"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius: Summary and Review

Few books were less meant to be read than Meditations. Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180. He wrote these notes to himself, in Greek, and he wrote part of them during wars on the Danube frontier. The end of the first book is marked “Among the Quadi at the Granua”, and the end of the second “This in Carnuntum”. The book has no story and no system. It shows a man who reminds himself, again and again, how he wants to think. That is exactly why it has outlived almost everything else written in his century.

What kind of book this is

The title is not Marcus’ own. The old manuscripts call the work something like “To himself”. Its twelve books read like a training diary. Most entries are short, and many of them repeat a few Stoic exercises. Stoicism was a school of Greek and Roman philosophy that taught people to live calmly and do their duty. Marcus learned it from his teachers and from the writings of the philosopher Epictetus.

This review takes the exercises one at a time. The order follows how important each one is in the book, not the order of the pages. There are eight main ideas.

Book 1: what Marcus owed to other people

The first book is different from all the others. It is a list of debts. Marcus writes down what he learned from his grandfather, his mother, his teachers, and his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius. From his grandfather he learned good morals and how to control his temper. From his teacher Rusticus he learned three things. The first was not to show off his self-discipline. The second was to read carefully instead of being happy with a shallow understanding. The third was the discourses of Epictetus, which Rusticus lent him from his own collection.

Many readers skip this book, and that is a mistake. Before a single argument, the most powerful man in the Roman world writes down that other people gave him his character. Later, the book insists again and again that people are made to help one another. That idea starts here, as a fact of Marcus’ own life.

You are upset by your judgments, not by events

This is the central Stoic idea, and it runs through the whole book. Things outside us are neither good nor bad in themselves. What hurts us is the opinion we form about them. Marcus practises separating what happened from the story he tells himself about it.

In Book 4 he puts it as a short chain of steps. Take away the opinion, and the complaint “I have been harmed” disappears. Take away the complaint, and the harm disappears too. Book 8 says it most plainly:

If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it.

In modern English: when something outside you causes you pain, the pain comes from your judgment about the thing, not from the thing itself.

This does not mean that nothing matters. Marcus still had to fight wars, judge court cases and bury his children. His claim is narrower and more useful. The event is outside your control, but your judgment is inside it. If you confuse the two, you suffer much more than you need to. Modern cognitive therapy grew from a similar insight. Its founders, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, both said that they owed a debt to the Stoics.

You can always retreat into your own mind

Early in Book 4, Marcus writes about people who look for quiet places in the countryside, by the sea or in the mountains. He calls this a habit of very ordinary people. A person can find more quiet, he says, by retreating “into his own soul”. He does not mean escape. He means a short list of principles that you keep brief on purpose. You can remember them in a moment, and they send you back to your work without bitterness.

The French historian Pierre Hadot used this image for the title of his study of the book, The Inner Citadel. A citadel is a fortress inside a city. Hadot’s reading is the key to the whole work. In his view, the entries are not essays. They are spiritual exercises: texts Marcus wrote to repeat a few principles until they became automatic. Once you see this, the many repetitions no longer look like a weakness. They are the method.

Expect difficult people, and work with them anyway

Book 2 begins with an exercise for the morning. Marcus tells himself that today he will meet people who are nosy, ungrateful, arrogant and envious. This is not cynicism. It is preparation, so that anger does not take him by surprise.

Then Marcus turns the thought around. Such people act badly because they do not know what is good. They share the same reason that he has, so they are his relatives in a deeper sense. For this reason he cannot be angry with them. People are made to work together, he writes, like feet, like hands, like the upper and lower rows of teeth.

In Book 6 the same idea returns in its sharpest form. The best revenge on someone who has wronged you, Marcus writes, is not to become like them. He was an emperor and could have taken any revenge he wanted. Coming from him, the sentence carries real weight.

Get up and do your work

Book 5 begins with a scene that everyone knows. The emperor does not want to get out of bed. His answer to himself is simple. He is getting up to do the work of a human being, the work he exists for. Staying under the blankets because it is pleasant would mean living for pleasure, not for action. Plants, birds and bees all do their part in the order of nature. Why should he refuse to do his?

Marcus does not talk about motivation or passion here. For him, duty is what a social and rational being does. This makes the book bracing rather than comforting. It never promises that the work will feel good. It only says that it is the right work.

