witness to the effect of the Meditations on a modern reader
than the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose essay “Homage
to Marcus Aurelius” takes its departure from the famous
statue of the emperor on the Capitoline hill in Rome:
I saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the
company of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one
of the most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was
leaving Rome for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed
one wishes for one’s funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to
stop, paid, and got out of the car.... Presently I discovered I was not alone:
a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of nowhere and quietly sat down a
couple of feet away. Its sudden presence was so oddly comforting that
momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes.... For a while we
both stared at the horseman’s statue.... And suddenly—presumably
because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michelangelo’s pilasters and
arches—all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of any
geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of this place;
but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze
progress.FURTHER READING
The standard modern biography of Marcus is A. R. Birley,
Marcus Aurelius (1966; rev. ed., New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1987), which makes full use of the
principal ancient literary sources—not only the Meditations
(especially Book 1), but the remains of the history of Dio
Cassius, the letters of Fronto and the biography of Marcus in