Which translation of the Meditations should you read?

Every English Meditations translates the same Greek notebook, which Marcus Aurelius wrote for his own use rather than for readers. The translations differ in four ways that matter when you choose one: how modern the English sounds, how much help the notes and introduction give, how closely the translator follows the Greek, and whether the text is free. For what the book is and how to read it, see the guide to the Meditations.

The translations at a glance

Each translation, profiled

George Long (1862). Long (1800–1879) was an English classical scholar. His translation, titled The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, comes with essays on Marcus’s life and philosophy and an index of key Greek terms with the English he chose for them. It uses thou and thee throughout and sets Marcus’s arguments with himself in long sentences broken by dashes. In the biographical sketch that opens the book, Long says he could have made the language “more easy and flowing” but preferred “a ruder style” as better suited to the original, and that he always gave “the same translation of the same word.” It was reprinted in the Harvard Classics, it is behind many free editions online, and it is on Project Gutenberg (opens in a new tab) as Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

Meric Casaubon (1634). The first English translation. Its seventeenth-century English is further from us than Long’s, and it reads as a period piece. It is worth a look if you are curious about how the book entered English, but it is not the place to start.

C. R. Haines (1916). The Loeb Classical Library edition (volume 58), published under the title The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, with the Greek text and the English on facing pages. Like Long, Haines writes in an older, formal register. Published in 1916, it is in the public domain in the United States. It suits readers who know some Greek or want the original in view.

Maxwell Staniforth (1964). Published by Penguin in 1964, Staniforth’s version was the Penguin Classics Meditations before Martin Hammond’s new translation of 2006. Its English is direct and readable, in a somewhat formal mid-twentieth-century register, and it has an introduction by the translator. Secondhand copies are easy to find.

Gregory Hays (2002). Published by the Modern Library in 2002, this is the translation many readers meet first. Its English is plain and contemporary, with short sentences; the publisher describes it as conveying the “spareness and compression” of the Greek. It favors natural English over a word-for-word match, and its long introduction covers Marcus’s life, the basics of Stoic doctrine and the book’s influence. It has fewer notes than Hammond’s or Waterfield’s. Because it is so widely read, many lines shared online as Marcus Aurelius quotes are in Hays’s wording.

Martin Hammond (2006). The current Penguin Classics translation, with an introduction by Diskin Clay, and notes, a list of names and an index at the back. Hammond’s English is modern but more literal than Hays’s, and a little more formal. If you want a modern translation that stays close to the Greek, this is a good choice.

Robin Hard and Christopher Gill (2011). The Oxford World’s Classics edition: Hard’s translation, with an introduction and explanatory notes by Christopher Gill, a scholar of ancient philosophy, and a selection of Marcus’s correspondence with his tutor Fronto. The letters show a younger Marcus, which makes this a good edition for study.

Robin Waterfield (2021). Meditations: The Annotated Edition, from Basic Books. Its notes sit at the foot of each page, so help with a name, an allusion or a Stoic term arrives when you need it, and it opens with a long introduction. It suits a first reader who wants a guide at hand, and anyone rereading.

There are others, such as A. S. L. Farquharson’s 1944 Oxford translation, but these are the ones you are most likely to be choosing between.

Which one to read, by goal

A first read. Gregory Hays, if you want to get through the book and enjoy it. Robin Waterfield, if you would rather have notes on every page. The book has no plot and repeats itself, so whichever you choose, read it a passage at a time rather than straight through.

Study. Waterfield for notes on the page, Hammond for a close modern translation with endnotes, Hard and Gill for a scholar’s introduction and the letters to Fronto. Comparing two translations of a hard passage teaches you more than either one alone; if you read any Greek, add the Loeb.

Free and online. George Long. Haines’s Loeb translation is also in the public domain in the United States.

Reading aloud. Long, if you like the cadence of older English. Hays, if you want it to sound like someone talking. Staniforth sits between them.

Checking a quotation you saw online. Long, because the full text is free and searchable. Search for a distinctive word rather than the whole line, since a modern wording won’t match his. If nothing in the book says anything like it, it is probably not Marcus; see fake Stoic quotes.

A good arrangement is two texts: a modern translation to read, and Long’s free one to search. For the rest of a Stoic reading list, see Stoicism books.

George Long’s English, in three passages

Here is Long at three points in the book, so you can judge the free option for yourself. Most of what makes him harder is on the surface: the old pronouns, the long sentences and Stoic technical terms that a modern translator might turn into everyday English. Underneath, he is careful.

The only obstacle here is thou risest. Put simply: on the mornings you don’t want to get up, remind yourself what you are getting up for. Long sets the reminder off with a dash, and in the rest of the section he uses dashes to mark Marcus answering his own excuses, so it reads like an argument with himself, which is what it is. For the whole section and the morning lines Marcus did and didn’t write, see Marcus Aurelius on mornings.

This is the hardest of the three, and it shows what Long keeps that a smoother version can lose. Indifferent is a Stoic technical term: Long’s index of terms glosses it as things “neither good nor bad.” Marcus is not saying he stops caring about people who block him. He is saying that, as obstacles, they belong in the same class as the sun, the wind or a wild beast: they can get in the way of what he does, but not of the mind he acts from. Acting conditionally is another technical term. It renders the Greek hypexairesis, which Long’s index glosses as “exception, reservation”: acting with a condition attached, the idea modern writers call the reserve clause. With those two terms unpacked, the end of the passage is clear: the mind can turn a hindrance into a help, and even an obstacle on the road can help a person along it.

That last line is the source of a phrase that circulates in a much shorter modern wording; for where it comes from, see the obstacle is the way.

Long isn’t always hard. Apart from abides and the old word order of the last sentence, this could have been written recently. His other strength shows across the whole book rather than in one section: Long says he always gave the same Greek word the same English, so once you know what indifferent means in 5.20, you can expect it to mean the same thing when it comes back. A freer translation may vary its wording for style, which reads better but makes it harder to follow one idea through the book.

If you can read these three without strain, you can read Long. If 5.20 stopped you, start with a modern translation and keep Long for checking.

Why this site and the app use Long

Every quotation from Marcus on this site and in the Stoic Practice app is from Long’s 1862 translation, for three reasons.

It is in the public domain. Long published it in 1862 and died in 1879, so his translation can be quoted in full, every day, without anyone’s permission. The modern translations profiled above, from Staniforth’s on, are still under copyright.

Anyone can check it. The full text is free on Project Gutenberg. If we quote Meditations 6.21, you can open the book and find the same words in the same section.

It is checked word for word. Each quotation is compared by software against a pinned copy of that Gutenberg text, and a quotation that doesn’t match is rejected when the app’s and the site’s content is built. Cuts are marked with an ellipsis. Our sources page has the details, including the other translations we quote: Long’s Epictetus and Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca.

The cost is Victorian English, which is one reason the app pairs each morning’s passage with a short explanation in plain English. It also means that if you know a line from Hays or another modern translation, it will look different here: the same Greek, a different translator.