An emperor warns himself not to become a Caesar. In Meditations 6.30, Marcus Aurelius says imperial power can change a person, then tells himself to remain just and willing to help. He remembers his adoptive father Antoninus Pius listening patiently to criticism.
The book keeps returning to a demanding claim: only goodness makes a life good. Wealth, health, and reputation are worth caring for, but possessing them does not make someone just; losing them does not make someone wicked. In 2.11, Marcus puts death and pain in the same category. He calls these things neither good nor evil because he reserves those words for moral character.
When he says a judgment causes distress, he means that an event arrives with an assessment: this is unbearable, this disgraces me. He asks whether the assessment is true and whether it interferes with acting well. The force of 4.7, where removing a judgment removes the harm, depends on his definition of harm. A person can injure his body or block his plans without forcing him to become unjust. Treating every injury as imaginary would lose that distinction.
Marcus also thinks human beings are made for one another. The morning exercise in 2.1 lists people who will annoy him, then compares them to hands or teeth that must cooperate. Getting out of bed is justified by work for the community. 5.20, on adapting when someone obstructs him, begins with the obligation to help and bear with others.
The reason for accepting events is partly religious. In 7.9, one divine reason pervades the universe and is shared by rational beings. Providence means that the whole has an order worth trusting, even when an individual suffers. Marcus also considers a world made by atoms, as in 4.3. Scholars disagree about what those alternatives reveal about his convictions. His repeated appeals to the gods make it difficult to read the book as a wholly secular account of emotional control.
His fellowship with humanity does not amount to a modern account of equality. In 1.17, he thanks the gods for an obedient wife and good household servants. Book 1 also credits the private education his family could afford. These are a ruler's reflections. They do not tell us how his subjects experienced his rule, and his warnings against misusing power cannot establish how consistently he followed them.
Marcus ruled from 161 to 180 CE and wrote this work in Greek. Its direct addresses to himself and repeated exercises support the usual scholarly view that he was writing for his own moral improvement. We cannot establish every detail of his intentions or the order in which he composed it. Two place headings name the country of the Quadi and Carnuntum, linking some of the writing to his northern campaigns. They do not locate every entry in an army camp. The surviving text and its form leave those limits in place.
The reader below contains 28 selected passages, with an explanation of each. Long and Haines appear throughout; Farquharson supplies excerpts on 12 passages, and Hays supplies the concluding lines of 5.20. Choose All to add Casaubon's older English. Use the arrows or keyboard to move, or click the passage title for the index. These selections cover recurring ideas, not the whole twelve-book work.
Sources and limits
The edition names link to the copies used. The reference numbers follow the familiar Book.section arrangement; Casaubon's different divisions are given beside his excerpts. Three editions cover all 28 selections. That does not mean their full translations are reproduced here.
- Meric Casaubon, 1634: the 1900 Rouse reprint. George Long, 1862: the later edition in Project Gutenberg 6920. C. R. Haines, 1916: the Loeb edition and its page scans.
- A. S. L. Farquharson, 1944: selected lines checked against the scanned edition's transcription. Gregory Hays, 2002: the short conclusion to 5.20, reproduced in the publisher's excerpt from Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way. A printed citation identifies Hays's Book 5, section 20, page 60.
- Greek: the received text on Greek Wikisource, compared by content with Leopold's 1908 edition in Perseus. The online copies differ in numbering and some readings. Brackets mark shortened quotations or an editor's supplied wording.
The explanations are paraphrases. Translation wording is preserved apart from simplified punctuation and corrections to obvious transcription slips. Abridged passages are marked as excerpts. The unfinished clause in 12.17 and the differing numbers in 12.36 show why a received Greek text is not the same thing as an author's surviving manuscript.
Card portrait: marble bust of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Museums, Rome; photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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