Sir Arthur Evans and the Search for The Minoan Empire

In March of 1900 work began in Crete, the largest island in the Aegean Sea,  on a  excavation site on its northern shores. Within three years a previously unknown people came to light that hd been lost from the world for centuries. 

This excavation and others   led to the discovery of one of the first major European civilizations--a long vanished sea empire based on that island.  This culture which traded and was greatly influenced by the art and culture of  Egypt,   rose up in the earliest time of the Bronze Age (3000 BCE) and continued for a millennium  and one half. By 1600 it became the leading power in the eastern Mediterranean. But within a century afterwards it sufferd a great volcanic eruption on the near-by island of Thera and a quick series of tsunamis. Combined with earthquakes at other times, these events may have been the catalyst to its destruction.

 

Whatever the particulars, conquest from the Hellenic mainland by the Mycenaean Civilization soon likely followed Minoan declaine, and the great sea empire of  a single kingdom or feudal city-states was usurped. All this happened over a thousand years before the Golden Age of Greece.    

The man who led the expedition and named the peoples of the temples he found "Minoan" (after King Minos, a legendary king of  Crete)had been a former journalist for the Manchester Guardian and had covered wars and independence movements in the Balkans against the Turkish Empire.  He also had a fortune at his disposal. Evans had beat others to the claim of being the discoverer of ancient Crete --including Heinrich Schliemann, the wealthy German merchant who excavated the ancient site at Troy and the great burial mounds and beehive-shaped tombs of the Mycenaean civilization---to the prize.  It was the latter find at Troy and the Greek mainland that had him and others to further sources that had only been gleamed previously in the great epics of Homer like "The Iliad" ,  written down centuries after the fall of the Bronze Age  powers.

  But Schliemann ran into trouble with local real estate owners for the site tht would later be known to the world as Knossos. 

 

 It was Evans (left) who later stepped in, helped perhaps by Crete's independance rom Turkey. He had the opportunity and what he and his experts and workers found at this site and others throughout the island  changed the history of the region forever.   

From the website ancientgreece.com 

One of the favorite themes for discussion among scholars is the possible causes for the destruction of the Minoan Civilization. Evidence of a violent end through fire and demolition is clear, but the clues to what caused such destruction have been elusive.

Professor Marinatos was the first to suggest in 1939 that the eruption of Thera, along with the associated effects, was the cause for the catastrophe. The theory argues that the earthquakes destroyed the palaces, tsunamis obliterated the fleet and peers of the Minoans, and the volcanic ash of Thera covered the whole island destroying crops and suffocating animals.

Many geologists have argued that the Thera eruption was of a colossal scale, and the effects described by Marinatos were possible. Others have disagreed. Recent data places the bulk of the ash deposits of the volcano to the East carried by the easterly jet streams of the area, with little effect upon the island of Crete (D.M. Pyle, "New estimates for the volume of the Minoan Eruption". Thera and the Aegean World III, see bibliography)

The biggest blow to this theory came in 1987 from studies conducted at the Greenland ice cap. Scientists dated frozen ash from the Thera eruption and concluded that it occurred in 1645 BC, some 150 years before the final destruction of the Minoan palaces.

Even so, the tsunamis and earthquakes associated with the Thera eruption could have still caused much physical damage to the Minoan fleet and infrastructure, and it would have affected the climate, the economy, and the politics of the region. However, it is doubtful that it could have caused in itself the end of the Minoan civilization. After all, the Minoan society had exhibited acute reflexes in its past history when it rebounded from other physical disasters to elevate its culture to even higher levels. So why did it not recover after the destruction of 1450 BC?

Another factor that might have contributed to the end of Minoan civilization is the invasion and occupation of Crete by the Mycenaeans. Their documented invasion took place around 1400, and in combination with the effects of the Thera eruption present a likely scenario for the final destruction of the Minoan civilization. In this theory, the Minoan fleet and ports were destroyed by the 50 foot waves and were never rebuilt. Possible climatic changes affected crops for many years, which in turn could have led to economic downfall and social upheaval. In this background, the foreign invaders from Mycenae provided the conclusion to a splendid culture which flourished for 1600 years.

