Marcus Aurelius Quotes
The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002, p. 37.
Philosophically, Rivera was a pacifist, but when in the Spanish Civil War he hfelt he had no other recourse but to protect his people from the onslaught of the German and Italian supported Fascists. Civilian populations were deliberately bombed from the air. However, when he had to give the order to fire he added this philosophical/religious wrinkle.
At first reading, this is just a common report of a German war correspondent riding along on a bombing mission. However what makes it a very important historical quotation is the description of the fires and the date. In WWII the allies firebombed Hamburg {624722} and Dresden, and were then accused by the Germans—and by some historical revisionists in the 21st century—of bombing civilian cities and using the firbombing technique where one huge conflagrant sucked the air out of the area and roasted even people in bomb shelters. However, it was clear that the Germans had started the bombing of civilian cities, but the firebombing was less clear. This quotation proves that it was the Germans who first broke the rules of war and that made the subsequent Allied use of the technique legal and for most people then moral.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180 AD), an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
