Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.18.1

If any have offended against you, consider first: What is my relation to men, and that we are made for one another; and in another respect I was made to be set over them, as a ram over the flock, or a bull over the herd.

But examine the matter from first principles, from this. If all things are not mere atoms, it is Nature that orders all things: if this is so, the inferior things exist for the sake of the superior, and these for the sake of one another. . .

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 11.18 (tr Long)

I know a fellow who can’t seem to get over the fact that Marcus Aurelius was one of the most powerful men on earth. I usually respond that I care little for that, and that I think he may well have been one of the best men on earth.

The fact is, of course, that he was both, and the two don’t often seem to go together. I have known many mighty men who insisted that they were good, but I have rarely met mighty men who actually tried to be good, and who took their responsibilities to others so seriously.

Did he sometimes fail? Of course he did, as we all do, and his writings reveal that inner struggle. What always amazes me, however, is his constant sense of reflection, of seeking improvement, of aiming to match his own thoughts and deeds to the order of Nature.

Pontius Pilate washed his hands, and asked, “What is truth?”

Marcus Aurelius disciplined his mind, and asked, “How may I serve truth?”

All things are made to work together. Nature is not a random collection of things. Some parts are smaller, and some are bigger, but all are necessary. The leader may rule the pack, but he is still responsible for the pack, and his own role is to look for the common good, not merely for his own. The lower may indeed serve the higher, but the higher serves the whole.

We say it often, but we rarely do it. For shame!

I am not a ram or a bull, so I must look at this from the bottom up, and not from the top down. To be quite honest, I actually prefer that. I have a hard enough time trying to be virtuous with next to nothing, and I would have a much harder time being virtuous with almost everything; I don’t envy the Emperor.

So the Philosopher-Emperor will offer nine (well, actually ten, but stay tuned) rules of moral conduct here, and with this first one he begins by remembering that we are all made for one another. We will do this in very different ways, and we will serve many different roles, and we will find ourselves at vastly different places in the pecking order. Still, we rise and fall together, because there can be no good over here at the expense of another over there.

Written in 5/2009