One question still remains however. How did the inhabitants of Mycenae escape the effects of the volcanic eruption, when the Minoan civilization was brought to its knees by them? Considering the topography of the Aegean, and accepting the enormity of the volcanic eruption of Thera, it is hard to understand how the Mycenaeans who were just as vulnerable were able to overcome the destruction, while at the same time they were able to preserve (or rebuilt) their fleet and to mount an ambitious expedition to conquer the vast island of Crete.

The questions regarding the destruction of the Minoan civilization linger precariously as the historical records do not provide a definitive answer, and it is these persistent questions which have shrouded prehistoric Crete with an aura of seductive enchantment.

 

"Cleopatra: A Life"

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Stacy Schiff

Julius Caesar restored her to the throne after she showed up unannounced in her Roman-occupied palace in Alexandria, dressed in a sack. The two may or may not have voyaged down the Nile but they definitely had a son --Caesarion--whose very existence threatened the whole Roman Empire.

Marc Anthony needed her to finance his war against the Armenians and the Parthia-ns and later dressed himself up as Dionysus to her Isis in a grand display in Alexandria; Marcus Cicero hated her for upstaging him when she was Caesar's guest in Rome; she crashed Roman society and started a craze for all things Egyptian in fashion among Romans of both sexes. King Herod (the Great) wanted to assassinate her when she passed through Jerusalem after seeing Marc Anthony off on one of his eastern conquests, and, finally, the ruthless and back-stabbing Octavian wanted to take her captive back to Rome to celebrate his victory at Actium in 31 BCE and later invasion of her kingdom. (She had other plans, although not death by the bite of an asp you get in Shakespeare's play.)

She ruled over a kingdom of eight million people, and was the richest person in the ancient world by far. She was a hands-on monarch, meeting with delegations of her people and serving justice to those who had been wronged by her vast bureaucratic layer of inspectors and officials. She had a bit of a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, Arsinoe IV, which got resolved when she had her agents drag the younger daughter of her beloved father outside a temple of refuge in Greece and put to death. (She could be nasty, yes, but this was not unusual in those days when brothers and sisters competed to rule kingdoms.)

And nineteen centuries later, the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille enticed a star actress, Claudette Colbert, with the offer of playing the Egyptian queen in his epic movie by asking her, "How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?"

Much of Stacy Schiff's memorable and for me fascinating book recalls a lot of these well-known situations this great Queen faced. (She was the last of the Ptolemaic monarchs in Egypt, a dynasty that lasted nearly three centuries.) Her main theme is to show that Cleopatra was an amazing woman in her own right, who mastered several languages and was as witty and able a rhetorician than any leader in Rome or elsewhere. A great deal of her biographies from ancient times have been written by Roman historians like Plutarch, Dio Cassius and the Romanized Jewish general Josephus. They tended to portray her as a temptress and a practitioner of magic, taking over men like Marc Anthony and making them slaves to oriental decadence.

The truth, as always, is much more nuanced. Yes, she needed Roman assistance at times but her rule of Egypt and popularity as a living embodiment of Isis made her more of an ally than a lover. And her Nile-fed land was rich in grain for hungry Italians, and precious metals for all who had the disposable income to covet them.

She was no "martyr to love" as Chaucer called her, or a "silly little girl" as Bernard Shaw described her. Rather she was in Schiff's judgement closer to the 7th Century Coptic bishop who termed her "The most illustrious and wise of women, greater than the kings that preceded her."

I highly recommend this book. Below, Ms. Schiff reads from the book on "The PBS News Hour". Her description of ancient Alexandria in Cleopatra VII's time shows why it was THE great metropolis of the age.

Queen Cleopatra of Egypt: Then and Now

(above) Screen vamp Theda Bara in a still from the first film about Cleopatra, from 1917.  Only forty seconds of the film still exists sadly, as this and many of Miss Bara's other silent films are lost.

(left) Elizabeth Taylor. 

A recent exposition has come to the city of Philadelphia showing artifacts connected to the most famous queen in the ancient world. The exhibit "Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt"  is sponsored by the Franklin Institute and The National Geographic Society.   

Cleopatra (69BC--31BC) was actually the seventh monarch from the Ptolemaic Dynasty to bear that name but the first to rule by herself after the death of her brother. Her greatest achievement seems to have been the ability to play off the massive Roman Empire by beguiling two of its most powerful men in succession: first, the mighty Julius Caesar and, later, his former ally and avenger against Caesar's assassins, Marc Anthony. 

