Vindobona

A Roman legionary camp on the Danube frontier that would one day become Vienna. Marcus Aurelius spent his last years campaigning in its cold marshes against the Marcomanni, writing the private notes to himself that became the Meditations. Tradition holds he died here on March 17, 180 CE, a philosopher-emperor finishing his notebook at the edge of the empire.

Vindobona was a legionary fortress rather than a city, set where the Danube marked the line between the empire and the tribes beyond it. Marcus Aurelius spent much of the 170s on this frontier, and the campaigning was miserable work in cold wet country against enemies who would not stay beaten. The Meditations were written in those conditions, which explains their tone. They read less like a treatise than like a man talking himself into getting up in the morning.