Attitude Towards Christians
Although, before becoming emperor, Marcus Aurelius followed the lenient line of the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, he is listed among the persecutors of Christians along with Nero, Domitian and Decius. Henry Wace attributes his severity as emperor to rivalry between the rising teachers of Christianity and the professors of the school of Stoicism to which the emperor belonged, to a personal bitterness to which he gave expression in his Meditations, and to the occurrence of natural calamities that the populace attributed to the anger of the gods against those who denied them and that the Christians saw as signs of the end of the world.
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