- Length
- 254 pagesHays translation, Modern Library 2002
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Meditations
An emperor on a freezing frontier writes notes to himself in Greek, in the evenings, for nobody. He is not building a system, not addressing a school, and not expecting a reader. The result is the most widely read Stoic text in the world, and the clearest case in this section of a book that answers nothing and was answered by nothing, because for most of its existence almost nobody knew it existed.
- Date
- c. 170-180
- Author
- Marcus Aurelius
- Region
- The Danube frontier; Rome
- Language
- Greek
- 1559 Latin, Wilhelm Xylander Printed beside the Greek in the first edition Attested
- 1634 English, Meric Casaubon First English version Attested
- 1862 English, George Long Public domain and still widely reprinted Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Out of philosophical circulation for most of its existence and now among the most widely read philosophical texts in the world.
What the book says
Twelve short books of notes, none of them written to be read by anyone else. There is no argument running through them and no order that has ever been convincingly explained; the first book is a list of debts to the people who taught him something, and the remaining eleven circle the same handful of ideas in slightly different words, hundreds of times. Nothing is in your power except your own judgements, so spend nothing on the rest. What upsets you is not the event but your opinion about it, which you can revise. Everything changes, everyone you resent will shortly be dead, and so will you - reasons for proportion, not for despair. Do the work in front of you properly and without complaining about it. He tells himself to get out of bed. He tells himself that the person who has wronged him did not know better. He reminds himself that fame is short and that the emperors before him are names nobody says. Read straight through it is repetitive, because repetition is the point: this is a man rehearsing a discipline he expects to need again tomorrow morning.
What it argues
There is no thesis, and looking for one misreads the book. What recurs is a set of exercises. Distinguish what is in your power from what is not, and spend nothing on the second. Judgements, not events, are what disturb us, so the response to an insult or a loss is a revision of the judgement. Everything is in flux, everyone you envy will shortly be dead, and so will you, which is a reason for proportion rather than despair. Above all, the work you owe is the work in front of you: the frontier, the campaign, the case to be judged, done properly and without complaint.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
It does not argue. It repeats. The same handful of propositions return in slightly different words dozens of times across twelve books, which is what a person does when the point is not to establish something but to keep hold of it. Read as philosophy the repetition looks like a defect; read as what it is, a private discipline written down to be reread, it is the method. This is why the book has no interlocutor and needed none.
The moment
Marcus Aurelius spent much of the last decade of his reign on campaign against the Marcomanni and Quadi along the Danube, in a period that also carried a plague through the empire. The notes are written from inside that, by a man doing a job he had not wanted, in the language of philosophy rather than the language of the state he governed. The choice of Greek is itself part of the meaning: Latin was the language of his office and Greek the language in which he thought about how to bear it.
How it travelled
The transmission is barely a transmission at all. Nothing certain is known of the text between its composition and around 900, when Arethas of Caesarea, a Byzantine bishop and collector, refers to it and appears to be responsible for its survival. The first printed edition came at Zurich in 1558-9, from a manuscript that was destroyed in the printing, with Xylander's Latin translation beside the Greek under a title suggesting it was an autobiography. It made little impact for a further seventy-five years. Meric Casaubon's English version of 1634 began its long life in that language, and its present ubiquity is a phenomenon of the last few decades.
The strongest objection
The strongest objection is that the book asks almost nothing of the world and everything of the self. Its counsel to accept what cannot be changed was written by the man best placed in the empire to change things, and it contains no reflection at all on slavery, on the wars he was prosecuting, or on the persecutions carried out under his authority. A discipline that produces equanimity in a ruler while leaving the ruled exactly as they were is open to the charge that its serenity is purchased rather than earned. The book does not answer this, because it never imagined a reader who would ask.
Why read it
Because it is the only surviving record of a Stoic practice from inside, written with no audience to impress and no position to defend, and because it is short, unsystematic and can be opened anywhere. Books of Power excluded it for having caused nothing nameable, which is correct and is exactly why it belongs here: it is an argument with the self, and the self is the only party it ever persuaded.
- First printed
- 1559
- First in English
- 1634
- Digitised
- Yes
The first printed edition was produced at Zurich in 1558-9 by the press of Gesner, with a Latin translation by Wilhelm Xylander. The manuscript it was set from was taken apart during typesetting and is lost, which makes that edition one of the two principal sources for every modern text.
Nineteenth-century English versions by George Long and others are out of copyright; the widely read modern versions are not.
Where it stands
It is not a live text in academic philosophy and is a very live one everywhere else, which is an unusual position for anything in this section. The revival is genuine rather than a marketing accident, and rests on the fact that the book was written for exactly the use it is now put to.
The passage
Confine yourself to the present.
George Long's translation of 1862, book seven. Public domain.
Contested
Sources differ on whether the first edition is dated 1558 or 1559, and on which Gesner oversaw it; the Latin translation is securely Xylander's. The title is not the author's, and the form Ta eis heauton comes from the lost manuscript rather than from Marcus. Whether the twelve books are in any deliberate order, and whether book one belongs with the rest, are both open questions. The claim that the work was unknown until Arethas is probable rather than established, since a fourth-century reference by Themistius may point to it.