A Brief Pause
I’m a bit like Marcus Aurelius.
Ok, I’m not at all like Marcus Aurelius, but he had this idea in his head that he would spend most of his time lolling about in Rome thinking about shit and writing stuff down whilst his brother, Lucius Verus, would do all the administrative stuff and the bashing of barbarians. Which is why, when Antoninus Pius, their adoptive father, died in AD 161, Marcus made his younger, also adoptive, brother co-emperor, even though he didn’t have to.
Marcus was only 17 when Hadrian singled him out as the sort of chap who looked like he might make a fine emperor one day, and as part of the deal which saw Hadrian adopt Anontinus as his heir, he included the caveat that Antoninus should adopt Marcus as his heir.
The biggest problem with Marcus’ vision of sharing power was that Lucius didn’t much fancy the life of bashing the Danubian tribes either and would have preferred to spend his days at the games or being extravagant. Lucius also spoiled Marcus’ plans by dropping dead in 169, either of the plague or of a stroke, which was very inconsiderate of him.
That left Marcus a lot of behind-the-scenes administrative work to do on his own, whilst he also tried to sit around in his campaign tent writing Meditations all day before going out and socking it to the Marcomanni, who, despite what Ridley Scott might think in his daft movie Gladiator, didn’t dress in skins like cavemen.
And that is where, only where, I am like Marcus Aurelius. I spend all day writing whilst trying to reorganise things behind the scenes. Not only am I currently producing the daily stuff, and the social media stuff, and promoting the current book, but I am also working on my next book, which is going to be a more chronological history of the Roman Empire from 44 BC to (probably) AD 235. For the new book, I need a whole bunch of maps and diagrams to illustrate it and for those, I either need to license some, which is an option that is both expensive and doesn’t always result in the exact thing I am looking for; have someone create them, which means I can get what I want, but is also expensive; or take to Adobe Illustrator and make them myself. I have chosen the latter option.
With no Lucius Verus to dump the workload on, this means I need to take a short pause to reorganise my time. As a result, the daily birthday articles will go into a brief hiatus, only for a few days, and come back in another form that is easier for me to produce and yet more glorious and, hopefully, more entertaining. Starting from, probably next week, there will still be the same amount of content but on a different schedule where I can produce it in a way that is more time-efficient and fits around my current campaign against the Quadi tribes north of the Danube.
No, wait, that was Marcus Aurelius. I’m getting confused.
Anyway. Regular content will resume next week. In the meantime, stay safe, have fun, and please buy my book!
JC.