Every obstacle leaves a right way to respond

In recent years, the most quoted idea in the book has been a short passage in Book 5. Other people may block his actions, Marcus writes. But they cannot block his intentions and his attitude, because the mind can turn every obstacle into material for acting well. A delay, for example, becomes a chance to practise patience. An insult becomes a chance to practise self-control. The passage ends with a line that is among the key quotes below: the obstacle on the road helps us on the road. This line gave Ryan Holiday’s book The Obstacle Is the Way its title. But it helps to read it in context. Marcus is not saying that every problem is secretly an opportunity, in the style of a self-help book. He is saying that something remains possible whatever happens. There is always a right way to respond. So no event can make a good life impossible.

Everything passes, so act well now

The feeling that everything passes is the most constant mood of the book. Time is like a river of events, Marcus writes. As soon as you see one thing, the river carries it away and brings another. Alexander the Great and the man who looked after his horses ended in the same state. The whole court of the first emperor, Augustus, is gone: his wife, his daughter, his friends and his doctors. So are the crowds of an earlier emperor’s time, who married, ate, traded and complained about the present, just as people do now.

This could be depressing, and sometimes it is. But Marcus uses it as an argument for the present. In Book 2 he notes that the longest life and the shortest life lose exactly the same thing at the end. They lose the present moment, because that is the only thing anyone really has. In Book 4 he warns himself not to act as if he had ten thousand years to live. While you are alive, and while you can, he tells himself, be good.

You are part of a larger whole

Under all of these ideas lies a picture of the world. Marcus sees it as one ordered whole, and every person as a part of it. He often presents this as a choice that he does not need to decide. Perhaps a rational order guides the world. Or perhaps there are only atoms moving at random. In both cases, Marcus argues, the right response is the same: do your own part well and accept what comes. When he thinks of the world as ordered, he can greet events almost with gratitude. Whatever suits the universe, he says, suits him.

This part of the book has aged the most. Few readers today share the Stoic view of the cosmos. But the practical conclusion still works without it. Stop demanding that the world arrange itself around you, and judge yourself by how you act in it.

How it differs from other Stoic books

Meditations is the least systematic and the most personal of the classic Stoic texts. Three neighbours show the difference.

• Epictetus’ Enchiridion, the short handbook that his student Arrian put together, says the same core things more clearly and in a better order. It is the better first introduction to the ideas.
• Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius are warmer and more literary, and they are full of everyday Roman life. Seneca wrote them for readers.
• Modern books such as Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic turn these sources into daily lessons. This makes them easy to use, but also easy to skim.

Meditations offers something that none of them can. You watch someone practise. Nobody is teaching you. Instead, you overhear a man teaching himself, under the pressure of war, plague and government. A great epidemic, the Antonine plague, spread through the empire during his reign, and he spent years at war on the northern frontier. When he tells himself to be patient, he has good reasons to need the advice.

Where it falls short

The book has three weaknesses. The first is repetition. If you read it straight through, the same five or six thoughts keep returning in new words. Readers who expect an argument that builds step by step will be disappointed. Some entries are fragments whose meaning has been lost. A few are so short that the translator has to decide what they say.

The second weakness is what the book leaves out. Marcus handed the empire to his son Commodus, whose rule was a disaster. Christians were persecuted during his reign. The book mentions Christians only once, in a dismissive remark about their “obstinacy” in facing death. None of this disproves the exercises. But it reminds us that the notebook shows how Marcus wanted to think. It is not a record of how well he ruled.

The third weakness appears when people quote the book out of context. Then its idea of acceptance can turn into giving up. Marcus always pairs acceptance with hard, constant work. Quotations that keep only the acceptance make Stoicism a philosophy of not caring, and it is not one.

Which translation and format to choose

With this book, the translation matters more than usual. The Greek original is very short and dense, and famous lines are worded very differently in different versions.

• George Long (1862) is the translation quoted in this review. It is free online and still accurate. But its old words, such as “thee” and “thou”, put a Victorian layer between you and Marcus.
• Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002) is the most readable modern version, and the one most often recommended to first-time readers. The book buttons on this page lead to it.
• Martin Hammond (Penguin) and Robin Hard (Oxford World’s Classics) stay closer to the Greek and include fuller notes.

Read it in print or as an ebook, a few entries at a time, not from cover to cover. For the same reason, it does not work well as one long audiobook session. Each entry needs a moment before you move on to the next.