Meditations

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and spent much of that time on the northern frontier, in the wars against the Marcomanni and the Quadi. Somewhere in those years, in camp, he wrote in Greek a set of notes to himself. He gave them no title, and there is no evidence that he intended anyone else to read them; two of the datelines survive in the text as it has come down to us, one written among the Quadi on the river Granua, one at Carnuntum on the Danube. How the notebooks left his tent nobody knows. They are mentioned only glancingly in antiquity, no ancient manuscript survives, and the book effectively enters European literature in 1559, when Wilhelm Xylander printed the Greek at Zurich from a manuscript that has since disappeared.

The English here is Meric Casaubon’s, published in London in 1634 — the first complete version in the language, made by the son of the classicist Isaac Casaubon — and it should be read with its character in mind. Casaubon translates into the English of his own century, and he translates generously: he expands, he doubles his nouns and adjectives, and he supplies whatever he takes the Greek to imply. In his own editions everything supplied stood in square brackets; the later reviser whose text is followed here removed the brackets for the reader’s comfort and stated plainly, in the note printed at the back of this volume, that Casaubon’s is often a paraphrase rather than a close translation. That is a fair verdict, and a reader should have it in hand. Anyone who wants Marcus at his shortest and hardest should know that closer nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions exist — George Long’s of 1862 among them. What Casaubon offers instead is weight: a seventeenth-century gravity that suits a book about mortality, and the Marcus Aurelius that English readers had for two hundred years. One practical warning. His section divisions run about one out from the modern numbering, and the note at the back points out that what most editions call the opening of Book II stands here as the fifteenth section of Book I.

It is not a treatise and not a diary of events. It is twelve books of repetition — the same few propositions about death, duty, anger, other people and the shortness of time, turned over and set down again, because a man trying to hold to a discipline has to say the thing to himself more than once. Read a few sections at a time. Book One is the exception and should be read whole: an inventory of what he owed to his grandfather, his parents, his teachers and his adoptive father, and one of the most attractive things any ruler has written.

This edition presents the twelve books complete, with the notes and glossary of the edition followed, and the appendix of letters between Marcus and his tutor Fronto, recovered early in the nineteenth century from palimpsests. That edition’s own introduction — a later editor’s biography of Marcus, not his own writing — is not included.