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

Meditations 5.9, where Marcus reminds himself “not to think

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of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg
white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment.” On
this reading, the individual entries were composed not as a
record of Marcus’s thoughts or to enlighten others, but for his
own use, as a means of practicing and reinforcing his own
philosophical convictions. Such an interpretation accounts
for several aspects of the entries that would otherwise be
puzzling. It explains the predominance of the imperative in
the text; its purpose is not to describe or reflect (let alone to
“meditate”), but to urge, direct, and exhort.
7
And it explains
also the repetitiveness that strikes any reader of the work
almost immediately—the continual circling back to the same
few problems. The entries do not present new answers or
novel solutions to these problems, but only familiar answers
reframed. It was precisely this process of reframing and
reexpressing that Marcus found helpful.
The recognition that the entries are as much process as
product also accounts for the shapelessness and apparent
disorder of the work. We do not know by whom or on what
basis the individual books of the Meditations were arranged;
the order may be chronological, or partly chronological, or
wholly arbitrary. The arrangement of the individual entries
may or may not be Marcus’s own, though its very
randomness suggests that it goes back to the author (a later
editor would have been tempted to group together
thematically similar entries, and perhaps to tie up some of the
more obvious loose ends). Nor can we always be sure where

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individual entries begin and end; in some cases this is a
question Marcus himself might not have been able to
answer.
8
A special position is occupied by Book 1, which is
distinguished from the rest of the work by its
autobiographical nature and by the greater impression of
conscious design and ordering apparent in it. It consists of
seventeen entries in which Marcus reflects on what he
learned from various individuals in his life, either directly or
from their example (hence the title I have given the section
here, “Debts and Lessons,” which has no warrant in the
transmitted text). The entries roughly mirror the chronology
of Marcus’s early life, from his older relatives to his
teachers to his adopted father, Antoninus, and ultimately to
the gods.
9
This logical schema, as well as the increasing
length of the entries, suggests deliberate arrangement,
presumably by Marcus himself. If so, then this book, at least,
was conceived as an organic whole. It may be among the
latest portions of the text, if scholars are correct in thinking
(as most do) that the short sketch of Antoninus Pius in
Meditations 6.30 was the starting point for the longer
memoir in 1.16.
Attempts to find organic unity in the remaining books or
development from book to book are doomed to failure.
Wherever one opens the Meditations (with the exception of

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Book 1) we find the same voice, the same themes; Marcus’s
thought does not change or develop noticeably from one book
to another. Nor can any structure or unity be discerned within
individual books. It seems most likely that the division
between books is a purely physical one. The transmitted
“books,” in other words, represent the individual papyrus
rolls of Marcus’s original, or perhaps of a later copy. When
one had been filled, another was begun.
10
If the books as a whole are homogenous, the individual
entries show considerable formal variety. Some are
developed short essays that make a single philosophical
point; many of the entries in Books 2 and 3 are of this type.
Others are straightforward imperatives (“Take the shortest
route . . .”) or aphorisms (“no one can keep you from living
in harmony with yourself”). Sometimes Marcus will list a
number of basic principles in catalogue format (“remember
that . . . and that . . . and that . . .”). Elsewhere he puts
forward an analogy, sometimes with the point of comparison
left to be inferred. Thus human lives are like “many lumps of
incense on the same altar” (4.15) or like “a rock thrown in
the air” (9.17). In other cases the analogy will be made
explicit: “Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot . . . ?
That’s what we do to ourselves . . . when we rebel against
what happens to us” (8.34). Others present a kind of formal
meditative exercise, as when Marcus instructs himself to
imagine the age of Vespasian (4.32) or Augustus’s court
(8.31) and then to compare the imagined scene with that of

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his own time. Portions of two books (7 and 11) consist
simply of quotations. Some entries appear to be rough drafts
for others; several of the raw quotations from tragedies in
Book 7 are incorporated in the much more polished