Marcus Aurelius Biography

Living each day as if it were your last were the words which struck me when I first read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. His ideas of living in the present moment, one’s duty to the universal whole, and the relationship of all creatures to nature, though distant in time, are not distant at all for us. His concerns and questions still very much represent current topics today, showing only one instance of how the ancient world is alive. Through Marcus Aurelius, I developed a passion for the classical world.

As I studied Latin in high school, and both Latin and Greek in college, I wanted to know more about the life of the authors and their subjects, and how they interacted, searching for how such societies were born and produced a magnificent corpus of works, be it …show more content…
Classes on Herodotus and Thucydides have all advanced my understanding of the Greek language and have sparked an interest in learning more about the interaction of the Greek poleis during the archaic period especially. These two classes and my love for the classics drove me to classical archaeology. While my college has not offered classes on classical archaeology specifically, I took three archaeology courses on the ancient Maya, Aztecs, and Andean civilizations. All gave me an understanding on how the material found at the sites represents an ancient culture that is very much alive. New discoveries and theories change our understanding each day of how the ancients lived and even serve to parallel our lives today. The Andean people were not uncivilized or backward, but their society and the way the different states interacted represent interactions between modern countries. Similarly, both Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ account of the interaction between powers, be it Greece and Persia, or Sparta and Athens, can be used in a modern context in order to explain how powers interact, such as the