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Aurelius: The Emperor Of Ancient Rome

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“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” In life, where does one put himself in the bigger picture, in society, when it comes to who he is as a person and how he may contribute to that culture. No matter where you stand in the class system you may be put above others in the fact that you may do your job well and obtain all that you need through proper justice. One’s mindset is more important than any title or vast amount of money they could be given. One man who shows this well is the emperor of ancient Rome in the year 169 to 180 A.D. Even though he was a man who was given anything being the ruler of the state, he …show more content…
This approach is interesting in the fact that it doesn’t involve his environment, and I would say that Aurelius is stating that to grow up a mature adult you don’t need a good house, just a good family and community. His grandfather gave him morals, mother piety and beneficence, great-grandfather taught liberality, and his father's reputation modesty. His teachers gave him many things such as not to gossip, discipline, benevolence, stop finding fault, envy, duplicity, hypocrisy, stop indifference, truth, justice, self-government, and mildness of temper. The biggest lessons from his teachers that he holds dear to him is to love philosophy and stoicism. From there on he goes into specific detail upon his father's contributions in his life and growth in the early years. “To the Gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsman and friends, nearly everything good.” from Meditations, book one. In the end he thanks the Gods for all that he was given in his former life and he promises to make use of it as best as he can. In this book I can and can’t agree with all of the things that he finds valuable to learn about and thank others for. Now most of his family's morals and the teachers’ lessons gave him qualities that are good to have, but for how much he learned I don’t …show more content…
His message was for him, but in the sense of the general population his material is written as an unattainable goal and that is where differences and a change of opinion comes into play. In book one the main debate is that there are some lessons that aren’t mentioned that could be vital to learn in your younger years to make you wiser, knowledge seeking, and a contempt adult. The third book discusses life, the little events occurring daily that we grow from, and how to act around others to grow and build virtue and happiness in our lives from these small regular occurrences. The biggest issue is how Aurelius expects people to seek out this happiness, to eliminate gossip and only seek knowledge in life. Now this is attainable for some, as stated above, but not for everybody with the massive amount of people in the world. The final discussion came from Meditations book five in the topic of not small daily occurrences, but the discussion of daily life in general, doing work and being content with where you are for when you go to the grave. To wake up and go to work, come home to relax, and then do it all over again. The number one issue is that not everyone had the same path to happiness and people are often seeking individuality, so getting them all to believe in the same

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