How to read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations

What the Meditations is

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 until his death in 180 CE, and for much of his last decade he was at war on the Danube frontier. During those campaigns, probably in the first half of the 170s, he kept the notes we now call the Meditations (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). Two short notes in the text, if they are his, say where he was. In George Long’s edition, Book 1 ends with a line placing it among the Quadi, a people north of the Danube, and Book 2 ends with a note placing it at Carnuntum, a Roman town on the river.

The notes are addressed to himself: reminders, arguments with himself, one-line sayings, and lines copied from other writers. Marcus was a Roman, born in Rome, but he wrote them in Greek, the language of the philosophers he read, Epictetus among them. He left no title that survives. Long, whose 1862 translation this site quotes, wrote that the true title is unknown. The Greek title that has come down to us, ta eis heauton, means roughly “to himself” and may be a later addition, and Meditations is a later name still (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

Nobody knows whether he meant anyone else to read it. The complete text survives mainly through two manuscripts: one in the Vatican and one now lost, which was used for the first printed edition in 1558.

All of this tells you how to read it. The Meditations is not a textbook. Marcus already knew Stoic doctrine; he was trying to live by it, and he wrote it down so that it would be ready when he needed it. You will get the most from it if you read it the same way.

Why it feels hard to read

If you have started the Meditations and stalled, the reasons are mostly built into the book.

• It has no structure. There are twelve books and nearly 500 numbered sections in no evident order; they may simply be in the order he wrote them. Some are a single sentence; the longest runs past 900 words in Long’s English. Long himself warned his readers that, since the passages come in no order or connection, it takes a long acquaintance with the book to find everything in it.
• It repeats itself. Marcus returns to the same few thoughts dozens of times: judgment, duty, other people, death, change. Read as a textbook, that is tedious. Read as training notes, it makes sense. You repeat what you are trying to learn.
• It skips steps. He is writing to someone who already knows the theory. Terms like “the whole”, “nature” and “the ruling faculty” arrive without explanation, because he didn’t need one.
• Book 1 is a list of thanks. The book opens with seventeen sections on what he owed to his family, teachers and friends, and finally to the gods, starting with his grandfather. If you don’t yet know who these people are, it is a slow way in. It also looks different from the rest of the book and may have been written separately.
• The English can get in the way. Long’s translation is free and careful, but it is Victorian, with thou and thee and sentences that run on. Modern translations are easier going (more on choosing one below).

None of this means the book is beyond you. It means it should be read in small pieces, in a sensible order, with a question in mind: what is he telling himself to do?

Where to start

You don’t have to read it in order. Even the division into books may not be Marcus’s own (Long thought no one could tell), and editors have drawn some boundaries differently (older editions ended Book 1 with what are now the first three sections of Book 2), so numbering can vary slightly between editions. A sensible path:

1. Book 2. Seventeen sections, and most of the book’s ideas in small form. It opens with Marcus preparing himself to meet difficult people and keeps returning to death, time and the present.
2. Book 4. Fifty-one sections, mostly short, which suits reading a few a day. It includes his retreat into himself (4.3) and the river of time (4.43), both quoted below.
3. Books 5 to 7. Book 5 opens with Marcus arguing himself out of bed and includes the passage behind “the obstacle is the way” (5.20). Book 7 has the most sections, 75, including a run of lines he copied from poets and from Plato.
4. Book 3, then Books 8 to 12. Book 3 has fewer, longer and denser sections. By the later books the themes will be familiar, and you will start to notice how he varies them.
5. Book 1 last. Once you know what Marcus cared about, his list of thanks reads as the source of it: the teacher who lent him his own copy of Epictetus (1.7), the adoptive father whose habits he describes at length (1.16).

How to read one passage a day

In Book 1, Marcus thanks his teacher Rusticus, who gave him a habit worth taking to this book:

Learning “not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book” (Meditations 1.7) is a good standard for a book of short notes. One section, read properly, is worth more than a chapter skimmed. Here is a method that takes about ten minutes: read, restate, practice, review. We will use Meditations 2.11.

Read it twice. The first time for the general sense, the second time slowly. With Long’s English, reading aloud helps. Don’t worry if a passage has a hard middle. In 2.11 the omitted parts (marked …) are an argument about the gods and providence that you can come back to later; the first sentence and the last few are enough to work with.

Restate it in one sentence. Put it in your own words, as if you were explaining it to a friend over coffee. For 2.11: I could die today, so I should live today as if that were true; and since death happens to the good and the bad alike, it can’t be the thing that decides whether a life went well. If you can’t restate a passage, you haven’t understood it yet. Read it again, or leave it and come back tomorrow. The final line (“Therefore they are neither good nor evil”) is a technical Stoic claim you will meet all through the book: only character is truly good or bad, and everything else, death included, is neither.

