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

part of the continual change that forms the world. At other
points it is the ultimate consolation. “Soon you will be
dead,” Marcus tells himself on a number of occasions, “and
none of it will matter” (cf. 4.6, 7.22, 8.2). The emphasis on
the vanity and worthlessness of earthly concerns is here
linked to the more general idea of transience. All things
change or pass away, perish and are forgotten. This is the
burden of several of the thought exercises that Marcus sets
himself: to think of the court of Augustus (8.31), of the age of
Vespasian or Trajan (4.32), the great philosophers and
thinkers of the past (6.47)—all now dust and ashes.

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This theme is not specific to Stoicism. We meet it at every
turn in ancient literature. Marcus himself quotes the famous
passage in Book 6 of Homer’s Iliad in which the lives of
mortals are compared to leaves that grow in the spring,
flourish for a season and then fall and die, to be replaced by
others (10.34). He would have recognized the sentiment in
other writers too, from the melancholy Greek lyric poet
Mimnermus, who develops and expands on Homer’s simile,
to the Roman lawyer Servius Sulpicius, writing to his friend
Cicero on the death of the latter’s daughter:
I want to share with you something that brought me not a little consolation, in
hopes that it might have the same effect on you. On my way back from Asia,
on the voyage from Aegina to Megara, I gazed at the lands we passed.
Aegina was behind me, Megara before me, Piraeus on the starboard side,
Corinth to port—towns which flourished once upon a time, and now lie fallen
and in ruins before our eyes—and I said to myself, “Alas! . . . and will you,
Servius, not restrain your grief and recall that you were born a mortal?”
Believe me, the thought was no small consolation to me.
This is not a point modern grief counselors would be
inclined to dwell on, but it is one that Marcus would have
understood perfectly, and its appeal to him casts light on both
his character and his background. Marcus may have been a
Stoic, but he was also a Roman, influenced not only by Zeno
and Chrysippus but by Homer and Vergil. Vergil is nowhere
mentioned in the Meditations, and in a Greek work could

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hardly be quoted or alluded to, but there is a note of
melancholy that runs through the work that one can only call
Vergilian.
Other concerns surface as well. A number of entries
discuss methods of dealing with pain or bodily weakness of
other sorts. “When you have trouble getting out of bed . . .”
begin several entries (5.1, 8.12). A persistent motif is the
need to restrain anger and irritation with other people, to put
up with their incompetence or malice, to show them the
errors of their ways. Several entries focus on the frustrations
of life at court, nowhere more present than when Marcus tells
himself to stop complaining about them (8.9). He contrasts
the court against philosophy as a stepmother against a mother
—to be visited out of duty, but not someone we can really
love (6.12). Yet the court need not be an obstacle: it can be a
challenge, even an opportunity. One can lead a good life
anywhere, even at court, as Antoninus showed (5.16, 1.16).
“No role [is] so well suited to philosophy,” Marcus tells
himself, “as the one you happen to be in right now” (11.7).
A more subtle clue to Marcus’s personality is the imagery
that he prefers. It is worth noting, for example, how many
images of nature occur in the Meditations. Many readers
have been struck by Meditations 3.2, with its evocation of
“nature’s inadvertence” in baking bread or ripening figs,
olives, and stalks of wheat. Metaphors and offhand
comparisons in other entries evoke the pastoral and

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agricultural rhythms of the Mediterranean world, with its
flocks, herds, and vines, its seasons of sowing and
harvesting, its grapes drying slowly into raisins. Some of
these may be stock examples, but even a stock example can
be revealing. One can hardly read a page of Plato without
tripping over the helmsmen, doctors, shoemakers, and other
craftsmen who populated ancient Athens; such figures are
much rarer in Marcus. The image of society as a tree whose
branches are individual human beings expresses an important
Stoic principle, but the image is developed further than one
might expect and informed by what might be personal
observation: “You can see the difference between the branch
that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree
and growing with it, and the one that’s been cut off and
grafted back.”
Affection for the natural world contrasts with a persistent
sense of disgust and contempt for human life and other human
beings—a sense that it is difficult to derive from (or even
reconcile with) Stoicism. As P. A. Brunt puts it, “Reason
told Marcus that the world was good beyond improvement,
and yet it constantly appeared to him evil beyond remedy.”
The courtiers who surround him are vain and obsequious,
while the people he deals with on a daily basis are
“meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and
surly” (2.1). One of the most frequently recurring points in
the Meditations is the reminder that human beings are social
animals, as if this was a point Marcus had a particularly hard

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time accepting. The gods care for mortals, he reminds
himself, “and you—on the verge of death—you still refuse to
care for them.”
There is a persistent strain of pessimism in the work. “The
things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs
snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and
then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice,
truth—‘gone from the earth and only found in heaven.’ Why
are you still here?” (5.33). Images of dirt appear in several
entries. The world around us resembles the baths: “oil,
sweat, dirt, grayish water, all of it disgusting” (8.24). If
Marcus contemplates the stars, he does so only in order to
“wash off the mud of life below” (7.47). And the objective
analysis Marcus prizes often shades over into a depressing
cynicism (in the modern sense of the term). “Disgust at what
things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth. Or marble as
hardened dirt, gold and silver as residues, clothes as hair,
purple dye as shellfish blood. And all the rest” (9.36). The
human body itself is no more than “rotting meat in a bag”
(8.38). “[D]espise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of
bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries” (2.2).
Perhaps the most depressing entry in the entire work is the
one in which Marcus urges himself to cultivate an
indifference to music (11.2).
As one scholar has observed, “reading the Meditations for
long periods can be conducive of melancholy.” And even

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those who love the book cannot deny that there is something
impoverishing about the view of human life it presents.
Matthew Arnold, whose essay on the work reveals a deep
respect and affection for Marcus, identified the central
shortcoming of his philosophy as its failure to make any
allowance for joy, and I think this is a fair criticism. Marcus
does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a
means of resisting pain. The Stoicism of the Meditations is
fundamentally a defensive philosophy; it is noteworthy how
many military images recur, from references to the soul as
being “posted” or “stationed” to the famous image of the
mind as an invulnerable fortress (8.48). Such images are not
unique to Marcus, but one can imagine that they might have
had special meaning for an emperor whose last years were
spent in “warfare and a journey far from home ” (2.17). For
Marcus, life was a battle, and often it must have seemed—
what in some sense it must always be—a losing battle.
There are also a handful of points in the text where we
have glimpses of a different frame of mind, most obviously
when Marcus refers to the gods. From a Stoic perspective, of
course, “God” or “the gods” (the terms are used
interchangeably by many ancient writers) are merely
conventional terms for what we might equally well call
“nature” or “the logos” or “Providence,” or simply “how
things are.” Marcus stresses the benevolence of this power
(what is divine must be good, surely?), but it is clear that he
also ascribes to its actions the implacability with which

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orthodox Stoic doctrine endows it. It is not easy to see why
one should pray to a power whose decisions one can hardly
hope to influence, and indeed Marcus several times seems to
admit the possibility that one should not (5.7, 6.44, 9.40).
It is all the more surprising, then, to find Marcus
elsewhere suggesting a more personal concern on the gods’