{"id":155141,"date":"2020-04-13T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=155141"},"modified":"2020-02-25T06:49:54","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T06:49:54","slug":"marcus-aurelius-in-love-the-future-stoic-philosopher-and-roman-emperors-passionate-teenage-love-letters-to-his-tutor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/04\/marcus-aurelius-in-love-the-future-stoic-philosopher-and-roman-emperors-passionate-teenage-love-letters-to-his-tutor\/","title":{"rendered":"Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Future Stoic Philosopher and Roman Emperor\u2019s Passionate Teenage Love Letters to His Tutor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThose who love less should be helped out and lavished with more.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWho we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,\u201d a trio of psychologists wrote in their wonderful inquiry into limbic revision and how love rewires the brain<\/a>. But whom we love equally depends on who we are and who we want to become. Love, like time<\/a>, is as much a function of us as we are a function of it.<\/p>\n

An especially striking illustration of this equivalence, both for its intensity and its unexpectedness, comes from the adolescent love letters the future Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius<\/strong> (April 26, 121\u2013March 17, 180) to his teacher, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, collected and translated by Amy Richlin two millennia later in Marcus Aurelius in Love<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a most improbable addition to history\u2019s greatest LGBT love letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Fatherless since childhood, Marcus Aurelius was raised by his wealthy single mother, Domitia Lucilla. In 139, she hired Fronto \u2014 an African immigrant to Rome who described himself as \u201ca Libyan of the Libyan nomads,\u201d by then one of the era\u2019s preeminent orators \u2014 to teach her eighteen-year-old son the art of rhetoric in preparation for his political career.<\/p>\n

Across caste and rank, across twenty-some years of age difference, the two Marcuses fell in love.<\/p>\n

For six years, until Marcus Aurelius\u2019s socially necessitated marriage, they lived in close proximity and exchanged letters of devotion and tenderness, laced with intellectual admiration and erotic longing. Although their love was edged with danger under Roman law, it was not its same-sex nature that imperiled them \u2014 a grown man charged with seducing an adolescent male could be charged with adultery, the penalty for which was exile or death. But the seduction, if the term applies to their case at all, flowed the other way: Marcus Aurelius inundated Fronto with ardor that at first received only a timorous echo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the preface to the collection, Richlin draws on the early Stoic philosophers\u2019 forgotten axioms of sexuality to provide the deeper cultural context beneath the shallow reach of Roman law:<\/p>\n

Zeno (335\u2013263 BCE) and his successor, Chrysippus (280\u2013207 BCE), argued that sex between human beings who have learned the proper principles of respect and true friendship is a good thing, and that the ideal society would be one in which sex was enjoyed freely, without propertarian bonds of marriage. In particular, the young person just turning toward philosophy, the prokopton<\/em>, should be trained by his mentor first through a sexual relationship, which should grow into an understanding of philosophy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so it did for Marcus Aurelius and his mentor-turned-paramour.<\/p>\n

It was through the portal of intellectual reverence that the young man marched his heart into love. By the end of 139, he had already become besotted with Fronto. After receiving one of his tutor\u2019s essays, he exults:<\/p>\n

Should I not burn with love of you when you\u2019ve written this to me? What should I do? I can\u2019t stop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Soon, the young man began addressing his beloved as \u201cmy Fronto,\u201d unselfconsciously calling him \u201cmy number one delight,\u201d \u201cmy dearest and most loving,\u201d \u201cmy biggest thing under heaven,\u201d \u201cbreath of my life.\u201d Fronto, at first, met this ardor with considerable reserve \u2014 self-restraint, perhaps \u2014 but it was an ambivalent reserve. Aware that Marcus was being courted by another man \u2014 not uncommon practice in their time and place \u2014 and that this suitor already considered him his \u201cHe-Sweetheart,\u201d Fronto writes:<\/p>\n

