I have been reading Marcus Aurelius. I would like to have written "I have been re-reading Marcus Aurelius", which has a much grander air, but it wouldn't be true and besides, we all have to start somewhere. The unusual pandar for this recent intercourse between a Roman emperor from the second century after Christ and a late 20th-century Briton was a penguin, a bird which it is doubtful Marcus Aurelius ever saw. (Perhaps one made its way along the trade routes, another piece of exotica to be slaughtered at conspicuous expense in the Colosseum, but it seems unlikely.) On the second page of the ...
