Meditations

Overview

The Meditations is a hundred and ninety pages and it is not a book. Marcus Aurelius wrote it in Greek, the language of philosophy, for himself, in the last decade of his life, while campaigning on the northern frontier against the Marcomanni. The Greek title that survives means something like To Himself. He did not arrange it, did not revise it, and there is no sign he expected anyone to read it. How it came to be preserved is unknown.

That accounts for everything odd about it. There is no argument to follow and no order to the twelve books. Entries repeat, contradict each other in emphasis, break off, and return obsessively to the same handful of ideas. Some are a page long and some are four words. A modern reader who tries to read it as a treatise will find it maddening; a reader who takes it as what it is, a man’s notes to himself, will find that the repetition is the most interesting thing about it. You do not write the same reminder forty times unless you keep needing it.

The philosophy is standard Roman Stoicism and Marcus makes no claim to originality. What is his own is the application: a specific man, with specific temptations, checking himself.

The argument

Book I stands apart from the rest and should be read first, because it is the only place where Marcus explains where his convictions came from. It is a list of debts, name by name: from his grandfather, good morals and control of temper; from his mother, piety and plain living; from Rusticus, the idea of needing to reform his character at all, and the loan of a copy of Epictetus; and, in the longest entry by far, an extended portrait of his adoptive father Antoninus Pius, whose way of working, of holding power without display, of listening to advice and of refusing flattery, Marcus clearly regards as the standard he is failing to meet.

Books II to XII are the notebooks proper. A handful of positions recur, and it is worth naming them because everything else is variation.

The first is the division between what is up to us and what is not. Our judgements, impulses and desires are ours; body, reputation, office and the actions of other people are not. Nearly every consolation in the book comes from applying this line correctly to a particular annoyance. If someone wrongs you, the wrong is theirs; the disturbance is a judgement you added.

The second is that the universe is rational and single. Nature is one intelligent whole, everything that happens follows from its constitution, and each person is a limb of it. From this comes the acceptance that so much of the book is about, which Marcus presents not as submission but as understanding what you are part of. He is willing to entertain the alternative, that there are only atoms and chance, and points out that his conclusions about how to behave would hardly change.

The third is the constant rehearsal of death and impermanence. Marcus lists the dead: emperors, courtiers, whole cities, the people who talked about them and the people who remembered the talk. He asks what Alexander and his mule-driver have in common now. The purpose is not gloom but scale: a reputation that lasts a generation is nothing against the age of the world, so it cannot be worth what it costs to obtain.

The fourth is the analytical habit he uses on everything attractive or frightening. Take the impression apart, describe the thing in its bare components, and see what is left of its power. Roasted meat is a dead animal. Purple cloth is wool dyed with shellfish blood. The method is deliberately deflationary and he applies it to his own position without exception.

The fifth is duty to other people, which is where the Stoicism turns outward. We were made for cooperation, like rows of teeth. To be angry with a fellow human being for being human is absurd, and the mark of maturity is to do the work of a human being without expecting to be thanked, the way a vine bears grapes and looks for nothing further.

How to read it

Do not read it straight through. It was not written that way and it flattens if you try. Read Book I complete, then a few entries at a time, and come back.

Get a good modern translation. Hays is direct and contemporary, sometimes at the cost of precision, and it is the version that has made the book popular again; Robin Hard is closer to the Greek. George Long’s Victorian version is free, and is where most of the familiar wording comes from, but its stateliness can make a plain, tired man sound like a monument.

Read some Epictetus alongside it, even twenty pages. Marcus was given a copy of the Discourses by his teacher and the debt is obvious everywhere, and Epictetus supplies the arguments that Marcus is only reminding himself of.

Keep the situation in view. This was written by a man conducting a long war on a frontier, who lost most of his children, whose empire was struck by a plague, and who faced a revolt by a trusted general. When an entry says that nothing is unbearable, notice what was being borne.

The common misreading is to take it as a manual of detachment, a way of caring about nothing. Marcus is an emperor who got up every day and did the work, and the entries about duty to other people are as frequent as the ones about indifference. The indifference is to outcomes, not to obligations.

Questions it raises

• Marcus keeps telling himself the same things for years. Is that evidence that the philosophy works, or that it does not?
• If only our own judgements are up to us, is the resulting freedom real, or bought by narrowing what counts as yours?
• He says he would reach the same conclusions whether the universe is providence or atoms. Can an ethics really be indifferent to that?
• The analytical method strips things down to their components to remove their glamour. Does that reveal what they are, or only what they are made of?
• Is a private notebook better evidence about how to live than a finished treatise, or worse?
• Marcus held absolute power and reminds himself constantly not to be corrupted by it. Did the philosophy restrain the emperor, or did it console him for what the emperor had to do?