How she managed to do this mix of love and politics has made her irresistible for centuries to poets, playwrights, and history buffs.   Playwrights as famous as  Shakespeare and Shaw have found her a beguiling subject.

 But what made her  successful in keeping her throne intact (at least until Anthony lost it all to Octavian at the Battle of Actium) took great acumen. It is likely she was one of the few rulers of Egypt descended from the Macedonian General   who took the trouble to learn the Egyptian language.  The historian Plutarch claims she knew many languages of the region, and records that she was not an incomparable beauty but rather had an excellence in speech and intelligence to go with her attractiveness. 

In other words, she was fun and no snob when it came to discoursing with barbarians. 

Today modern Egyptologists are trying to find the tombs of Cleopatra and her last love Anthony in a small settlement 30 miles west of Alexandria.   There is still questions about her mother's identity and how much she was of Greek ancestry or African blood.  But all this is pat of her fascination that has endured for centuries.  

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."--Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 

  Her most famous incarnation was by Elizabeth Taylor  in the 1963 film, a spectacular over blown epic that made her and Richard Burton the modern Anthony and Cleopatra for the 1960's and 70's, an age of movie stars and the paparazzi who made a living off their binary star wattage. 

How real Cleopatra lasted as long as she has in history is her greatest long-term  achievement.   And if they do ever find her tomb, you can bet it will be the biggest story of  that week.  

 

 ctually 

The War That Killed Achilles:The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Caroline Alexander

"Sing, goddess, of Achilles ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey." --The Iliad, Book One

"True, Homer was blind and that explains why he dated those odd-looking women."--Woody Allen.



Most of us come across Homer's epic "The Iliad" at some time in our secondary school or college careers. My time came in my first year of college, when a teacher devoted much of a Western Humanities course to this one book. At one time, knowledge of this work and the companion volume, "The Odyssey" was considered vital background for a gentleman, especially if he had learned it in Greek.

The story concerned kings of Greek fiefdoms during the Mycenaean Age (circa 1600--1200) who ruled little parts of the islands and the mainland around the Aegean Sea. They all sailed to a small Hittite City called Troy, apparently to avenge the kidnapping of the Queen of Sparta, Helen, who was whisked off--for or against her will-- by the Trojan Prince Paris. Helen was beautiful and was the prize given to Paris for picking Aphrodite over two others in some kind of Olympic beauty contest. Trouble was she was married at the time to Mendaleus, the King of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon. The latter is the titular leader of the whole show and a son of the cursed House of Atreus.

So the whole war party sails to Troy to get Helen back and all the other loot Paris and she probably ran off with. They besieged Troy for ten years (!) and the poem beings in the concluding phase of the war.


I came away from studying this book weeks later a little alienated. Yes, you could see it was a gripping story, set in that distant Bronze Age. But hardly any actual regular soldiers had speaking roles. And what was the reason for this war? One woman who may or might not have left of her own volition? Well, possibly, but Alexander points out that research into the surviving "Linear B" tablets from the ruins of Mycenaean settlements confirm that the coast of Anatolia (or modern Turkey) was a place of trade and plunder for the people who lived in the Bronze Age sites across the Aegean.


Then there were long periods of "The Iiad" with catalogues of how many ships and men each Achaean King had. The Greek Gods were in the whole mess, apparently getting amusement out of the fray but also (in the case of Ares and Apollo) sometimes coming to the battlefield to help their favorite side for the moment.

Indeed, the whole "Wrath of Achilles" aspect to the story comes from his losing a female war prize when the war chief Agamemnon gives back his captured woman to a priest of Apollo to stop a plague. Being an idiot, the King of Mycenae takes Achilles' girl for himself. Achilles is their best fighter, and he loses all interest in helping out. His tardiness from the battlefield will ultimately cost both these men dearly. Before he goes to his tent for a good sulk however, Achilles lets the leader of expedition have it,calling him a "wine-sack" and questioning his bravery. Then Achilles casts a chill on the whole raison d etre of the war:

"But why must the Argives fight
the Trojans? Why did Atreus' son assemble
and bring us? Wasn't it for Helen's sake?
Are Atreus' sons the only men who love their wives?"


