to speak of the "pessimism" of Marcus Aurelius. E.R. Dodds,2 for example, insisted on the perpetual self-criticism which Marcus carried out upon himself, and related this tendency to a dream of Marcus', which is preserved for us by Dio Cassius.3 On the night of his adoption, says Dio, the emperor dreamed that his shoulders were made of ivory. According to Dodds,� this suggests that Marcus suffered from an acute identity crisis.
In a collaborative study, H. van Effentcrre and the psychosomatist R. Dailly undertook to diagnose the pathological aspects - both psychic and physiological - of what they termed "the case of Marcus Aurelius." ; Basing themselves on the testimony of Dio Cassius,6 they supposed that Marcus suffered from a gastric ulcer, and that the emperor's personality corresponded to the psychological correlates of this illness:
The ulcer-sufferer is someone closed in on himself, worried, and uneasy
. . . a kind of hypertrophy of the sel f renders him unable to see his fellow men . . . in the last analysis, it is himself that he is looking for in others
. . . He is conscientious to the point of punctiliousness, and is more interested in the technical perfection of administration than in human relationships, although the former should be only the sum total of the latter. If he is a thinking man, the ulcer-sufferer will be inclined to search for justifications, to fabricate superior personalities, and to adopt Stoic or Pharisaic attitudes.7
For these authors, Marcus' Meditalions arc a response to his need for
"self-persuasion" and "justification in his own eyes." H
The acme of this kind of interpretation is no doubt the article by Thomas W. Africa, entitled "The opium addiction of Marcus Aurelius." 9 Basing himself on passages in Galen and Dio Cassius, the author tries to detect a genuine addiction to opium on the part of Marcus Aurelius, and he believes he can discover its symptoms in the Meditations. In fact, however, the texts he cites do not constitute conclusive proof of Marcus' drug addiction. As for the texts from the Meditations themselves cited as symptoms of intoxication, Africa's interpretation of them is pure nonsense.
Dio Cassius does not mention opium at all; he only mentions that, during the Danubian campaign, Marcus did not eat at night, and during the day consumed only a bit of theriac to ease his chest and stomach. ID Galen docs indeed mention opium,1 1 but in such a way t hnt it is impossible to ded uce from his words a genuine addict ion to opium. I le merely 11nys thn t , during
Marcus Aurelius
1 8 1
the Danubian campaign, Marcus took a little bit of theriac every day - "in the quantity of an Egyptian bean" - for reasons of security. This was a frequent custom among Roman emperors, since theriac was considered an excellent antidote against poisons. Because theriac contained poppy-juice -
that is, opium - Marcus experienced chronic fatigue during the day when he took it. He therefore had the poppy-juice removed from the mixture, but then began to suffer from insomnia. He again returned to taking theriac with poppy-j uice, but this time the thcriac was aged and much less strong. After the death of Marcus' official doctor Demetrius, Galen himself was charged with the composition of the emperor's theriac, and Marcus was entirely satisfied with his services. Galen explained to him that his theriac was the best, precisely because it was composed according to traditional proportions.
Marcus' problems with fatigue and insomnia were, as we can sec, merely temporary. Marcus never sought out opium for its own sake, but for its medicinal effects, and thanks to Galen he seems to have found the proper balance in his dosage.
In the last note to his article, Africa himself admits that, even if one consumed as much thcriac as Marcus did, the quantity of opium it contained was, in all probability, insufficient to produce an opium addiction. But, he adds, we must suppose that the prescribed doses were not always respected, because we must find some way of explaining the strangeness of the emperor's Meditations and the bizarre nature of the visions he describes.
Here the weakness of Africa's reasoning leaps to the eyes. We are not at all certain, he argues, that Marcus Aurelius was an opium addict, but we have to presume that he was, since we have somehow to explain the strangeness of the Medittttions. This is a double sophism: first, even if Marcus' visions in the Meditations are bizarre, nothing obliges us to explain them by means of opium; after all, Dailly and van Effenterre were content to explain them by a gastric ulcer!
Africa thinks he can detect analogies between the Meditations and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-eater. But is such a comparison really possible?
We shall let Africa speak for himself: 12
Marcus' vision of time as a raging river carrying all before it into the abyss of the future was no school doctrine of life viewed from the Porch but an attempt to express the extended perspectives of time and space which opium had opened up to him. Temporal and spatial dimensions were accelerated until Europe was but a speck and the present a point and men insects crawling on a clod. History was no longer a reference hut an actual pageant of the past and Marcus shared the exacerbated scns;UionN of his follow-addict, De Quincey: "The sense of space, and in the eml t ill' sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings,
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Figures
landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled and was amplified to the extent of unutterable and self-repeating infinity. This disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion of time. Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a duration far beyond the limits of human experience." 13
The passages from Marcus Aurelius to which Africa refers are the following: Eternity is a kind of river of events, and a violent torrent; no sooner has each thing been seen, than it has been carried away; another is being carried along, and it too will be swept away. 14
Think often of the speed with which all that is and comes to be passes away and vanishes; for Being is like a river in perpetual flux, its activities are in constant transformation, and its causes in myriad varieties.
Scarcely anything is stable, even that which is close at hand. Dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and the future, in which all things vanish away.15
Pace Mr Africa, this theme is abundantly attested in Stoicism. Talce, for example, the following passages from Seneca:
Place before your mind's eye the vast spread of time's abyss and embrace the universe; and then compare what we call human life with infinity . . . rn
Everything falls into the same abyss . . . time passes infinitely quickly . . .
Our existence is a point; nay, even less; but nature, by dividing this puny thing, has given it the appearance of a longer duration. 17
This image is a venerable one; we find it in the following fine verses of Leonidas of Tarentum: "0 man, infinite was the time before you came to the dawn, and infinite will be the time awaiting you in Hades. What portion of life remains for you, but that of a point, or if there is anything tinier than a point?" 18 To be sure, Marcus' river is none other than the Stoic river of being, which "flows without ceasing," 19 but in the last analysis, it is also the river of Heraclitus, who, Plato tells us, compared all beings to a river's flow.20