What Is Marcus Aurelius Evil

Marcus Aurelius was a very influential individual in his time and continues to be impactful even today through his writing. Marcus Aurelius was a famous Roman emperor. He was the last of the good emperors as many have said. Marcus Aurelius always tried to put others’ needs before his own and lived a very virtuous life. Aurelius practiced Stoicism which was reflected in his text entitled Meditations. Aurelius wrote Meditations with no intent to allow anyone else to read it. He wrote this text to himself as a way to remind him of the virtues that he held most dear. After his death, though, Meditations was found and published and is now a very famous text in literature. I, personally, have three favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

Aurelius states, “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.” Here, Marcus Aurelius is stating that he will meet with some kind of evil everyday. He goes on, then, to explain that there is this evil in the world because of the ignorance of people to distinguish between what is good and evil. Aurelius argues that this ignorance is what causes evil. When people don’t decipher the difference between good and evil, they oftentimes do evil. It is hard to be a good person all the time, so when someone doesn’t know the difference between good and evil, they will take the easy way out and be nefarious. This is what Aurelius is warning himself about in this passage. Marcus Aurelius is reminding himself that everyday he will come into contact with people who are evil but he cannot, he still needs to be virtuous and self

Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, is basically warning people about being lazy. He claims that laziness causes evil. This is one of the reasons that he was such a great emperor. He was not lazy. Aurelius also argues that humans have to be virtuous. Marcus Aurelius was a man of Stoic philosophy, so he held himself to high virtues, which again, made him a great emperor in history. Clearly, Marcus Aurelius is an important figure in our world’s history because of his Meditations, and he ability to be a great Roman