The Meditations isn’t our only insight into Marcus’s thinking, though. In the early nineteenth century, the Italian scholar Angelo Mai uncovered a treasure trove of ancient letters between the Latin rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto and several other notable individuals, including his student Marcus Aurelius. We can’t date the individual letters precisely, but they appear to span the whole period of Marcus and Fronto’s friendship, until the latter’s death around 167 AD at the height of the Antonine Plague.
