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

part. The final entry of Book 1 is the most obvious example.
Here Marcus indicates that the gods have aided him quite
directly “through their gifts, their help, their inspiration,” just
as they have others (cf. 9.11). Their help is curiously
concrete. Among the things for which they are thanked are
“remedies granted through dreams,” including “the one at
Caieta” (1.17; the text is uncertain). The gods also assist
other people, he reminds himself, “just as they do you—by
signs and dreams and every other way” (9.27). That Marcus
himself did believe deeply in the gods, not merely as a figure
of speech but as a real force in his own life, is suggested by
his refutation of those who doubt their existence: “I know the
gods exist. . . .—from having felt their power, over and
over” (12.28). How was this personal relationship with the
divine to be reconciled with the impersonal logos of the
Stoics? The question seems to be played out in the dialogue
at Meditations 9.40. “But those are things the gods left up to
me,” protests one voice, to which another responds, “And
what makes you think the gods don’t care about what’s up to
us?” Marcus himself may not have fully recognized or
acknowledged this conflict, but its existence may point to a

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half-conscious awareness that the answer Stoicism offered
was not in every respect satisfactory.
Later Influence
How or by whom the Meditations was preserved is
unknown. The late-fourth-century Historia Augusta paints a
picture of Marcus lecturing on the Meditations to a
spellbound audience at Rome—one of the charming fantasies
in which that peculiar work abounds, but certainly an
invention. The passage does suggest, however, that the text
was in circulation by the fourth century, when it is also
mentioned by the orator Themistius. It was very likely
familiar also to a contemporary of Themistius’s, the neo-
pagan emperor Julian (known to later ages as Julian the
Apostate), in whose dialogue “The Caesars” Marcus is
pictured as a model for the kind of philosopher-king that
Julian himself aspired to be.
The century that followed Themistius and Julian was one
of decline, at least in the West—decline in political
institutions, and also in the knowledge of Greek. For the next
thousand years Marcus’s work, like that of Homer and
Euripides, would remain unknown to Western readers.
Copies survived in the Greek-speaking East, of course, but
even there the Meditations seems to have been little read.
For centuries, all trace of it is lost, until at the beginning of

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the tenth century it reappears in a letter from the scholar and
churchman Arethas, who writes to a friend, “I have had for a
while now a copy of the Emperor Marcus’s invaluable book.
It was not only old but practically coming apart. . . . I have
had it copied and can now pass it on to posterity in better
shape.” Whether Arethas’s copy was indeed responsible for
the work’s survival we do not know. At any rate, its
readership seems to have increased in the centuries that
followed. It is quoted a generation or two later by the vast
Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, and it was
perhaps around this period also that an unknown Byzantine
poet composed a brief appreciation that came to be copied
along with the text:
O
N THE 
B
OOK OF 
M
ARCUS
If you desire to master pain
Unroll this book and read with care,
And in it find abundantly
A knowledge of the things that are,
Those that have been, and those to come.
And know as well that joy and grief
Are nothing more than empty smoke.

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The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to an
exodus of scholars, bringing with them the Greek texts that
inspired the Italian Renaissance. The Meditations must have
been among them. Yet even at this date the work’s survival
hung by a thread. The only complete manuscript to survive is
a fourteenth-century codex (now in the Vatican), which is
riddled with errors. The first printed edition did not appear
until 1559, when Wilhelm Holzmann (known as Xylander)
produced a text from what seems to have been a more
reliable manuscript. That manuscript, unfortunately, has not
survived. But even at its best it was a very imperfect witness
to what Marcus himself wrote. Our text of the Meditations
contains a number of passages that are garbled or in which
one or more crucial words seem to have been omitted. Some
of these errors may be due to the confused state of Marcus’s
original copy. Others may have been accidentally introduced
in the course of the copying and recopying that the work
underwent in the millennium following Marcus’s death. In
some cases the informed guesswork of scholars over several
centuries has been able to restore the original text. In others,
there is still uncertainty.
11
The Meditations has never attracted great interest from
professional students of the classics, and the reasons are
perhaps understandable. It contains few direct references to
historical events and provides relatively little material for
social historians. As evidence for later Stoicism it pales

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beside the greater bulk of Epictetus’s Discourses. Yet it has
always exerted a fascination on those outside the narrow
orbit of classical study, perhaps especially on those who can
best appreciate the pressures that Marcus himself faced. The