This book should have been entitled Marcus Aurelius and his Age, not as it is, Marcus Aurelius, a Life. In fact, so much of the age of MA the author take the care to talk about that, in fact, as example of this, the life and feats of his son Commodus, with MA already dead, is almost enough large to make possible another biography, this Time "Commodus, a Life". So what the author gives us is a lot fuller view than what you expect from a biography, where, of course, we demand an amount of extra history to understand the character; Mc Lynn gives much more. Another peculiarity: he gives that extra history not as it is usual, in compartmentalized chapters of the kind "Economic features of the age of so and so..." Instead, McLynn just stop what he is telling us about MA, leave him somewhere in the thread of the narration and begin to tell us about that extra aspects in full, page after page, so you remember the stile of Montaigne and his genial digressions. But this is not a flaw; he does such a thing with verve and so you find after a while that so a massive books is almost already read in just a couple of days. Informative, opinionated, sometimes humorous, this is great reading even for experienced Rome history geeks.