Meditations

Introduction

The Meditations are the private notebooks of a Roman emperor. Marcus Aurelius wrote them in Greek, the language of philosophy in his day, during the last decade of his life, much of it spent on campaign along the Danube frontier. They were not meant for publication. The oldest manuscripts call them simply "To Himself": reminders, arguments and exhortations addressed by a man to his own mind, written in the evening after the work of governing an empire was done.

The first book is a grateful record of what Marcus learned from his family, his teachers and his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius. The other eleven gather hundreds of short entries — some a single line, some a page or more — in which he returns again and again to the same questions: how to act justly among difficult people, how to bear pain and loss, how to face death, how to keep the mind free amid the noise of power and fame.

His answers come from Stoic philosophy, above all from the teaching of Epictetus. What disturbs us, he writes, is not things but our judgements about them; the only true good is a just and rational will; every person is a fellow citizen of one great city, the universe; and nature, which brings all things into being and takes them back, is to be welcomed rather than resented. Few books have joined such hard discipline with such tenderness towards others, and none was written by a man who held more power. That is why, for almost two thousand years, readers of every kind — statesmen and soldiers, scholars and ordinary people in hard times — have kept the Meditations close at hand.

This translation follows the Greek text edited by J. H. Leopold (Oxford, 1908). The work is divided, as in all modern editions, into twelve books and numbered chapters. Notes identify the persons, places and quotations to which Marcus alludes.