Meditations

Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 to 180. Meditations is not a book he wrote for readers. It is a private notebook: twelve books of short reminders that he wrote in Greek for his own use. He gave it no title; the usual one, roughly "To Himself", was probably added later.

Because it is a notebook, it has no chain of argument. The entries are short, often unconnected, and they come back again and again to the same few thoughts. This summary follows those thoughts instead of the order of the pages: what is in our power and what is not, accepting what happens, working together with other people, the passing of time and death, the view from above, and the duty that waits for us today.

Marcus was a Stoic, and his notes sometimes speak of the gods and of the order of the universe. The summary reports these as his own beliefs.

Notes. The closing lines of the first two books name places on the Danube frontier ("Among the Quadi at the Granua", "This in Carnuntum"). If those lines are his, he wrote at least part of the notebook on campaign. The English quotes in this summary come from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain and keeps the old forms "thee" and "thou". The Dari lines are our own translation of the English, and the quotes do not carry book and section numbers.