Meditations

What It Is

Twelve short books of Greek, written between roughly AD 170 and 180 by the emperor of Rome, much of it in camp on the Danube frontier during a war he did not want. He gave it no title. The heading that survives means, simply, to himself.

It is not a treatise and it was not written for you. There is no argument, no structure, no development. What there is: reminders, rebukes, instructions, the same handful of hard truths returned to again and again in slightly different words, as a man repeats something he is trying to make himself believe. The first book is a list of what he owed to the people who raised and taught him, set down one by one.

The repetition is not a flaw. It is the method: a mind performing maintenance on itself, in private, under strain.

Why It Matters

Every other work of Stoicism is trying to persuade somebody. Seneca is writing for publication. Epictetus is teaching a room. Marcus is the only one with no audience, no reputation to defend, and nothing to sell, and that is the source of the book's authority. You are not being addressed. You are overhearing.

What makes it unbearable and great is the gap between the situation and the tone. This is the ruler of the known world, with a plague running through his armies, a war he cannot finish, and eventually a rebellion by one of his own generals, and none of it is in the book, because he did not consider his troubles the interesting part. What is in the book is a man telling himself to get up in the morning, to stop being angry with fools, to remember that he will die soon and so will everyone who might have remembered him.

It survived by luck, barely known for a thousand years, first printed in 1559. Since then it has been the private book of an improbable range of people: Frederick the Great, John Stuart Mill, soldiers, prisoners, and several million readers in the last twenty years who found it in an airport. The popular verdict, for once, is correct.

Before You Read

Two hundred pages. Do not read it in a weekend. Read cover to cover, it becomes monotonous, and readers who do that come away describing it as a book of platitudes.

Read a page or two a day for a few months, at the beginning or the end of the day. It was written in fragments over a decade and it works on a reader the same way, by accumulation.

If Book 1, the catalogue of debts to people whose names mean nothing to you, bogs you down, skip it and come back at the end. It is the most moving thing in the book once you know the man, and the least rewarding thing in it when you do not.

Which Translation to Read

• Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002) — recommended. The reason this book sells in the hundreds of thousands today. Hays strips out every trace of Victorian drapery and writes hard, short, contemporary English that hits like it was written this year. His introduction is one of the best short essays on Stoicism in print. Nothing else comes close for a first reading. The cost: he is free with the Greek and renders the technical Stoic vocabulary into plain English, so the philosophical scaffolding underneath disappears. Hays gives you the man rather than the system. View on Amazon →
• Robin Hard (Oxford World's Classics, 2011), with introduction and notes by Christopher Gill. The accurate one. Hard keeps the Stoic terminology intact and Gill's notes explain what it is doing, and the volume includes selections from Marcus's correspondence with his tutor Fronto, which show you a very different and rather charming man. The best second reading. The cost: cooler and more distant on the page than Hays.
• Martin Hammond (Penguin Classics, 2006), with an introduction by Diskin Clay. The middle path: faithful, clear, neither modernised nor stiff, with excellent notes. A thoroughly trustworthy Meditations. The cost: nothing in it lodges in the memory the way Hays does.

Take Hays first, then Hard once the ideas have taken hold. Avoid the free public-domain versions; George Long's translation of 1862 is everywhere online, and its Victorian solemnity is precisely what Hays was written to escape.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Epictetus first, or at least alongside. Marcus is applying a philosophy he learned from the Discourses, and half the entries are him working on a lesson Epictetus set. Read them together and Meditations stops being a book of sayings and becomes a record of practice.

And resist the temptation to read it as advice for your career. It was written by a man trying to be decent while doing an impossible job, in the full knowledge that none of it would be remembered. The parts that are useful to you are not the parts he would have thought were the point.