Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius is the one great figure of antiquity who still speaks to us today, nearly 2,000 years after his death.A philosopher as well as an emperor, his was an extraordinary reign. He proved himself a great leader, protecting the Empire from Germans in the North and fighting the Parthians in the East, and his Meditations---compared by John Stuart Mill to the Sermon on the Mount---remains one of the most widely-read Classical books. Impeccably researched and vividly told, Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius is the definitive biography of a monumental historical figure.`Impressively well-researched and unfailingly engaging'-Irish Times`McLynn has written a huge, erudite survey of the social, cultural, economic and political world of the second century AD rather than a mere biography of Marcus Aurelius...there is much to enjoy here and even more to be learned'-Literary Review
Marcus Aurelius is the one great figure of antiquity who still speaks to us today, nearly 2,000 years after his death. A philosopher as well as an emperor, his was an extraordinary reign. He proved himself a great leader. This is his biography.
The vivid, magisterial and long-awaited biography of Marcus Aurelius — the last of the “five good emperors” of the Roman Empire.Emperor Marcus Aurelius — the embodiment of the philosopher’s king — is the one figure of antiquity who still speaks vividly to us today, over 2000 years after his death. We may thrill to the exploits of Alexander the Great, Hannibal or Caesar, and historical novelists may beguile us with their imaginative reconstructions of this life or that, but the only voice from the Greco-Roman world that still seems to have contemporary relevance is that of the man who ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 A.D. His book of reflections, Meditations, continues to sell in large numbers in numerous editions. Though a persecutor of Christians, Marcus holds out the prospect of spirituality for atheists, happiness without God, joy without heaven and morality without religion. He truly was a man for all seasons, and those seasons include the twenty-first century.His reign foreshadowed the eventual decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and his life itself represents the fulfillment of Plato’s famous dictum that mankind will prosper only when philosophers are rulers and rulers philosophers. Marcus Aurelius by acclaimed historian Frank McLynn, promises to be the definitive biography of this monumental historical figure — now known very widely through the Oscar-winning film Gladiator.From the Hardcover edition.