Meditations

Antoninus, soon called Pius, ruled for twenty-three quiet years, and Marcus spent them at his side: as son, as junior colleague and, from 145, as son-in-law, when he married Antoninus’s daughter Faustina, his cousin. Over the next two decades she bore him at least thirteen children, including two sets of twins. Many died young. It is worth remembering, every time Marcus writes calmly about loss, that he buried more children than most of his readers ever will.

His schooling was the best money could buy. Herodes Atticus taught him Greek oratory, and Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the most admired Latin speaker of the day, taught him Latin; their letters, rediscovered in 1815 beneath the writing of a later manuscript, show a deep, warm bond between pupil and master. But Marcus drifted from fine speech toward philosophy, and the man who pulled him was Junius Rusticus, a Stoic with a long career in public life. From Rusticus, Marcus wrote, he first got the impression that his character “required improvement and discipline.” Rusticus taught him to drop showy writing, to read a book properly instead of skimming it, and to make peace quickly with anyone who had wronged him once they showed they were willing. And he lent Marcus his own copy of the lectures of Epictetus, a lame former slave who taught that our happiness depends on one thing only: how we use what is up to us. It may be the most consequential book loan in history.

The other great teacher was his adoptive father. Book One holds a long, loving portrait of Antoninus at work: mild, steady once he had decided, ready to listen to anyone with an idea for the common good, plain in his food and clothes, careful with public money and patient with the grumbling that brought him, examining every question “as if he had abundance of time.” Years later, in the middle of a war, Marcus would remind himself: “Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus.”

Antoninus died on 7 March 161. Marcus could have ruled alone; instead he insisted on sharing power with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus, and for the first time Rome had two emperors. The luck ran out almost at once. Parthia invaded Armenia that year and destroyed a Roman army, and the war in the East dragged on until 166. The returning troops brought something worse home: the Antonine Plague, probably smallpox, which swept the empire and may have killed five to ten million people.

Then the northern frontier gave way. From 166 the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazyges and other peoples crossed the Danube, and raiders pushed as far as northern Italy. Lucius died early in 169, probably of the plague, and from then on Marcus carried the empire alone.

So the philosopher who had never wanted to be a soldier spent most of his last decade in army camps. He lived for about three years at Carnuntum, a legionary fortress on the Danube east of modern Vienna, and ran campaigns from Sirmium, in what is now Serbia. He was in his fifties and often unwell; in Book One he thanks the gods for remedies “against bloodspitting and giddiness.” His days were reports, lawsuits, petitions, funerals and inspections of troops. And at night, by lamplight, he wrote to himself.

The notebook has no title we can be sure Marcus gave it. The Greek words at the head of the manuscripts, Ta eis heauton, mean roughly “things to himself”; the English name Meditations came much later, from translators. He wrote it not in his native Latin but in Greek, the language of philosophy, and he wrote it for no one else. There is no plan, no argument built across chapters, almost nothing about battles or politics: just nearly five hundred entries, from a single line to a page, many saying the same thing again in new words.

Scholars now read it less as a diary than as a training log. Epictetus had told his students to write down the core principles day by day and keep them ready at hand, and Marcus was doing exactly that: rehearsing a few truths until they held under pressure, the way a soldier drills. That is why the book repeats itself, and why its harshest lines—the body as “blood and bones and network,” fame forgotten in a breath—read best as medicine he is prescribing for his own anger, ambition and fear.

Book One stands apart, and may have been written separately. It is a list of debts. One by one Marcus names the people who made him and what each gave him: his mother’s simple way of living, the tutor who taught him not to take sides at the chariot races, Rusticus and his Epictetus, the philosopher Apollonius who stayed the same even “on the occasion of the loss of a child,” and a Platonist who taught him not to keep telling people he had no leisure. It ends with a long thank-you to the gods, including for a wife “so obedient, and so affectionate, and so simple,” and then a note of place: “Among the Quadi at the Granua.” It was written on campaign, beside a river north of the Danube. Book Two ends with another: “This in Carnuntum.”

