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Article: Marcus Aurelius: Emperor and Stoic
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- May 31, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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MARCUS AURELIUS
A Biography
By Anthony Birley
Yale University Press. 320 pp. $25
WHEN PLATO, in The Republic, foresaw no end of troubles for human
communities unless philosophers became kings or kings philosophers,
he was thinking of small city-states like his native Athens, or
Syracuse, where his attempt to raise a young despot as philosopher
ended in dismal failure. He could hardly have imagined that some six
centuries after his own day a man trained as a philosopher and
devoted to philosophy would become sole ruler of an empire that
stretched from Spain and Scotland in the West to Syria and Egypt in
the East, including within its boundaries the future sites of Bonn,
Vienna, Budapest, ...