Meditations
Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161 to 180 CE
The private notebooks of a Roman emperor practicing Stoic philosophy: reminders to himself on mortality, duty, and the discipline of perception, never intended for publication.
- Composed
- Written circa 170 to 180 CE
- Original language
- Greek
- In the SOL library
- 230 searchable passages
- Rights
- Public domain
What this text is
The Meditations are the private notes of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 CE, written in Greek during military campaigns on the Danube frontier. He called them simply "to himself." They were never meant to be read by anyone else, which is precisely their value: they show a Stoic practitioner, under maximum pressure, actually using his philosophy, reminding himself daily how to meet mortality, anger, flattery, and fate.
The book survived through a thin manuscript tradition and has become the most read work of Stoic philosophy, valued less as a system than as a record of practice.
Why researchers read it
SOL studies contemplative disciplines as technologies, and the Meditations are among the best-documented cases in the ancient world: a specific person, a specific method, applied over years and recorded without any audience in mind. The text also preserves the Stoic account of a rational order pervading nature, a position with clear points of contact and friction with the other traditions SOL compares.
because thou art every day nearer unto death than other, but also because that intellective faculty in thee, whereby thou art enabled to know the true nature of things, and to order all thy actions by that knowledge, doth daily waste and decay: or, may fail thee before thou die. II. This also thou must observe, that whatsoever it is that naturally doth happen to things natural, hath somewhat in itself that is pleasing and delightful: as a great loaf when it is baked, some parts of it cleave as it were, and part asunder, and make the crust of it rugged and unequal, and yet those parts of it, though in some sort it be against the art and intention of baking itself, that they are thus cleft and parted, which should have been and were first made all even and uniform, they become it well nevertheless, and have a certain peculiar property, to stir the appetite.
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161 to 180 CE · Public domain
Research that draws on this text
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