Sublime

Quand, le 7 mars 161, Marc Aurèle accède à l'empire, c'est donc un événement inattendu et extraordinaire qui se produit. Rome a un empereur qui fait profession d'être un philosophe, et qui plus est un philosophe stoïcien.

Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.

According to a pamphlet written by his younger brother Gaius, quoted in a much later biography, this was the moment when Tiberius first became committed to reform. As he later put it to the Roman people, many of the men who fought Rome’s wars ‘are called masters of the world but have not a patch of earth to call their own’. To him, that was not

On the death of Nerva in 98 CE, Trajan’s succession was so guaranteed that the new emperor did not even return to Rome…

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