Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

The Meditations is a set of twelve short books of notes in Greek, which Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 CE, wrote for himself in his last decade, much of it on campaign against Germanic tribes along the Danube. The Greek title means To Himself, and the notes seem never meant for publication. Book 1 lists the people to whom he owes something, among them his mother, his adoptive father Antoninus Pius and his teachers. One of them, Rusticus, gave him a copy of Epictetus. The remaining books are a mix of reminders, aphorisms and exercises, with no fixed order.¹²

The themes are Stoic. Marcus reminds himself that he has power over his own judgment but not over events, that all things pass and are soon forgotten, that he should imagine looking down on the world from above to see human worries in proportion, and that people are made to cooperate, so he should treat even difficult people as kin. He works at these thoughts against a harsh background: the Antonine Plague, which began in the 160s and killed millions, wars on the frontier and a revolt by his general Avidius Cassius in 175. The manuscript survived the Middle Ages through Byzantine copies, and the first printed edition, by Wilhelm Xylander, appeared in Zurich in 1559.¹²³

The book became a favorite of statesmen and soldiers and a pillar of the modern revival of Stoicism. A 2002 translation by Gregory Hays brought it to a new wave of readers.²