ENGLISH COMMENTARY
BOOK I
This Book is a personal acknowledgement of lessons learned and good gifts received from the men and women who seemed in retrospect to have had the most influence on his life, especially on his intellectual and moral training. This acknowledgement takes the happy form of brief character sketches, so that the manner of the Book is different from the remainder of the Meditations, with the exception of Book vi. 30. 2. Recently the view has been expressed that it was intended as an Epilogue, rather than an Introduction, and was the last to be written.
In substance a group of reminiscences, its arrangement is determined partly in reference to Marcus' life, partly by the old Greek view, discussed in Plato's Meno, that character rests upon inherited endowment, on training of habits, on explicit instruction, but depends in the last resort on Divine grace.
Thus Marcus begins with his paternal grandfather, Annius Verus, and his own father, passes to childhood's discipline, the Greek training adopted in Rome, introduces next his earlier and later tutors, thus leading up to his instruction by his adoptive father, the Emperor Titus Aurelius Antoninus Pius, for public life. Finally, he remembers his debt to the immortal gods for the many good persons, in his own family and kinsfolk, who had assisted him.
With this arrangement contrast the strictly chronological epitome of ix. 21: his life under his grandfather after his father's death; his early youth under Lucius Catilius Severus, his mother's grandfather, and in his mother's gardens on the Caelian Hill in Rome; his life as Caesar, or heir-apparent, in the Palatine or in the Emperor's country seats at Lorium and Lanuvium.
Ch. 1. M. Annius Verus was son of a Roman provincial of a family long settled in Spain. His father rose to be praetor in the capital of the Empire. He was himself three times consul and Prefect of the City, a.d. 121–37, when he was succeeded by Catilius Severus (i. 4). Vespasian and Titus had created him a patrician. He adopted his grandson, Marcus, on the death of his son (ch. ii), circa a.d. 130, and is said to have been in the Senate on the occasion of Hadrian's adoption of Antoninus Pius,
