What was President Clinton’s favorite book? Not the same as candidate Clinton’s. Before his first election, it had been A Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet Gabriel García Márquez himself was among those present at William Styron’s dinner table in 1995 to hear Clinton declare that he had changed his mind: now, in the Oval Office, his favorite book was instead The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. With that telling stroke the president became one of the most vivid (and ironical) entries in a long Western tradition, not quite a cult, that holds Marcus to be uniquely enlightened among rulers, and his Meditations oracular.

Skeptics may cringe at the president’s self-identification with the tortured but pious philosopher-prince, or find bathos in Clinton’s confidence that the Meditations are a profundity rather than a gathering of platitudes. But such skepticism hardly matters. What does matter is Clinton’s demonstration that Marcus Aurelius is still a name to conjure with.

It is for the same reason that Fred McLynn’s biography of Marcus Aurelius matters: as the new millennium’s first example of a tradition, dating back to Julian the Apostate in the fourth century, of revering the great Roman.[1]Even within that tradition, McLynn’s contribution stands out—very few of Marcus’s admirers have made such absolute claims for him, at such great length, and with such zeal. It’s zealous rather than sensible for McLynn to pronounce Marcus “the one figure of antiquity who still speaks to us today … the only voice from