Thirteen years before Marcus Aurelius would be old enough to legally hold any public post, Hadrian decided something extraordinary: he was going to make Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome. What was it that Hadrian saw in this young boy? What gave him the sense that he was destined for great things? “Hadrian regarded himself as the greatest polymath of all time,” Frank McLynn tells us in Marcus Aurelius: A Life. And he wasn’t bashful about his affection for other intellectuals, “Hadrian bestowed honours and riches on tragedians, grammarians, comedians and rhetoricians.” Like it or not, McLynn says, Hadrian judged a man by his interest in literature.
From an early age, Marcus showed he fit that bill. His tutor Fronto wrote of how Marcus “used to go about in public with too serious a face and used to read books at the theatre or at banquets.” McLynn talks about how “the worst that his detractors found to say about him was that he sometimes took books from the city libraries for his own use.” That was exactly the kind of person Hadrian was drawn to.
Young or old, he believed, a love of reading is one of the surest signs that greatness lies ahead. That love seemed to be inherent in Marcus, but that’s not always the case. More often, it’s cultivated—by the seeking and unseeking alike. When he was in second grade, Harry Truman came down with a rare bacterial infection that paralyzed his arms and legs. The boy who could hardly stand to be indoors was suddenly and helplessly bedridden. “That’s when he started reading,” Truman’s sister recalled. “He couldn’t do anything else.” He read so much that when, miraculously and abruptly, he recovered, it was recommended that he skip third grade.
The infection would never come back but the reading bug was incurable. “I don’t know anybody in the world that ever read as much or as constantly as [Harry] did,” one cousin said. “He was what you would really call a ‘bookworm.'” A classmate remembered, “I saw Harry go home [from school] many a time with two or three books on weekends, and I guess by Monday he had them all read.” He became obsessed with finding out what caused success and failure, he said. So he “pored over” Plutarch’s Lives, Abbott’s biographies, even Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (Truman’s copy was famously filled with notes and underlines, even comments disagreeing with Marcus). The greats, Truman concluded, were all “readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history…Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Hadrian knew it. Marcus knew. Truman knew it.
What are you waiting for? Why aren’t you reading more? Why aren’t you challenging yourself as a reader?
Source: Daily Stoic
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