Book Two opens with one of the most useful paragraphs ever written. “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.” It is not cynicism. Marcus goes on: they act this way because they don’t know good from bad; they are my kin, sharing the same reason; none of them can make me do wrong; and “we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids.” Expect the worst of the day, and then refuse to let it make you worse.

From there the early books hammer at a handful of ideas. Life is short, and the only thing anyone can lose is the present moment, so the longest life and the shortest come to the same. Hippocrates cured many diseases and then fell sick and died. You could leave life at any moment, so act and think accordingly. In Book Four comes the famous retreat: people long for country houses and beaches, Marcus writes, but you can retire into yourself whenever you choose. Carry a few short principles, return to them, and come back refreshed. Two should always be to hand: that things themselves don’t touch the soul, because our turmoil comes from the opinion within, and that everything you see is already changing. “The universe is transformation: life is opinion.” Take away the opinion, he adds, and you take away the complaint “I have been harmed”; take away the complaint, and the harm is gone.

Book Five begins with an emperor who doesn’t want to get out of bed. When you rise unwillingly, he tells himself, remember: “I am rising to the work of a human being.” Was I made to lie under the blankets and keep warm? Look at the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders and the bees, each busy with its part of the world’s work. Later in the same book he notes that other people can block his actions but not his mind, which turns every hindrance into material: “that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.”

The middle books widen the lens. Marcus practises seeing things stripped of their glamour: a fine dinner is the dead body of a fish or a bird, the best wine a little grape juice, the imperial purple sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish. He turns the same trick on power. “Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar,” he writes, “that thou art not dyed with this dye”—a startling thing for a Caesar to tell himself—and holds up Antoninus as the cure. Alexander the Great and his stable boy, he observes, ended up in the same state.

Again and again he climbs above the scene. Asia and Europe are corners of the universe, the whole sea a drop, the present a point in eternity. Picture the age of Vespasian, a century back: people marrying, raising children, falling sick, dying, fighting, feasting, flattering, plotting, grumbling about the present. All gone. In Book Nine he tells himself to “look down from above on the countless herds of men,” their festivals and voyages, births and deaths, and to ask how many have never even heard his name. This isn’t contempt. It is a way of cutting worries and vanities down to size, and of seeing himself as one small working part of a vast whole.

It is also a defence. Book Eight calls the mind free from passions “a citadel,” the one stronghold that can never be taken, the image that gave the French scholar Pierre Hadot the title of his great study, The Inner Citadel. Close by is the book’s funniest advice. A cucumber is bitter? Throw it away. Briers in the road? Turn aside. That’s enough; don’t add, “And why were such things made in the world?” And about ruling he is surprisingly modest: do what is needed, don’t look round to see if anyone notices, and don’t expect “Plato’s Republic,” but be content “if the smallest thing goes on well.”

The final books grow sparer and more urgent. “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be,” Book Ten tells him, “but be such.” Book Eleven sets out nine rules for when someone has wronged you: remember we are made for one another; consider what drives them; they go wrong out of ignorance; you do wrong too; you may not even understand what they did; life is a moment; it is your opinion of the act, not the act, that disturbs you; your anger will hurt you more than the offence; and genuine kindness is invincible.

These were not abstract problems. In 175 Avidius Cassius, the general commanding in the East, declared himself emperor. The revolt soon collapsed when his own officers killed him, and Marcus asked the Senate to show mercy to his family and supporters. On the journey east that followed, Faustina died suddenly near the Taurus mountains. Ancient gossips accused her of affairs; Marcus, in his notebook, only thanked the gods for her.

In 177 he made his teenage son Commodus co-emperor. That same year, in Lyon in Gaul, a mob turned on the local Christians. According to a letter preserved by the church historian Eusebius, the governor wrote to the emperor for instructions, and the answer came back that those who confessed should be punished and those who denied their faith released. Forty-eight people died, among them the bishop Pothinus, who died in prison after a beating, and the slave woman Blandina, thrown to the beasts. The notebook’s only mention of Christians, in Book Eleven, is a dig at their readiness to die “from mere obstinacy,” and some scholars suspect even those words were added by a later hand.

