It would be a stain on two otherwise flawless reputations.
Even if Justin had been totally and indisputably wrong on this matter of religion, might the Stoics instead have considered that idea of sympatheia, which dated back to Zeno and Chrysippus? How could they have forgotten that we are all part of one large body, each with our own role, our own part to play? Marcus Aurelius would write beautifully that even the misinformed, even the selfish, even the shameless and stupid fit in that equation, and that we shouldn’t be surprised when we meet them. It would have been an idea he and Rusticus had discussed countless times.
Was a world of one hundred percent agreement on anything possible? Wasn’t it inevitable that some people would dissent, particularly on matters of religion? What was so shocking about the existence of the occasional heretic? What if—gasp—the heretic knew something you didn’t? What if most people, even the disruptive ones, were genuinely sincere in whatever they were doing?
Okay, Rusticus might have told himself as he presided over Justin’s trial, this man is one of those people who must exist in the world. Let me slap him on the wrist and let him go. But he didn’t. He was too lost in the black-and-whiteness of the legal case in front of him: Justin was refusing to comply with sacrificial ordinances, a daily practice in Roman life. This was civil disobedience and the law was clear. So he ordered one of the most famous executions in Christian history in 165 AD.
But only in retrospect.
This “martyrdom” was barely notable at the time. Rome was in the middle of the Parthian War and a conflict with Germanic tribes on the border was bubbling up. A plague was ravaging the empire. Millions would die. A death sentence for one lawbreaker would not seem like the kind of thing that history would remember.
History is like that. Just as the unremarkable decision to hand Marcus Aurelius a book would have outsize consequences, so too would this tiny case, which probably seemed at the time to be utterly indistinguishable from hundreds of others.
Just as it did not occur to the Stoics to question the institution of slavery, true religious freedom was an utterly inconceivable concept. But to martyr oneself for one cause, to refuse to compromise even under the threat of death? This should have been at least begrudgingly respected by someone as well versed in Stoicism as Rusticus.
Sadly, he could not do so. All he saw was a threat to the public order, a threat to his power. It was, ironically, the same thing that had motivated a paranoid emperor to kill Rusticus’s grandfather.
Duty-bound, Rusticus had done what he believed he had needed to do. Justin Martyr, the same. For the former’s failure to see a bigger picture, he would be a villain to millions of Christians for the rest of history. The latter, the victim, inspires the persecuted to this day.
In 168 AD, Junius left his position as urban prefect. Within two years he would be dead. Even as Marcus waged a brutal war hundreds of miles from Rome, he took the time to order the Senate to confer honors over his longtime teacher and friend, with whom he’d closely spent nearly half of his life. The Historia Augusta says that statues to Rusticus were placed around Rome—honoring a man not given to arguments, spectacles, or sermons, but only to the training of his character and public duty.
But the real monument to Rusticus—outshining even his own infamous court case—would be found in the life of the student he trained, the Stoic who would, finally, be king.
MARCUS AURELIUS
THE PHILOSOPHER KING
(Marcus Au-REE-lee-us)
Origin: Rome
B. 121 AD
D. 180 AD
Since Plato, it had been the dream of wise men that one day there might be such a thing as a philosopher king. Although the Stoics had been close to power for centuries, none of them had come close to wielding supreme command themselves. Time and time again they had hoped the new emperor would be better, that this one would listen, that this one would put the people before his own needs. Each one would prove, sadly, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Caesar. Octavian. Tiberius. Claudius. Nero. Trajan. Vespasian. Domitian.
The list of flawed and broken kings was long, stretching back not just past Rome but to the kings of Zeno and Cleanthes’s time. Just as the Christians had prayed for a savior, so too had the Stoics hoped that one day a leader cut from their own cloth would be born, one who could redeem the empire from decay and corruption.
This star, born April 26, 121, was named Marcus Catilius Severus Annius Verus, and for all impossible expectations and responsibilities, he would manage, to paraphrase his great admirer Matthew Arnold, to prove himself worthy of all of it.
The early days of the boy who would become Marcus Aurelius were defined by both loss and promise. His father, Verus, died when he was three. He was raised by both his grandfathers, who doted on him, and who clearly showed him off at court. Even at an early age, he developed a reputation for honesty. The emperor Hadrian, who would have known young Marcus through his early academic accomplishments, sensing his potential, began to keep an eye on him. His nickname for Marcus, whom he liked to go hunting with, was “Verissimus”—a play on his name Verus—the truest one.
What could it have been that Hadrian first noticed? What could have given him the sense that the boy might be destined for great things? Marcus was clearly smart, from a good family, handsome, hardworking. But there would have been plenty of that in Rome, and there have been plenty of “true” teenagers. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good heads of state.
By the time Marcus was ten or eleven, he had already taken to philosophy, dressing the part in humble, rough clothing and living with sober and restrained habits, even sleeping on the ground to toughen himself up. Marcus would write later about the character traits he tried to define himself by, which he called “epithets for yourself.” They were “Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.” Hadrian, who never had a son and had begun to think about choosing a successor (just as he had been selected himself by the heirless emperor Trajan), must have sensed the commitment to those ideas in Marcus from boyhood on. He must have seen, as they hunted wild boar together, some combination of courage and calmness, compassion and firmness. He must have seen something in his soul that Marcus likely could not even see himself, because by Marcus’s seventeenth birthday, Hadrian had begun planning something extraordinary.
He was going to make Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome.
We don’t know much about Hadrian’s stated reasons, but we know about the plan he settled on. On February 25, 138, Hadrian adopted an able and trustworthy fifty-year-old administrator named Antoninus Pius on the condition that he in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius. Tutors were selected. A course of successive offices laid out. Even after Marcus became a member of the imperial family, we’re told, he still went to the residences of his philosophy teachers for instruction, though he could have just as easily demanded they come to him. He continued to live as if his means and his status had not irrevocably improved.
By the time Hadrian died a few months later, destiny was set. Marcus Aurelius was to be groomed for a position that only fifteen people had ever held in Rome—he was to wear the purple, he was to be made Caesar.
It was not an altogether dissimilar path to the one that Nero’s mother had charted for her boy. Would the results be different?