Meditations

About this book

Meditations is a collection of personal notes written in Greek by Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD. It is arranged in twelve books, and the entries range from a single sentence to a page or two. The work has no plot and no argument that builds from beginning to end. It is a record of one man reminding himself, repeatedly, how a Stoic should think and behave.

The book was never meant for readers. That is a large part of why it has lasted. There is no performance in it, no attempt to persuade anyone else, and the same handful of ideas return over and over because the author kept needing to hear them. It is the most widely read work of Stoic philosophy and one of the few texts from the ancient world that still sells as a practical guide to daily life.

The story

There is no story in the usual sense. Book I is a list of debts: the qualities Marcus says he learned from his grandfather, his mother, his teachers and his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius. The remaining eleven books are undated notes, some of them headed with the places where they were written, including military camps on the Danube frontier during the wars against Germanic tribes.

The entries circle a few concerns. How to meet difficult people without anger. How to treat death as natural. How to separate what is within one’s control from what is not. How to do the work in front of you without complaint. Read in order, the books give the impression of a person under heavy pressure keeping himself steady by writing.

Themes and historical context

Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic, following a school founded in Athens around 300 BC and developed in Rome by writers such as Seneca and the former slave Epictetus. Stoicism taught that virtue is the only real good, that external events are indifferent, and that a rational person should live in agreement with nature. Meditations applies these doctrines rather than explaining them, and readers new to the school may want a short introduction to the terms.

The historical setting matters. Marcus ruled during plague, war on the northern frontier, and a rebellion by one of his own generals. Much of the book was apparently written on campaign. The repeated reminders about patience, perspective and the shortness of life were being addressed by the most powerful man in the Roman world to himself, in conditions where those reminders were needed.

The text survived through a narrow line of manuscripts and was first printed in Zurich in 1558. Since then it has been translated many times and taken up by readers far outside philosophy, from statesmen to soldiers to people looking for a secular guide to conduct. In recent decades it has been central to the revival of Stoicism as a popular self-help practice.

Who should read it

Meditations suits readers who want something they can return to rather than finish. The entries are short, many are memorable, and a page a day is a reasonable pace. The difficulty comes from the compression and from the Stoic vocabulary, which uses ordinary words like “nature” and “reason” in technical senses. Older translations, including the one on Gutenberg, use a formal English that takes a little adjustment. It is a short book, roughly the length of a long essay collection, and it does not need to be read in order.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg text was prepared by J. Boulton and David Widger. It is one of the public-domain English translations and is included in the Harvard Classics series listing on Gutenberg.