Meditations — Commentary

In brief

Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 until his death in 180, and spent much of his last decade on the Danube frontier fighting the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Sarmatians while an epidemic ran through the empire. At some point in those years he wrote down, in Greek and not in his native Latin, several hundred notes to himself. They are short, repetitive and unarranged. They survive in twelve books, and we call them the Meditations.

The notes tell him what a Stoic should tell himself: that only his own judgement can harm him, that other people are kin, that everything is soon forgotten and that he will shortly die. The first thing to notice is that he needed telling. “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial” (II.1). He wrote to steady himself, and his readers ever since have been overhearing.

The argument

Stoicism gives Marcus a short creed. Virtue is the only good. What happens to you is neither good nor evil, and what hurts is your opinion of it: “Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed’” (IV.7). The universe is rational and you are a part of it, so your duty is to do your job in it. And people are made for each other: “Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then, or bear with them” (VIII.59).

Marcus adds little to the doctrine. What he adds is a technique of contempt, used on himself. To see a thing properly, he says, strip it: “this Falernian is only a little grape-juice”, a purple robe is sheep’s wool dyed in shellfish blood (VI.13). Fame gets the same treatment. Augustus and Hadrian have become “a mere tale” (IV.33), and in the end everyone is “smoke and ash and a tale, or not even a tale”. He applies the method to his own office too.

The shape of the book

The book has no plot, and the division into twelve may not be his. Book I stands apart: a list of what he owes to each relative and teacher, ending with thanks to the gods, and a careful piece of writing in a way the others are not. The note “Among the Quadi at the Granua” closes it, on a campaign north of the Danube, and Book II ends “This in Carnuntum”, a fortress on the river. These two tags are nearly all the book says about where it was written.

After that, themes come round without order. Book IV is rich in the idea of inner retreat, where “it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself” (IV.3). Book V opens with the passage on getting up. Book XI ends with a string of sayings copied from Epictetus and others. Book XII stops on the actor dismissed before the last act: “Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied” (XII.36).

Never meant for us

Marcus almost certainly did not intend these notes for publication, and nearly everything strange about them follows from that. He drops names we cannot place, quotes without saying so, and says the same thing twenty times because he is not trying to interest anyone. The title is not his either. The work has no title of its own; the earliest we know of, from a Byzantine bishop’s notes and the manuscript behind the first printing, is Ta eis heauton, usually translated as “To Himself”. The English word goes back to Casaubon’s version of 1634, his Meditations Concerning Himself; Long preferred Thoughts.

The survival is close to an accident. After Marcus’s death there are a few doubtful mentions, and the first clear one comes more than seven hundred years later, when Arethas of Caesarea told another bishop, before 907, that he had an old copy “so old indeed that it is altogether falling to pieces”, and had it recopied. The modern text rests almost entirely on two sources: a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican, corrupt and with about forty-two lines dropped, and a Heidelberg manuscript that Wilhelm Xylander printed at Zurich in 1558 or 1559, with a Latin translation, and that has since been lost.

The voice

Every note addresses a “thou” who is the writer, nagging and encouraging by turns. “In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present,—I am rising to the work of a human being”, and he imagines the reply: was he made “to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?” (V.1). Then he is short with himself: “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such” (X.16).

The prose is plain on principle. Rusticus taught him to “abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing” (I.7), and he did give up the elaborate oratory he had been trained in by Fronto. Yet the flatness produces its own images: the soul “dyed by the thoughts”; life as “a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn” (II.17); the busy world as “puppets pulled by strings”.

War and plague

The Marcomannic Wars ran from about 166 to 180, and around 170 an invasion reached Italy and besieged Aquileia. Marcus sold palace property to pay for the fighting. His column still stands in Rome, celebrating the same campaigns. The book barely mentions them, but when it does, the tone is notable: “A spider is proud when it has caught a fly”, and so is a man “when he has taken Sarmatians. Are not these robbers, if thou examinest their opinions?” (X.10). That is a commander calling his own victories robbery, in a note, and then carrying on with the war. His picture of the man who cuts himself off from others is “a hand cut off, or a foot, or a head” lying apart (VIII.34), a thing a commander had seen.

The Antonine Plague appeared with the eastern armies around 165, was described by Galen, whom Marcus summoned, and lasted until about his death. Modern estimates are uncertain, with five to ten million dead often cited; smallpox is the usual guess, not proved. Lucius Verus, his co-emperor, may have died of it in 169. The Meditations never names it. The nearest he comes is IX.2, which says “the destruction of the understanding is a pestilence, much more, indeed, than any such corruption and change of this atmosphere”, a line whose calm is either admirable or chilling, and I think both.

The Christians

Christians died in his reign, and the book does not help his reputation. Justin Martyr was beheaded in Rome around 165, after a trial before the city prefect, Junius Rusticus: the same Rusticus to whom Marcus says he owed “the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection”, and who taught him “to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled” (I.7). In 177 at Lyon a mob and the local authorities killed some forty-eight Christians, among them the slave Blandina and the aged bishop Pothinus, as a letter preserved by Eusebius records.

