For Maximus:

Self-control and resistance to distractions.

Optimism in adversity – especially illness

A personality in balance: dignity and grace together

Doing your job without whining.

Other people’s certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice.

Never taken aback or apprehensive. Neither rash nor hesitant – or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious – but not aggressive or paranoid either.

Generosity, charity, honesty.

The sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it.

That one could ever have felt patronized by him – or in a position to patronize him

A sense of humor. 

Meditations 1:15

 

Maximus is Claudius Maximus, the Stoic senator. Maximus, besides being one of Marcus’s heroes, also oversaw the trial of Apuleius (he of the Golden Ass, the only surviving Roman novel) for the practice of magic.

As I’ve said repeatedly in these, there isn’t necessarily a lot of depth to many of the mediations. They, rather, rallying cries Marcus wrote to himself t encourage himself to lead a more perfect life. Kind of like the runner’s of today posting Prefointaine.