the faces of his generals. They already know that he must prepare to leave the northern frontier and lead an army to the east with great haste. Cassius’s legions may march against Rome itself in an effort to secure his claim on the imperial throne. This looming threat has cast the city into a state of total panic and emboldened Marcus’s critics in the Senate. However, Marcus’s reputation with the mighty legions serving him on the Danube is now unassailable.
The following morning, Marcus sends the dispatch rider on his way with letters for the Senate in Rome, his ally Martius Verus in Cappadocia, and, most importantly, Cassius in Egypt. His message is clear: the emperor confirms that he is alive, in good health, and will soon return. Now he must make rapid arrangements for peace in the north so that he will be free to march southeast, reinforce the loyalists in Cappadocia, and quell unrest by appearing in person. However, it would be premature to address his troops about the incident until he knows that a civil war is unavoidable. They’re still fighting pockets of resistance among the northern tribes, and he doesn’t want the barbarians along the Danube getting wind of the crisis back home while negotiations for peace are still underway.
In private, he continues to meditate on his reaction to the news. The hardest thing to deal with is the uncertainty of the situation. Marcus assumes that at some level Cassius believes he is doing the right thing: he acts out of ignorance of what is genuinely right and wrong, for, as Socrates and the Stoics taught, no man does wrong knowingly. Of course, it’s precisely this philosophical attitude that Cassius resents in Marcus, because to him forgiveness is merely a sign of weakness. It leads to a contest between their personalities, two ways of ruling, and two philosophies of life: one harsh, the other forgiving.
Several weeks have now passed since Marcus received the Senate’s dispatch notifying him of events in Egypt. His first action on receiving news of the rebellion was to summon his thirteen-year-old son, Commodus, to Sirmium, where he took the toga virilis, officially making him an adult Roman citizen in preparation for being acclaimed emperor. He is being commended to the legions as Marcus’s natural heir in order to help quash Cassius’s claim on the throne. The news must have reached Cassius that the emperor was still alive, but there has been no word of him standing down. However, the failure of Cassius’s rebellion to spread across the Taurus mountain range into Cappadocia means he doesn’t have enough troops to be confident of holding Syria against a major offensive by the loyalist army. Nevertheless, rumor and unrest are growing in Marcus’s camp. The time has come for the emperor to address his men and announce that they will be marching southeast to join forces with Martius Verus in Cappadocia before engaging Cassius’s main army in Syria.
Marcus prepares himself for the day ahead, contemplating the actions of Cassius and the senators who are working against him. Marcus tells himself, as always, that he must be ready to accept meddling, ingratitude, violence, treachery, and envy.1 According to the Stoics, individuals are bound to make moral errors, because the majority do not have a firm grasp on the true nature of good and evil. Nobody is born wise, but rather we must become so through education and training. Marcus believes that philosophy has taught him right from wrong and the ability to understand the nature of men like Cassius, who appear to act unjustly. He reminds himself that even those who oppose him are his kin, not necessarily through blood but because they are his fellow citizens in the universal community, sharing the potential for wisdom and virtue. Even though they may act unjustly, they cannot truly harm him because their actions cannot tarnish his character. As long as Marcus understands this, he cannot be angry with them or hate them. Those who oppose him have come into being, he says, to work together with him, just as the upper and lower rows of our teeth work together to grind our food. To turn against men like Cassius in anger, or even to turn his back on them, would be contrary to reason and against the law of Nature. Marcus reminds himself not to regard the rebel faction as enemies but to view them as benignly as a physician does his patients. He takes his time, in quiet contemplation, knowing how important it is to preserve a rational frame of mind in the face of adversity, especially given the tremendous power invested in him by the Roman people. As soon as Marcus has finished these meditations, he dons the military cape. Pompeianus and several other advisors meet him outside his room. It is time for him to address the ranks of legionaries assembled in the center of the camp.
Marcus greets them as his fellow soldiers. He says there’s no point complaining or feeling bitter about the rebellion in the east. He accepts whatever ensues as the will of Zeus. He asks them not to be angry with the heavens, and assures them of his heartfelt regret that they must be engaged in war after war in his service. He wishes that Cassius had come to him first and argued his case before the army and the Senate. Astoundingly, Marcus promises them that he would even have stepped down and relinquished the empire without a struggle if he had been persuaded that it was for the common good. However, it’s too late for that now, as war is already upon them.
He reminds his troops that their reputation far surpasses that of the eastern legions, and so they have reason to be optimistic. Although Cassius is one of his most esteemed generals, he says, they have nothing to fear from “an eagle at the head of jackdaws”—a comment that draws a few somber laughs. It wasn’t really Cassius who won those famous victories, after all, but the very soldiers who now stand before him. Moreover, loyal Martius Verus will be by their side, a general no less accomplished than Avidius Cassius. Marcus tells them of his hope that Cassius may still repent now that he knows the emperor lives. He must assume that it was only through mistakenly believing him to be dead that his once-loyal general would have betrayed him in this manner. If not, and Cassius persists in his rebellion, he will be forced to think again when he learns that Marcus Aurelius is marching against him at the head of such a formidable army of seasoned veterans from the north. (The Roman historian Cassius Dio presents what he claims to be the original text of this remarkable speech.)