How far Marcus himself was responsible is much disputed. Persecution was mainly a matter for local officials, and no Christian writer of the time blames him. The single mention in the book says that readiness to die should come “not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians” (XI.3), and even those words are suspected of being a later reader’s note, as C. R. Haines argued. Long defends him at length in his introduction. John Stuart Mill drew the harder lesson in On Liberty, calling it “one of the most tragical facts” in history: the best ruler of his age, using his best judgement, could sincerely do this. Marcus’s philosophy told him that all men are kin, and it did not tell him to look at who the state was killing.

Why he had to keep saying it

The usual picture is of a serene sage. The book shows no such person. Nobody writes “Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen” (VI.30) unless he feels the dye taking. A man who is not angry at busybodies does not need to warn himself about them each morning. In Book VIII he admits that “it is plain that thou art far from philosophy” (VIII.1).

Pierre Hadot, in The Inner Citadel, argued that this repetition is method: these are spiritual exercises in the Stoic manner, written to reshape the writer’s mind, and not a diary of his moods. He is right, but an exercise is still evidence of what needs exercising. You rehearse what you do not yet have.

What makes this an emperor’s book is that nobody else could say these things to him. A court exists to agree with its master, and Marcus says that the court is a stepmother and philosophy the mother he keeps returning to. Few in Rome could tell him he was wrong, so he wrote the corrections himself. I think that is the real interest of the book: a man supplying the check that absolute power had removed. The same sentences mean something different in other mouths. When Epictetus, born a slave, says that nothing external can touch you, he is describing the one thing a slave owns. When an emperor says it, he is refusing to enjoy everything else that he owns, and trying not to believe the people who bow.

The practice has a cost and limits. “Leaves, also, are thy children” (X.34), he writes, and he is passing on Epictetus’s advice to whisper to the child you kiss that it may die tomorrow (XI.34). Faustina bore him at least thirteen children, and many died before him. The discipline does not reach politics at all: “nor yet expect Plato’s Republic”, he writes, but “be content if the smallest thing goes on well” (IX.29). The Historia Augusta says Plato’s line about philosopher kings was always on his lips. Here is the actual philosopher king, telling himself not to hope, and asking “who can change men’s opinions?” He left the empire to his son Commodus. Cassius Dio thought that history then fell from “a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”.

The people

Rusticus

Quintus Junius Rusticus, a Stoic with a family history of opposition to bad emperors, drew Marcus away from Fronto’s oratory and lent him Epictetus. Marcus thanks him for the impression “that my character required improvement and discipline”.

Epictetus

Epictetus was born a slave around 50 and taught at Nicopolis, and his pupil Arrian took down his lectures. No one shapes the book more: “Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say” (IV.41). Epictetus died when Marcus was a boy, so this is an emperor taking lessons from a dead slave’s lectures.

Antoninus Pius

Antoninus Pius, his adoptive father, is the book’s actual model of how to rule (I.16; “Imitate all this” at VI.30). He is praised for ordinary things, such as forgiving a toll-collector and relieving himself only at the usual hour.

Faustina and Commodus

Faustina, who died around 175, appears in I.17 as “such a wife”, “so obedient, and so affectionate, and so simple”, and Roman gossip about her makes this harder to read. Commodus is not named anywhere in the book, a silence that is hard to get past.

Readers and the self-help revival

The Victorians made him a saint of secular duty: Long’s version of 1862 was the occasion of Matthew Arnold’s essay of 1863. Renan closed his history of Christian origins with him in Marc-Aurèle (1882). Clinton has called it a favourite, and Wen Jiabao said he had read it a hundred times.

The present boom runs through therapy and marketing. Aaron Beck’s manual for cognitive therapy traced its origins to the Stoics, and Albert Ellis’s therapy drew on them. Then came Gregory Hays’s brisk translation of 2002 and Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way (2014), whose title comes from V.20 and which the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks had him in to talk about. The original sentence says “that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road”, but the obstacles are people, and the road is the duty to “do good to men and endure them”. In Marcus the point is that you can still be just if you lose. In the revival, the point has tended to be that you will win. Alexandra Alter of the New York Times called Holiday’s approach “more entrepreneurial than philosophic”.

The practical advice does work, as far as it goes. But the revival has to leave out most of the book: providence, disgust at the body, the steady expectation of being forgotten. A book that says you will soon be nothing does not sell as a route to the top without a good deal of cutting.

How to read it

Know what the free text is. George Long’s version (1862) is accurate and has the standard book and section numbers, with an anchor for most sections, so the links here go to the very note. The manner is Victorian, full of “thou” and “dost”, with square brackets for words he supplies. It also silently leaves out the clause of VI.13 where sex gets the same stripping as wine: a rubbing of entrails and a spasm. Meric Casaubon’s English of 1634, also free, keeps it, but is by its own editor’s account often more paraphrase than translation, and its numbering is not the standard one.
Buy a modern version. Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002) is the most direct and the one to start with. Martin Hammond (Penguin, 2006) is more formal and has good notes. Robin Hard (Oxford, 2011, introduction by Christopher Gill) adds letters between Marcus and Fronto. Robin Waterfield’s annotated edition (Basic Books, 2021) has the fullest help for the reader.
Do not read it straight through. A few pages at a time is how it was written, and how the repetition stops being tedious. Read Book I last.