Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire for nineteen years, fought two long wars on its frontier, and outlived most of his children. He also kept a private notebook. One of the first things in it is a note reminding himself, at dawn, to get out of bed.
He never meant anyone to read it. There is no title, no audience, no argument to win. He wrote it to himself, in Greek, the language philosophy was done in, while he was the most powerful man alive and Latin was the language of his state. Much of it was written in an army camp on the Danube, between campaigns against the tribes across the river. There is almost nothing else like it from the ancient world: the inside of a powerful man's head, talking to itself.
What he tells himself, over and over, comes down to a few things. You control almost nothing except your own judgments. Peace comes from accepting what you cannot change, doing the work in front of you, and remembering how short the whole thing is. We are upset not by what happens to us but by our opinions about what happens. The book is one man drilling those ideas into himself, in the dark, with death close.
He wrote in Greek, and the English translators do not agree on how to carry it across. Here is one sentence, Book 7, six ways:
Ἔνδον σκάπτε, ἔνδον ἡ πηγὴ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ ἀεὶ ἀναβλύειν δυναμένη, ἐὰν ἀεὶ σκάπτῃς.Book 7, section 59 · one sentence, four centuries of English
- Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper.Casaubon, 1634
- Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.Long, 1862
- Look within. Within is the fountain of Good, ready always to well forth if thou wilt alway delve.Haines, 1916
- Dig within. There lies the well-spring of good: ever dig, and it will ever flow.Staniforth, 1964
- Dig inside yourself. Inside there is a spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging.Hammond, 2006
- Dig within; for within you lies the fountain of good, and it can always be gushing forth if only you always dig.Hard, 2011
Same sentence. The early translators tell you to look within; the modern ones hand you a shovel. The Greek verb is skapte, to dig, so the moderns are the more faithful ones, but you would never guess that from the Victorians. That spread, multiplied across the whole book, is the subject of this page.
Below are the passages that carry the book, the load-bearing ones rather than the most-posted ones. For each you get the Greek, a plain breakdown of what it is doing and where the translators part ways, and then the English versions stacked so you can read them against each other. Three run the entire book: Meric Casaubon's 1634 first English, George Long's Victorian standard, and the literal 1916 Loeb. Five modern translations join in on the famous lines. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move between passages.
Where the text comes from
Every translation here is reproduced verbatim. I pulled the texts with scripts and parsed them, so nothing was retyped or paraphrased by hand or by a model, and every line is attached to the translator who wrote it.
- The Greek is the received text of the Ta eis heauton (To Himself), from Greek Wikisource, cross-checked against the Koine text at maurelius.app.
- The three complete translations are public domain and reproduced in full: Meric Casaubon's 1634 first English version (from the 1900 Rouse edition), George Long's 1862 standard, and C. R. Haines's literal 1916 Loeb, both via Project Gutenberg and Wikisource.
- The five modern translations (A. S. L. Farquharson 1944, Maxwell Staniforth 1964, Gregory Hays 2002, Martin Hammond 2006, Robin Hard 2011) are still in copyright. They appear only on the keystone passages, one short attributed line each, quoted for comparison and study. If you want to read one straight through, Hays is the one people press into your hands.
The breakdowns are mine. A couple of warnings for anyone who has met Marcus mostly through quote images. The single most famous "Marcus" line, we are disturbed not by things but by our opinions about them, is not his; it is his teacher Epictetus (his own version is at 8.47). And two of the most-shared quotes attributed to him, you have power over your mind, not outside events and everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact, appear in no translation of the Meditations at all. They are modern inventions. Where the oldest editions and the moderns disagree, or where a beloved line turns out to belong to a different translator (the popular wording of 10.16 is Staniforth's), I have tried to say so rather than smooth it over.
The portrait on the homepage card is a marble bust of Marcus Aurelius (c. 161 to 180 CE) in the Capitoline Museums, Rome; photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The bronze equestrian statue of him survived the Middle Ages only because people mistook it for the Christian emperor Constantine, so it was never melted down like the other imperial bronzes.
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