Eventually Achilles decides his honor has been served enough after his friend, Patrocklus, is killed wearing Achilles special armor and so he finally sallies forth and enters the fray. He kills the Trojan Prince Hector, a good family man and possibly the one truly sympathetic figure in this story.

His speech to his wife as goes out to battle, leaving her and his son behind, is one of the most poignant summations of men doing their duty in wars they themselvess never started I've ever read:

"No man, against my fate, sends me to Hades'.
And as for fate, I'm sure no man escapes it,
Neither a good nor bad man, once he's born."

After Hector is dead, old King Priam comes down from Troy's walls and asks for his son's body back. Achilles, the son of a mortal man and a sea goddess, Thetis, shows pity on the man and for a time a bit of decency is restored.

This is a good book for someone, like myself, who wants to revisit this epic tale of war--the natural state of mankind it seems all too often--but wants a brisk and not-too detailed and footnoted guide. Ms. Alexander cuts through the obscure passages and brings one up to date on modern scholarship and also show how "The Iliad" echoes more recent and bloodier wars in modern times.

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Karen Armstrong

"Centuries of institutional, political, and intellectual development have tended to obscure the importance of compassion in religion. All too often the religion that dominates the public discourse seems to express an institutional egotism: my faith is better than yours! As Zhuangzi noted, once people interject themselves into their beliefs, they can become quarrelsome, officious, or even unkind. Compassion is not a popular virtue, because it demands laying aside of the ego that we identify with our deepest self: so people often prefer being right to being compassionate."

Karen Armstrong is a well-known popular historian who has written a couple dozen books on religious matters. She herself is not affiliated with any one spiritual faith, but began her adult life as a nun in a convent in England from 1962 to 1969. (A time she recalls in her memoir, "The Spiral Staircase"). She found out she was more motivated to be a scholar then to be in holy orders and so she left the convent to devote herself full-time to her studies. She had a career as a writer and a television host where she explored religious and political events in the Middle East and modern Europe. She initial books were more negative toward religion and spirituality, but her current life has led her to work for international entities that try to bring people of different faiths to conferences and other projects to achieve greater understanding.

This book goes through a period that philosopher Karl Jaspers called The Axial Age, a period modernists date from roughly 900 to 200 BCE. It was in this span of time that the foundation of four great religious, social and political traditions developed that is the bedrock of much of the major cultures of the globe: Greek rationalism, Jewish monotheism, Indian religion and philosophy, and the development of the Confusion and Taoist traditions that helped united China from a group of warring states to an single unified empire.

Armstrong focuses on a great span of history and to try and cover all points of development would be a small book in itself. Suffice to say it is a great "refresher course" in ancient history. It highlights the rise (and fall) of Representative government in 5th Century Athens; the struggles and eventual loss of the Jewish independence to a variety of greta empires, the most traumatic of which was the 60-70 year Babylonian exile; the development of the Vedic religion in Indian history that , after urbanization, led to a movement away from blood rituals and into groups of "renounce-rs" and monks t leaving these environments toward an inner-self (Atman) and to a strong effort at tranquility of the soul, symbolized by Gautama (The Buddha) approaches toward an inner tranquility beyond all suffering and life vicissitudes to something called "nirvana" where ego is gone and the spirit is at rest from the struggles of rebirths and suffering. She also traces the rise of Sages like Confucius, a 6th Century sage who sought to create inner peace within society itself through a search for something called "ren", a transcendent and sacred reality that could only be achieved by discipline and renouncement of self.

Many others spiritual paths are discussed in being the historical background. Some are directed toward a universal love and acceptance of others without any recourse to a God or gods. Others paved the way for a greater emphasis on monotheism. Schools of divinity and skepticism, or idealism and idealism competed for adherents in places like the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

This western tradition of philosophic friction had to give way with the rise of institutionalized Christian power from Rome and Byzantium. But after rediscovery of Greek traditions (much of which came from Islamic scholarship during the later Crusades, ironically) in the 12th Century the ancient learning in astronomy and physics and engineering eventually became the catalyst for the scientific movements that led to the Second Axial Age of Newton, Freud, Darwin and Einstein.

