SOURCE: “The Noblest Roman of Them All,” in The Yale Review, Vol. 77, No. 2, March, 1988, pp. 287-92.

In the following essay, Segal reviews Marcus Aurelius: A Biography, by Anthony Birley, also commenting on Aurelius's life and times.

It was a golden age. Gibbon regarded it as the time when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.”

In the second century a.d., the Roman Empire extended over nearly two million square miles. One city ruled the entire world. Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa were merely its “farms” (as a contemporary man of letters, Aelius Aristides, expressed it). Roman prosperity was enhanced by luxuries as diverse as Irish metals and “the perfumes of Arabia” (and even its oil, though it was still only being used by scholars to burn at midnight). Education was more widespread and accessible than at any previous time, and the rate of...