Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome at the time this text was believed to have been composed. In addition, he was also notably a philosopher who followed the school of stoicism. It is on the basis of his being a Stoic rather than the leader of an empire which was actively persecuting early Christian sects that the author placed his hopes that this argument for justice, mercy and understanding would appeal.
Lucius Aurelius Commodus
The conventional wisdom of propaganda goes that if you can’t convince the man himself, you try going through his son. The man known more familiarly to history simply as Commodus was the son of Marcus and, for a brief period, something essentially along the lines of co-Emperor. Commodus would eventually succeed his father to the singular power afforded the Emperor so that is reason enough for the author to direct his appeal to both men in his introduction.
Angels
The text is not merely speculative philosophical nor a lesson in history. It is also thoughtful contemplation and analysis of certain aspects of Christian theology which are, to put it plainly, fodder for flights of fancy and confusion. For instance, the role of angels in the hierarchical structure of Creation. Turns out that these begins are not nearly as confusing as it often seems as the author identifies the role entrusted them with a definitive lack of ambiguity. They are in “control of matter and the forms of matter…to exercise providence for God over the things created and ordered by Him.”
The Trinity
The main characters, so to speak, of this text are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the sense that without them there would be no Christian for the Romans to persecute. The trinitarian nature of monotheistic deity has always been and still remains a source of profound difficulty for many to explain, but the author gives it a shot and does at least as well as anyone else. The explanation is that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are to be understood not as three separate deities, but three separate aspects of the same deity all existing in a state of timeless eternity and representing distinct concepts.
The Roman “Idea” of Christians
In reality, the main character of the text is akin to what the called “composite characters” in movies and TV shows based on true story. The persecution of the early Christians was not entirely driven willy-nilly around the fear of a new religion in town. Conspiracy theories had been constructed at the grassroots level to create a natural suspicion of and hatred toward this strange new kind of person so at odds with the polytheistic worship of Roman myth. As a result, a “Christian” for many Romans mean specifically someone who was atheistic since they rejected all the Empire’s many famous gods and goddesses, a person who practiced cannibalism in their religious rituals, and—basically—a sexual deviant. Or, put another way, an early Christian was to Romans what many pagans have been to Christians ever since.