Not all religious movements were involved in imposing a faith on others---the Buddhism of the 2nd Century Emperor Ashoka of India and the early Islamic Empire are examples of a power without cohering of spirituality. It is this freedom that I believe is the greatest gift of the Axial Age-the freedom to choose from all the great sages of the past and draw what is unique and similar to find a greater inner peace and hopefully a better external life.

Democracy at War: Athens and Pericles' Funeral Oration

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many (1) and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. "--The Funeral Oration of Pericles, from Book Two of "The Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides  

   The Funeral Oration of Pericles is a eulogy given in the year we now call 430 BCE to honor the dead who fell in the first year of the long war (or rather series of wars) between Athens and Sparta, known to history as The Peloponnesian War. It was recorded for posterity by Thucydides, an Athenian general who lived during that time and resigned from service after suffering a major defeat. The eventual victors, in 404, were the Spartans and her allies. The latter city-state won after twenty long and insufferable years. The Athenians' empire melted away. Athens would become a center of learning and culture again, but never would it try to mix democracy with imperial ambitions.

 

     As in all wars, economic and political affairs overlapped. The purpose of Pericles' address was twofold--to honor the dead who perished in the cause of promoting Athenian power and to give the living an appreciation for how unique it was to be an Athenian citizen (i.e., if you were free and male). Athenians lived in a city of admirable public buildings--the greatest ones like the Parthenon and the Temple of Nike built on the Acropolis under the leadership of Pericles. Art and philosophy were vibrant; all males over eighteen in theory had a say in the affairs of state when they gathered in a direct assembly near the Acropolis at the "ecclesia", the popular assembly that met forty times a year and voted on resolutions brought to the assembly by the "Boule", a council of five hundred men over thirty years of age chosen by lot.

 

The other side of the coin was that Athens was a rapacious empire, which gathered and coerced other Greek cities for taxation and tributes to build her great temples and feed her people and pay for her fleet. None of the other city-states paying tribute to Athens had any hope of being represented in the Ecclesia or the Boule. Pericles in theory was only one of ten generals who were elected annually. In practice, he was a virtual dictator at least on matters of war and imperial expansion. But he was not a tyrant, he could not have stayed in power for the twenty odd years he did without getting genuine public support. He was said to be a great orator. He was also a patron of music and philosophy, and while he sent ships and men to add to the Delian Empire, he also made Athens the "school of Hellas" , an outward-looking center of commerce and learning and for the first time in Western society, an empire created by public acclimation (i.e., the rich wanted to get richer; the poor, in the main, wanted to gain more from trade and from service in the ships that brought the extracted goods from all over the Greek world to Athens.)

 

This video shows some selections of Pericles' Oration. A year after he made this address, he was dead. The great leader of Athens Golden Age was felled by the terrible plague that swept through the city after many from all of Attica crammed into the defensive walls of the city to escape the soldiers of Sparta, the martial land power celebrated today not for philosophy or literature but in popular movies and video game celebrating militarism without culture or dreams of human freedom. The Spartans imposed a rule of "Thirty Tyrants" on Athens, some of the new leaders being former followers of the philosopher Socrates. When Athens was restored to a democracy within less than two years, it wouldn't be long before Socrates, the most famous philosopher from that time, would be put to death by an ignoble jury of men looking for scapegoats for their civic humiliation.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations-- "I Came, I Saw, I Ruminated"

"The emperor Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus who reigned from 161-181 was the only Roman emperor besides Julius Caesar whose writings were to become part of the canon of Western classics. His Meditations are a loosely-organized set of thoughts relating to the stoic philosophy which had been popular among the better-educated citizens of Rome for some centuries. It stressed self-discipline, virtue, and inner tranquillity. Aurelius was also a social reformer who worked for the improvement of the lot of the poor, slaves, and convicted criminals. Non-Christians in the Western World have often looked to him as a role model. He was also a fierce persecutor of Christianity, doubtless because he felt that the religion threatened the values that had made Rome great. Aurelius was not an original or brilliant thinker, but his Meditations reflect well the stoic strain in Greco-Roman civilization. The emphasis on morality combined with emotional detachment is strongly reminiscent of Buddhist thought, with which Stoicism has often been compared."

