(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977) is an
exhaustive analysis of the civil and administrative functions
performed by Marcus and his fellow emperors,
complemented for military matters by J. B. Campbell’s The
Emperor and the Roman Army (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984).
Most of the major ancient sources for Marcus and his
world are conveniently printed with facing-page English
translations in the Loeb Classical Library. The valuable but
highly unreliable life of Marcus in the Historia Augusta can
be found in the three volumes of Scriptores Historiae
Augustae, trans. D. Magie (1921–1932), as well as in A.
Birley, trans., Lives of the Later Caesars (New York:
Penguin, 1976). The Loeb series also includes the letters of
Fronto, trans. C. R. Haines (2 volumes, 1919); and of the
historian Dio Cassius, trans. E. Cary (9 volumes, 1914–
1927, of which the last two are relevant to Marcus).
Although composed and collected a generation before
Marcus’s birth, the Letters of Pliny the Younger, trans. Betty
Radice (2 volumes, 1969), are a rich and illuminating source
for upper-class society in the mid-empire. Insight into the
intellectual life of the period can be gained from the Attic
Nights of the antiquarian Aulus Gellius, trans. J. C. Rolfe (3
volumes, 1927), the works of the satirist Lucian, trans. A. M.
Harmon, K. Kilburn and M. D. MacLeod (8 volumes, 1913–
1967), and Philostratus’s entertaining Lives of the Sophists,
trans. W. C. Wright (1921). Finally, mention should be made