What are the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius?

A book with no title

Marcus never called it the Meditations. As far as we know, he gave it no title at all. The manuscripts head it Ta eis heauton, roughly “the things to himself,” and even that may be a copyist’s label. The English name goes back to Meric Casaubon, whose translation of 1634, the first in English, presented the emperor’s “meditations concerning himself.”

It is not a diary either. There are no dates and almost no events: no battles, no names of enemies, no news from Rome. It is closer to a philosopher’s workbook. The same few truths come back again and again in new words, written so that they would be ready when he needed them.

Why Greek, and where

Marcus was a Roman who spoke Latin in the Senate and in his letters. But for an educated Roman of the second century, philosophy was done in Greek, the language of Plato and of the Stoic teachers he had studied since boyhood. The former slave Epictetus, whose ideas run all through the book, had lectured in Greek, and Marcus thought in that vocabulary.

Two notes of place survive in the text. One, at the end of Book 1, reads “Among the Quadi at the Granua,” a river in today’s Slovakia, north of the Danube. Another, “This in Carnuntum,” names the legionary fortress east of today’s Vienna. So at least part of it was written on campaign, during the wars against Germanic peoples in the 170s, in the last decade of his life.

What is in it

The twelve books are uneven. Some entries are a single line; others run to a page. Book 1 stands apart: a list of what he owed to each person who shaped him, from his grandfather to his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, ending with thanks to the gods. The other eleven circle a handful of themes:

• Judgment. Take away your opinion that you have been harmed, and the harm is gone (4.7).
• Other people. Begin each morning expecting to meet the meddling, the ungrateful and the arrogant, and remember that they act from ignorance of good and evil. We were made to work together, like the two rows of teeth (2.1).
• Duty. When you cannot face getting out of bed, tell yourself you are rising to do the work of a human being (5.1).
• Death and time. Alexander the Great and his mule driver ended up in the same state (6.24). Do not live as if you had ten thousand years ahead of you (4.17).
• The inner retreat. People look for a retreat in the country or by the sea, but you can withdraw into your own mind at any hour (4.3).

How it survived

For centuries the book nearly disappeared. In the third century the historian Herodian praised the sayings and writings of Marcus that were still around, which may include it. In 364 the orator Themistius told an emperor he had no need of Marcus’s exhortations. The first sure trace comes from Arethas, a Byzantine bishop and book collector, who wrote before 907 that he owned an old copy of the emperor’s most profitable book, so old it was falling apart, and had it copied. The Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia of the late tenth century, knows it in twelve books.

Our text rests on two manuscripts. One, from the library at Heidelberg, was printed in Zurich in 1559 by Wilhelm Xylander, with a Latin translation, and then lost. The other, copied in the fourteenth century, is in the Vatican Library, nearly complete but riddled with errors. From those two damaged witnesses came every translation since, and a private notebook became one of the most widely read books of ancient philosophy.