Meditations

A private notebook written by an emperor

Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 CE. His reign was hard. A plague swept the empire, and he spent many years on the northern frontier fighting Germanic tribes along the Danube. During those years he kept a private notebook in Greek. Scholars think he wrote much of it in camp, at night, during the campaigns. Two early books carry short notes of place, one written among the Quadi and one at Carnuntum, both on the frontier.

The notebook was not written for readers. Its Greek title is usually rendered as "To Himself." It contains no plot and no system. It is a set of reminders, arguments and exercises that Marcus wrote to train his own mind. He returns to the same few ideas again and again, because the point is to practice them, not to state them once.

The ideas come from Stoicism, a Greek school of philosophy founded centuries earlier. Marcus learned it mainly through the teachings of Epictetus, a former slave whose lectures had been written down by a student. The core Stoic claims are simple. Virtue is the only true good. External things (health, wealth, reputation, even life) are neither good nor bad in themselves. What matters is how we judge them and how we act. And the world is ordered by a rational principle, the logos, which humans share through their power of reason.

The text is divided into twelve books. Most are loose collections of short entries. Modern readers usually meet it in translation, and wording varies a lot between translators.

Book 1: a list of debts

The first book is different from the rest. It is a list of the people Marcus thanks and what he learned from each one. His grandfather taught him good character and an even temper. His mother taught him piety, generosity and a simple way of life. His teacher Rusticus made him aware that his character needed training and lent him the works of Epictetus. Other teachers taught him to accept criticism, to avoid showy rhetoric and to be open to correction.

The longest entry describes his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius. Marcus praises his patience, his willingness to listen to advice, his steady work habits, his modesty about power and his calm response to setbacks. The portrait reads like a model of a good ruler that Marcus wants to follow.

The book ends with thanks to the gods for his good fortune in family and teachers. This opening sets the tone for the whole work: a person examining who formed him and what he still needs to become.

Our judgments are the source of distress

The central practical idea of the Meditations is that events do not disturb us. Our judgments about events disturb us. Marcus repeats this many times. Things stand outside the mind and cannot touch it. Distress comes from the opinion we add to them.

So the remedy is to remove the opinion. If you stop judging that you have been harmed, the sense of harm goes away. This does not mean pretending nothing happened. It means seeing the event as it is, without the extra story of injury.

Marcus uses a technique that some scholars call the objective description. He describes things in plain, physical terms to strip away their glamour or their threat. Fine food is a dead animal. An expensive wine is fermented grape juice. A purple imperial robe is sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish. Sex is friction and a brief spasm. The goal is not to sneer, but to see clearly so that desire and fear lose their grip.

He also describes the mind as a refuge. People seek retreats in the country or by the sea, he notes in Book 4, but a person can retreat into their own mind at any moment. There, a few basic principles can restore calm. The French scholar Pierre Hadot later called this inner stronghold the inner citadel.

Living with difficult people

Marcus spent his days surrounded by courtiers, officials and generals. Many entries deal with how to handle other people.

The opening of Book 2 is the most famous example. Marcus tells himself each morning to expect to meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and unsocial. They act this way because they do not know good from bad. But he knows that they share the same nature and the same reason that he does. So he cannot be harmed by them, and he cannot be angry with them. Humans are made to work together, like feet, hands or the upper and lower rows of teeth. To work against each other is against nature.

Several practical rules follow from this:

• Do not take offense. If someone does wrong, the wrong is theirs. It harms them, not you.
• Correct gently or let it go. If you can show someone their mistake, do it kindly. If you cannot, tolerate them.
• Look at your own faults. Before judging another person, ask whether you make the same mistake.
• Kindness is a strength. Marcus argues that real gentleness, not faked, is very hard to resist.
• Work for the common good. He compares society to a beehive: what does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee.

Marcus also warns himself against anger many times. He lists reasons to stay calm, such as the fact that anger causes more harm than the act that provoked it, and that the other person may not even be doing wrong.

Impermanence, death and the present moment

Marcus returns often to the shortness of life and the scale of time. Everything changes. Time is like a river that carries everything away. Emperors, philosophers and generals who were once famous are now forgotten, and so will be the people who remember them. He notes that Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and ended in the same state.

He uses this perspective in three ways.

First, it shrinks the importance of fame. Praise lasts a short time and comes from people who will also soon be gone. Seeking it is foolish.

Second, it focuses attention on the present moment. In Book 2, Marcus argues that a person can lose only the present, because the present is all anyone has. The past is gone and the future is not yet here. So a long life and a short life lose the same thing at death.

Third, it creates urgency. He tells himself not to act as if he has thousands of years to live. Death hangs over him, so he must become good now. He also practices what modern readers call the view from above: imagining human life from a great height, to see its battles, markets and weddings as small and passing.

He treats death itself as a natural process, like birth or aging. It is not evil, because nature does nothing evil. He considers two possibilities: either death scatters us into atoms, or it returns us to the whole. Either way, it is nothing to fear.

Nature, providence and doing your duty

Marcus believes the universe is a single, rational, living whole. Everything that happens is part of that order. To live well is to live in agreement with nature: both the nature of the universe and your own rational, social nature.

He often sets out a dilemma: providence or atoms. Either the world is guided by a rational order, or it is a random mix of particles. If it is ordered, you should accept what happens as part of the whole. If it is random, you should still keep your own mind in order. In both cases, the right response is the same: act well and accept the rest.

Duty is a constant theme. Book 5 opens with Marcus arguing with himself about getting out of bed at dawn. He reminds himself that he was born to do the work of a human being, not to lie under warm blankets. Plants, birds and bees all do their work. Why should he refuse to do his?

Hadot argued that the Meditations are organized around three disciplines that Marcus took from Epictetus: the discipline of assent (judging impressions correctly), the discipline of desire (wanting only what is in our power and accepting fate) and the discipline of action (acting justly for the common good). This reading helps make sense of the repetition: each entry trains one of the three.

What the critics say

The text is repetitive and unsystematic, because it was never meant as a finished book. Some readers find its Stoic acceptance too passive in the face of injustice. Historians also note the gap between the ideals and the record: Christians were persecuted during Marcus's reign, and he named his son Commodus, who became a notoriously poor emperor, as his successor.

Who should read it

This book suits anyone who wants a practical guide to staying calm, fair and focused under pressure. It reads best in small doses, a few entries at a time, and a modern translation such as Gregory Hays's makes it easy to start.