Book Twelve closes with death in view. What a man should fear, Marcus writes, is not that he must one day cease to live, but “never to have begun to live according to nature.” The last entry imagines an actor dismissed after three acts instead of five. “Thou sayest well,” comes the answer, “but in life the three acts are the whole drama.” Go, then, satisfied. Marcus died on 17 March 180, on campaign at Vindobona (Vienna) or Sirmium, aged fifty-eight, with Commodus beside him.

Commodus made peace on the Danube and hurried home to Rome. He was the first emperor born to a reigning emperor, and the worst advertisement for his father’s judgment: he fought in the arena as a gladiator, posed as Hercules, renamed Rome after himself, and was strangled in his bath by a wrestler on the last day of 192. The historian Cassius Dio, who lived through it, said Rome had passed from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.

The notebook disappeared from view. A few later writers may hint at it, but the first clear witness comes some seven centuries on, around 900, when the Byzantine scholar Arethas of Caesarea mentions it and sends a copy to an archbishop. The Suda, a tenth-century encyclopedia, is the first to speak of twelve books. In the Renaissance a manuscript from Heidelberg reached Zurich, where Wilhelm Xylander printed the Greek text with a Latin translation in 1558–59. That manuscript has since been lost, and modern editions rest on it and on a damaged fourteenth-century copy in the Vatican. Meric Casaubon made the first English translation in 1634, and George Long’s version of 1862 became the standard for generations.

Since then the emperor’s private notes have travelled further than he ever did. The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said he had read them a hundred times, and a twenty-first-century revival of Stoicism turned Marcus into a self-help hero: sales jumped from about 16,000 copies in 2012 to about 100,000 in 2019. A man who kept reminding himself that fame is nothing has become one of the most read writers of the ancient world.

Marcus became emperor in 161 and almost at once everything went wrong: war with Parthia, then a plague that may have killed millions, then invasions across the Danube. His co-emperor Lucius Verus died in 169, and Marcus spent most of his last decade in army camps such as Carnuntum and Sirmium. There, at night, he wrote notes to himself in Greek, never meant for anyone else. Today we call them the Meditations. Book One is a list of thanks to the people who shaped him, ending with a note: “Among the Quadi at the Granua,” a river beyond the Danube. The other eleven books are nearly five hundred entries of advice to himself, repeated until it stuck. Epictetus had told his students to write down their principles day by day and keep them ready at hand, and Marcus was doing exactly that. It is why the book says the same things again and again, and why its harshest lines read best as medicine he is prescribing for his own anger, ambition and fear.

Begin each morning, he writes, by expecting to meet the busybody, the ungrateful and the arrogant—and remember they are your kin, and none of them can make you do wrong. Events don’t harm you; your opinion of them does, so take away the opinion and the harm goes with it. You can retreat into your own mind anywhere; the mind free from passions is “a citadel.” When you don’t want to get out of bed, remember you are “rising to the work of a human being.” Look down from above at the countless lives that came before and are forgotten, and your worries shrink to their real size. Don’t become “a Caesar”: stay simple, kind and hard-working, like Antoninus. When someone wrongs you, he lists nine things to remember, among them that you do wrong too, that you may not understand what they did, and that your anger will hurt you more than their act. A cucumber is bitter? Throw it away, without asking why the world contains such things. Stop talking about what a good person should be, and be one. And keep death in mind, not to despair, but to stop wasting the time you have.

Marcus’s last years tested every word. In 175 his general Avidius Cassius declared himself emperor and was killed by his own officers, and Marcus asked for mercy for the rebel’s family. Faustina died on the journey east; in 177, the year he made his son Commodus co-emperor, Christians were martyred at Lyon under his rule. The notebook’s last entry imagines an actor sent off the stage after three acts of five, and answers that in life three acts can be the whole drama. He died on campaign on 17 March 180, with Commodus at his side. Commodus became a cruel, erratic emperor who fought as a gladiator and was strangled in 192. The notebook vanished for seven centuries, resurfaced in Byzantium around 900, and was first printed in Zurich in 1558–59 from a manuscript that has since been lost. Today it is one of the most read books from the ancient world, a bestseller for people who want to stay steady in chaos.