Memento Mori: A Review of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

By Brett Z. Chancery

to readers who may never claim the title of emperor. His approach to death is no exception. The idea weighs heavily upon the emperor’s thoughts. To him, understanding death was essential to organizing life. He explains, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”

Considering one’s own mortality may carry a degree of morbidity, but the philosopher king constantly places death in the context of nature. Aurelius describes death as “a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.” By recognizing the inevitability of death, Aurelius explains, “Death overshadows you.” Aurelius even extends this argument. Besides being natural and inevitable, death, in one sense, is prerequisite to birth: “Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.” By viewing death as cyclical, he removes its sting and with it the stigma of a seemingly morbid topic. “When we cease from activity or follow a thought to its conclusion, it’s a kind of death. And it doesn’t harm us. Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation a kind of dying.” Surprisingly, Aurelius emphasizes the good in death, for it is natural, inevitable, and prerequisite to transformation.

Grappling with the certainty of death can undoubtedly lead to fear, but the Stoic philosopher rationalizes dying: “And what dying is—and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it’s nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of.” Making death a natural process desensitizes death’s sting. Despite this realization, Aurelius admits that death is “a natural mystery.” The great mystery for Aurelius is what happens after death. He reminds himself, “Wait for it patiently—annihilation or metamorphosis.”

Aurelius addresses this concern more than once in Meditations. Using the analogy of a journey on a ship, he describes life’s journey poetically: “You boarded, you set sail, you’ve made the passage. Time to disembark. If it’s for another life, well, there’s nowhere without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure.” Interestingly, Aurelius understands two possible outcomes following death. On the one hand, death is the staging ground for transformation. He bases this belief in transformation simply on faith. (While Christianity existed in the Roman Empire, Aurelius adhered to the traditional gods of the Romans.) His reliance on faith provided comfort for any fears regarding death. Wrestling with the mystery of life after death, he also writes,

If our souls survive, how does the air find room for them—since the beginning of time? How does the earth find room for all the bodies buried in it since the beginning of time? They linger for whatever length of time, and then, through change and decomposition, make room for others. So too with the souls that inhabit the air. They linger a little, and then are changed—diffused and kindled into fire, absorbed into the logos from which all things spring, and so make room for new arrivals.

Uncertainty plagues Aurelius’ understanding of this transformation. He struggles with articulating the nature of this metamorphosis, but as Aurelius considers metamorphosis, he recognizes the influence of the gods and his own faith as noted above:

“If it’s for another life, well, there’s nowhere without gods on that side either.”

Wavering between his understanding of metamorphosis and annihilation, Aurelius explores the consequences of both as they relate to fear of death. This mystery could be a potent provocation of fear for Aurelius. Part of addressing one’s fears is defining the object of fear. For Aurelius, he defines this mystery as “the end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.” Aurelius ultimately concludes, “Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it—change, but not cease.” Building upon his understanding of death as a natural process, Marcus Aurelius addressed the fear of death by visualizing its possible effects by logic and accepting its outcomes by faith.

By considering one’s fateful appointment with death, the Roman emperor wages war on fear and considers his own posthumous fame. As an emperor of the mighty Roman empire, one may take actions to secure a positive and enduring legacy. Aurelius considers this pursuit of fame a quest in futility: “People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too.” Even great emperors cannot escape death through fame; “Alexander the Great,” he writes, “and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms.” The universality of death becomes a great equalizer.

The Latin phrase memento mori challenges readers to consider their own mortality. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations provides this sobering reminder as well. For one who could relish his own earthly power, to choose humility is not a common characteristic, yet Aurelius consistently reminds himself to pursue humility in his personal journal. Ironically, the emperor’s pursuit of humility actually secured his legacy.

While the topic of death is not often a joyful discourse, it is a topic as relevant as life itself. Popular culture today echoes this tradition by reminding us to live with death in mind. While Aurelius’ Meditations addresses a number of thoughts and issues, his attention to his own mortality permeates the text.

Aurelius considers each person’s appointment with death as fate, combats the fear of death with logic and faith, and explores the pursuit of posthumous fame as futility. Taking the time to read the classic work is well worth the effort. As with any work (classic or modern), the reader may not agree with every conclusion, but engaging the difficult ideas proves to be a beneficial exercise. Death is a part of the human experience, and Aurelius understands this well as he writes, “What humans experience is part of human experience. . . . Nothing that can happen is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.” As part of human experience, humanity must engage thoughtfully with death. In short, Aurelius’ closing statement reveals the impact of his own intellectual exploration of death on life: “So make your exit with grace— the same grace shown to you.”

As an alumnus of the University of Mobile and the University of South Alabama, Brett Chancery serves as a fulltime history instructor with Coastal Alabama Community College.

In 1989, Oxford University Press published a massive book by David Hackett Fischer entitled Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, destined to become a classic. Albion’s Seed showed how four streams of English-speaking settlers in America—Puritans; “Cavaliers” and indentured servants; Quakers; and “Borderers,” including Scotch and Northern Irish—brought with them distinctive outlooks and ways of life. Fischer described the book as the first installment in a “cultural history of the United States.” In his preface and on subsequent occasions, he referred to planned volumes that would follow. This enormously ambitious project morphed considerably over time, but from the beginning Fischer had promised a volume that would focus on the diverse and distinct cultures and folkways that enslaved Africans brought with them from their native continent: different languages, different religious practices, different skills, different senses of community. He never abandoned that plan, and