You seem likely, dear Boy, to want to understand\u2026 why, pray, I who am not in love strive so eagerly to gain the same Things that Lovers do. So will I tell you first how that may be. By Zeus, that Fellow who is so very a Suitor was not born with a sharper Pair of Eyes than I who am no Lover, yet I in fact am sensible of your Beauty no less than the rest; I might say, more acutely so than your Suitor.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Me you approach not at your Peril, nor at the Cost of any Harm will you keep Company with me; nay, \u2019twill do you every Good. Indeed, Beauties are help\u2019d and benefitted more by those who love them not, as green Shoots are help\u2019d by the Waters. For Springs and Rivers love not green Shoots, yet in their going near and their flowing past do they make them to flower and to bloom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fronto\u2019s conflicted push-pull message achieved none of the push. With the same stubborn optimism<\/a> and imperviousness to adversity<\/a> that would one day make him a great Stoic and a great emperor, Marcus responds:<\/p>\n

Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me\u2026 with whole clumps of arguments, but you will never put off your Suitor \u2014 I mean me. Nor will I proclaim it any less that I love Fronto, or will I be less in love, because you\u2019ve proven, and with such strange and strong and elegant expressions, that those who love less should be helped out and lavished with more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two millennia later, W.H. Auden would echo this sentiment in his stunning poem \u201cThe More Loving One.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Marcus accelerates the propulsion of his undeterred ardor:<\/p>\n

God, no, I am dying so for love of you, and I\u2019m not scared off by this doctrine of yours, and if you\u2019re going to be more ripe and ready for others who don\u2019t love you, I will still love you as long as I live and breathe.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Socrates didn\u2019t burn more with desire for Phaedrus than I\u2019ve burned during these days \u2014 did I say days? I mean months \u2014 for the sight of you. Your letter fixed it so a person wouldn\u2019t have to be Dion to love you so much \u2014 if he isn\u2019t immediately seized with love of you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then, in a touchingly innocent closing line, he adds:<\/p>\n

My lady mother says hello.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Fronto\u2019s birthday, Marcus writes:<\/p>\n

Because I love you next to my own self, I want to make a wish for myself on this day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an imaginative romp through the intellectual and spiritual epicenters of the ancient world, he gathers a posy of blandishments and beneficences for his beloved:<\/p>\n

I go down to Athens, and on bended knee I beseech and beg Minerva that whatever I may ever learn about letters should above all journey from Fronto\u2019s mouth to my heart.\u2019 Now I return to Rome, and I call on the gods of roads and voyages with wishes that every trip I take may be with you beside me, and that I may not be worn out so frequently by such ferocious longing. In the end I ask all the guardian gods of all the nations, and Jupiter himself, who thunders over the Capitol Hill, to grant us that I should celebrate this day, on which you were born for me, along with you, and a happy, strong you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fronto did not remain unresponsive. \u201cWith good reason I\u2019ve devoted myself to you,\u201d he eventually writes, \u201cconsidering your love for me, which I feel so lucky to have.\u201d Whatever the nature and magnitude of his own feelings may have been, he makes no pretense of denying that he loves being so loved:<\/p>\n

Good-bye, Caesar, and love me the most, as you do. I truly love to pieces every little letter of every word you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Plucked from antiquity when the manuscript was discovered in 1815, and reanimated by Richlin\u2019s painstaking scholarship despite missing pages, illegible handwriting, and untranslatable sentiments, the forty-six letters collected in Marcus Aurelius in Love<\/em><\/strong><\/a> radiate a testament to an elemental fact I have observed elsewhere<\/a>: The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse \u2014 to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable \u2014 varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again \u2014 cannot begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.<\/p>\n

For a further testament across time and space, savor Emily Dickinson\u2019s electric love letters to Susan Gilbert<\/a> and Herman Melville\u2019s passionate epistolary longing for Nathaniel Hawthorne<\/a>, then revisit the grown Marcus Aurelius, his wisdom having ripened under Fronto\u2019s formative sun, on the key to living with presence<\/a> and how to begin each day with unassailable serenity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWho we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,\u201d a trio of psychologists wrote in their wonderful inquiry into limbic revision and how love rewires the brain. But whom we love equally depends on who we are and who we want to become. Love, like time, is as much a function of us as we are a function of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":155142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1177],"class_list":["post-155141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}