The Washington Post, May 31st, 1987
MARCUS AURELIUS A Biography By Anthony Birley Yale University Press. 320 pp. $25 WHEN PLATO, in The Republic, foresaw no end of troubles for human communities unless philosophers became kings or kings philosophers, he was thinking of small city-states like his native Athens, or Syracuse, where his attempt to raise a young despot as philosopher ended in dismal failure. He could hardly have imagined that some six centuries after his own day a man trained as a philosopher and devoted to philosophy would become sole ruler of an empire that stretched from Spain and Scotland in the West to Syria and...
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