Marcus Aurelius In Love Analysis

As an emperor to be, the young Marcus Aurelius was expected to be well educated, and was thus appointed the teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto. Their relationship was unusual in that there were many levels of the power dynamics of a young emperor in training and an older, more mature teacher. The letters between Marcus Aurelius, while he was still young, and Fronto give a brief glimpse of their relationship over the course of six years, but Marcus Aurelius’ short mention of Fronto in his personal reflection of his life when he is older presents a stark contrast to their letters.
Pederasty was a completely acceptable, and in fact, culturally expected in Greek culture. It is a relationship between male Greeks in which a, mature, married man would take a youthful boy or young man under his wings and teach him how to be a Greek. It was completely acceptable for these relationships to be sexual, so long as the older man, the erastes, was the penetrator and the younger man, the eromenos, was the one being penetrated.

In the second letter documented in Marcus Aurelius in Love by Amy Richlin, a classics professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Fronto writes about love, saying that Marcus surely has many suitors drawn to his beauty, but that Fronto will not be one of those suitors, and that Marcus should not be a suitor of Fronto because suitors get nothing in return as a result of their love (39). But in letter three, Marcus replies, “Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me, with whole clumps of arguments, but you will never put me off your Suitor–I mean me… I am so dying for love of you, and I’m not scared off by this doctrine of yours.”PAGE 45. And nearly all of Marcus’ letters end with a declaration of love for Fronto, while many of Fronto’s early letters end with a