Choose one thing to practice. Ask what the passage tells you to do today, and make it small enough that you will know by evening whether you did it. Marcus tells himself to “regulate every act and thought accordingly” (Meditations 2.11). One version for an ordinary day: before you send a message, ask whether you would be content for it to be the last thing that person heard from you. The snippy text, the passive-aggressive note to a coworker, the curt email with no greeting: each gets a second look.

Review it at night. Did you do it? When did you forget? One line in a notebook is enough, and the Evening Examination gives you a short structure for it. The next morning, take the next section, or stay with the same one if it didn’t take. Writing things down is, after all, how Marcus himself worked; Stoic journaling shows how to keep that kind of notebook.

Marcus was suspicious of reading that never turned into living. In Book 2 he tells himself to stop wanting more books and hold on to the principles he already had:

That is a good argument for reading a passage a day. A section you have actually tried out is closer to how Marcus used his notes than the whole book read in a weekend.

The main themes, with a passage each

A summary of the Meditations can list its topics in a sentence. It is more useful to see what Marcus actually says. Seven themes run through the whole book; here is one section for each, in Long’s translation.

Judgment: it is your opinion that disturbs you

Marcus returns to this idea constantly. The event is outside you; the distress comes from what you think about it, and that thought is yours to change. He doesn’t stop at changing your mind, though. If the trouble is something you ought to be doing, do it. If it truly can’t be done, the failure isn’t yours. Epictetus puts the first half in one line in Enchiridion 5, and Meditations 5.20 turns it on obstacles (“the obstacle is the way”).

Duty: rising to the work

The dashes mark Marcus’s own excuses (“But this is more pleasant”) and his replies to them. The ruler of Rome is negotiating with his own blankets. His answer is that he exists for action, just as the plants, birds, ants and bees each do their part. For the passage in full and the popular morning line Marcus never wrote, see Marcus Aurelius on the morning.

Other people: made for co-operation

Marcus starts the day expecting to meet the busybody and the ungrateful, and he still refuses to be angry with them. Their faults come from ignorance, and in any case “we are made for co-operation” (Meditations 2.1). Being vexed with someone and turning your back on them is, he says, itself a way of acting against them. For using this with a difficult coworker or relative, see Stoicism and difficult people.

Death and the present moment

However long you live, the only life you can lose is the present one, because the past is gone and the future isn’t yours yet. Marcus comes back to death again and again, but rarely to frighten himself. The point is to put his attention back on the day in front of him. More of his lines on mortality are collected in Stoic quotes about death, and the modern practice built on them is memento mori.

Change: everything is carried away

Whatever is in front of you, the bad week or the good one, is already on its way past, and something else is coming. Marcus reaches for the image of moving water more than once; in 2.17 he calls everything bodily a stream. For more of what he and the other Stoics wrote about time, see Stoic quotes about time.

Virtue: nothing better than a good character

Marcus dares himself: if you can find anything better than justice, truth, temperance and fortitude, take it. He is sure you won’t. Later in the same section he names the rivals that tempt him away (praise from the many, power and pleasure) and tells himself to choose the better and hold to it. His list differs slightly from the usual four; see the four virtues.

The retreat within

You don’t need a house in the country. A quiet place is available whenever you choose, as long as you keep a few short principles ready, and Marcus names two: things don’t touch the soul, our opinions do; and everything we see is changing. That is the judgment theme and the change theme in one breath, which makes 4.3 a good summary of the whole book. Its last line, “The universe is transformation: life is opinion” (Meditations 4.3), is worth memorizing.

Other threads run through the book too. In 7.48 (crediting the idea to Plato) and 9.30 he pictures the human world from high above, with its armies, markets, marriages and lamentations in a single view; the modern name for that exercise is the view from above. He also reasons about the gods, providence and the order of nature, as in the middle of 2.11. Those passages are harder going, and they can wait for a second reading.

Which translation to read

For a first reading, a modern translation with notes is the easiest; George Long’s 1862 version is free and accurate but old-fashioned, and it is the one quoted throughout this site because it is in the public domain and can be checked word for word. The translations are compared by translator, year and kind of reader in Meditations translations compared.

One warning. Many lines shared online as Marcus Aurelius come from a modern translation, so they won’t match Long’s wording, and some of the most popular are not in the Meditations at all. See fake Stoic quotes before you repeat one.

Read it free

Long’s translation is free at Project Gutenberg as Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (eBook #15877) (opens in a new tab). The edition includes Long’s biographical sketch of Marcus, his essay on Marcus’s philosophy, an index of terms and notes that explain many of the names and allusions. Every passage of the Meditations on this site is checked word for word against that file.

If you would rather start with a single passage than a whole book, today’s teaching gives you one, verified, with an explanation in plain English and one thing to practice. For what to read alongside Marcus, see Stoicism books.