Paul Brians
Department of English
Washington State University 

"Loss is change, and change is nothing but nature's delight."--Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius was the last of the "Five Good Emperors" of Rome who ruled from 98AD--180AD, a period that Edward Gibbon of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" fame thought "was the most civilized  portion of mankind".  The good emperors included Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines--Antonius Pius and his adopted son, Marcus.  

It was at this point--the Second Century of the Common Era-- that the Empire reached its height  of control over a vast part of the Western world--from Armenia, which was under a king bound to Rome, all the way across Europe below the Rhine, down through Palestine, Egypt, all of north Africa,  Spain, Gaul and through Britain to the fringes of what would later be called Scotland.  At some point in the wars against the Parthian Empire, Roman soldiers even reached the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers near the Persian Gulf.  

    

Re-reading "Meditations" recently, it struck me that the old Marcus would not have been a blogger.  He doesn't talk much about himself, doesn't seem interested in news or popular culture or any kind of gossip. Whether he intended these works to be read by anyone else, it's certain  he loved writing and expressing the Stoic philosophy of self-control and maintaining personal integrity no matter what disasters befall an individual or his circumstances.  

His education came from several tutors: (from Wikipedia) He had three tutors in Greek, Aninus Macer, Caninius Celer, and Herodes Atticus, and one in Latin, Cornelius Fronto. (Fronto and Atticus, however, probably did not become his tutors until his adoption by Antoninus in 138.) The preponderance of Greek tutors indicates the importance of the language to the aristocracy of Rome.^[80] This was the age of the Second Sophistic, a renaissance in Greek letters. Although educated in Rome, in his Meditations, Marcus would write his inmost thoughts in Greek.^[81]

Aurelius believed in doing whatever work your particular station called you to do.  He was big on getting up out of bed each day and do it and don't complain or express frustration. Secondly, that you can only expect to see a positive way ahead if you can except change.  Change has  still been a scary process in my life and I don't know if a good Stoic would have always found me an apt pupil.  But still some of it rubbed off on me I suppose because I go about in hard times at work or in family situations with the attitude that the only thing I can count on consistently is change. 

This to me sums up a lot of what old M.A. was getting at about life and gaining a perspective on this world.  It's from Book Four of this work:

"Think continually how many physicians are dead after often fretting over the sick; and how many astrologers after predicting with great pretensions the deaths of others; and how many philosophers after endless discourses on death or immortality; how many heroes after killing thousands; and how many tyrants who have used their power over men's lives with terrible insolence as if they were immortal; and how many cities are entirely dead, so to speak, Helice and Pompeii and Herculaneum, and innumerable others. Add to the total all whom you have known, one after another.

 "One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him: and all this in a short time. To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time in the way of nature, and end your journey in contentment, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. "

Cheerful stuff, huh?  The only thing close to this "vanity of vanities, all is vanity"approach to life comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  

  

In the first part of "The Meditations" he lists all of his relatives and friends and teachers who helped him to maturity.    But beyond that we get little autobiographical detail about his life and extraordinary position.  In some ways this is refreshing because he doesn't go on about his military achievements the way Julius Caesar did when he was slaughtering Gauls and building "civilization" by sword and fire back in his day.   

It was during the last of these times that Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations, between 160-168 AD, mostly with the Roman legions on the northern fringes of the empire, facing the Germanic tribes who weren't interested in being part of the Pax Romana. 

 They were trouble enough, but Aurelius also had to also at various times face attacks from the powerful Parthian Empire in the East, a terrible plague that killed as many as two thousand Romans a day at its height and may have wiped out five million people, and the trouble with naming a decent successor.  (If he hadn't been a Stoic by instruction, he probably would have had to form  a similar philosophy to maintain his bearings.) 

It's hard to believe that he was really happy with his loathsome and cruel son, Commodus, but he ascended to the throne after Aurelius' death anyway after the father died from--what else--plague--in what is now Vienna.  But he had little choice as the fifteen children he had with his wife Faustina  had dwindled to four by that time he died. 

Somehow, from reading his meditations, I think Aurelius would have been happier as a teacher and not a great leader with crushing responsibilities.  But that was not his fate, and I think he did his best with what nature, fate  or God put to him to do.