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

Meditations was among the favorite reading of Frederick the
Great; a recent American president has claimed to reread it
every few years. But it has attracted others too, from poets
like Pope, Goethe, and Arnold to the southern planter
William Alexander 
Percy, 
who 
observed 
in 
his
autobiography that “there is left to each of us, no matter how
far defeat pierces, the unassailable wintry kingdom of
Marcus Aurelius. . . . It is not outside, but within, and when
all is lost, it stands fast.”
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If Marcus has been studied less than many ancient authors,
he has been translated more than most. But it has been a
generation since his last English incarnation, and the time
seems ripe for another attempt. My intention in what follows
has been to represent in readable English both the content
and the texture of the Meditations. I have been especially
concerned to convey the patchwork character of the original,
both the epigrammatic concision that characterizes some
entries and the straggling discursiveness of others. I hope the
results will bear out my conviction that what a Roman
emperor wrote long ago for his own use can still be
meaningful to those far removed from him in time and space.
We do not live in Marcus’s world, but it is not as remote
from us as we sometimes imagine. There could be no better

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witness to the effect of the Meditations on a modern reader
than the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose essay “Homage
to Marcus Aurelius” takes its departure from the famous
statue of the emperor on the Capitoline hill in Rome:
I saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the
company of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one
of the most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was
leaving Rome for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed
one wishes for one’s funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to
stop, paid, and got out of the car. . . . Presently I discovered I was not alone:
a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of nowhere and quietly sat down a
couple of feet away. Its sudden presence was so oddly comforting that
momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes. . . . For a while we
both stared at the horseman’s statue. . . . And suddenly—presumably
because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michelangelo’s pilasters and
arches—all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of any
geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of this place;
but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze
progress.
F
URTHER 
R
EADING
The standard modern biography of Marcus is A. R. Birley,
Marcus Aurelius  (1966; rev. ed., New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1987), which makes full use of the
principal ancient literary sources—not only the Meditations
(especially Book 1), but the remains of the history of Dio
Cassius, the letters of Fronto and the biography of Marcus in

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the so-called Historia Augusta. Birley also draws on recent
research into the careers of upper-class officeholders
(prosopography) and the workings of the imperial
administration to paint a picture of Marcus’s background and
the society he moved in.
The most comprehensive and reliable treatment of the
Antonine age can be found in the Cambridge Ancient
History, volume XI, The High Empire, A.D. 70–192
(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Edward Gibbon’s
famous characterization of the period in the opening chapters
of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
remains well worth reading, although the picture it paints
may be too rosy-colored. A useful counterbalance is E. R.
Do d d s , Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1965),
which offers a very different assessment of the period.
Treatments of special topics abound, and only a few titles
can be mentioned. The upper-class education that Marcus
enjoyed is described by S. F. Bonner, Education in Ancient