A new Translation, with an Introduction, by Gregory Hays the modern library

Meditations: the ethical doctrine of late Stoicism,
incorporating a certain amount of Platonic and Heraclitean
material, and overlaid with occasional reference to other
schools and thinkers. But what of the Meditations itself?
How and why was it written? Who is its audience? What
kind of book is it? For the answers to these questions we
must turn from the book’s content to its form and origins.
The MEDITATIONS: Genre, Structure, and Style
I suspect that Marcus would have been surprised (and
perhaps rather dismayed) to find himself enshrined in the
Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. He would have
been surprised, to begin with, by the title of the work
ascribed to him. The long-established English title
Meditations is not only not original, but positively
misleading, lending a spurious air of resonance and authority
quite alien to the haphazard set of notes that constitute the

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book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed
edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus’s
original—the work was entitled “To Himself” (Eis
heauton). This is no more likely than Meditations to be the
original title, though it is at least a somewhat more accurate
description of the work.
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In fact, it seems unlikely that Marcus himself gave the
work any title at all, for the simple reason that he did not
think of it as an organic whole in the first place. Not only
was it not written for publication, but Marcus clearly had no
expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. The
entries include a number of cryptic references to persons or
events that an ancient reader would have found as
unintelligible as we do. While a contemporary might have
recognized some of the figures mentioned in Meditations
8.25 or 12.27, for example, no ancient reader could have
known what was in the letter that Rusticus wrote from
Sinuessa (1.7), what Antoninus said to the customs agent at
Tusculum (1.16), or what happened to Marcus at Caieta
(1.17). Elsewhere Marcus reflects directly on his role as
emperor, in terms that would be quite irrelevant to anyone
else. We find him worrying about the dangers of becoming
“imperialized” (6.30), reminding himself to speak simply in
the Senate (8.30), and reflecting on the unique position he
occupies (11.7). From these entries and others it seems clear
that the “you” of the text is not a generic “you,” but the
emperor himself. “When you look at yourself, see any of the

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emperors” (10.31).
How are we to categorize the Meditations? It is not a
diary, at least in the conventional sense. The entries contain
little or nothing related to Marcus’s day-to-day life: few
names, no dates and, with two exceptions, no places. It also
lacks the sense of audience—the reader over one’s shoulder
—that tends to characterize even the most secretive diarist.
Some scholars have seen it as the basis for an unwritten
larger treatise, like Pascal’s Pensées or the notebooks of
Joseph Joubert. Yet the notes are too repetitive and, in a
philosophical sense, too elementary for that. The entries
perhaps bear a somewhat closer resemblance to the working
notes of a practicing philosopher: Wittgenstein’s Zettel, say,
or the Cahiers of Simone Weil. Yet here, too, there is a
significant difference. The Meditations is not tentative and
exploratory, like the notes of Wittgenstein or Weil, and it
contains little or nothing that is original. It suggests not a
mind recording new perceptions or experimenting with new
arguments, but one obsessively repeating and reframing ideas
long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.
Perhaps the best description of the entries is that suggested
by the French scholar Pierre Hadot. They are “spiritual
exercises” composed to provide a momentary stay against the
stress and confusion of everyday life: a self-help book in the
most literal sense. A revealing comment in this context is