born April 26, ad 121, Rome died March 17, 180, Vindobona [Vienna], or Sirmium, Pannonia
Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Vita M. Antonini philosophi, the standard and reasonably reliable life from the set of late Latin biographies of emperors; Dio Cassius, book lxxi, which survives only in Byzantine excerpts; Fronto, Epistulae, which presents the correspondence (of which it is important to use the modern edition by M.P.J. Van den Hout, 1954); Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, v, 1—the account of the martyrs of Lyon; and A.S.L. Farquharson (ed.), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, 2 vol. (1944), the full annotated edition.
Farquharson’s edition contains a brief biography (vol. 1, pp. 256–268); the fullest treatment (in German) is by P. von Rohden and H. von Arnim in Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie, vol. 1, pp. 2279–2309 (1894), still fundamental in spite of its date. Anthony Birley, Marcus Aurelius (1966), is a more recent biography in English; A.S.L. Farquharson also produced a wider-ranging study: Marcus Aurelius: His Life and His World, ed. by D.A. Rees (1951). The general history of the principate by Albino Garzetti, L’impero da Tiberio agli Antonini (1960), places Marcus’ reign in its historical setting and contains a useful bibliography. G.R. Stanton, “Marcus Aurelius, Emperor and Philosopher,” Historia, 18:570–587 (1969), well represents a skeptical current in points of view about Marcus.
For more detail on the controversial problems of the chronology of the reign, see the papers of C.H. Dodd in Numismatic Chronicle, 11:209–350 (1911), 13:162–199, 276–321 (1913), and 14:34–91 (1914); W. Zwikker, Studien zur Markussäule (1941); and J. Morris, “The Dating of the Column of Marcus Aurelius,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15:33–47 (1952).
Marcus-Aurelius-bas-relief-depicting-his-triumphal-entry-into-RomeMarcus Aurelius, bas-relief depicting his triumphal entry into Rome in a quadriga; in the Palazzo …[Credits : Alinari/Art Resource, New York]
Bronze-equestrian-statue-of-Marcus-Aurelius-in-the-Piazza-delBronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, in the Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome, c. ad …[Credits : Alinari—Art Resource/EB Inc.]
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