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

Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). E.
Champlin’s Fronto and Antonine Rome (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980) is the best modern study of
Marcus’s teacher. Glen Bowersock’s Greek Sophists in the
Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) is a
fundamental study of intellectual culture in the second
century. Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World

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(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977) is an
exhaustive analysis of the civil and administrative functions
performed 
by 
Marcus 
and 
his 
fellow 
emperors,
complemented for military matters by J. B. Campbell’s The
Emperor and the Roman Army (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984).
Most of the major ancient sources for Marcus and his
world are conveniently printed with facing-page English
translations in the Loeb Classical Library. The valuable but
highly unreliable life of Marcus in the Historia Augusta can
be found in the three volumes of Scriptores Historiae
Augustae, trans. D. Magie (1921–1932), as well as in A.
Birley, trans., Lives of the Later Caesars (New York:
Penguin, 1976). The Loeb series also includes the letters of
Fronto, trans. C. R. Haines (2 volumes, 1919); and of the
historian Dio Cassius, trans. E. Cary (9 volumes, 1914–
1927, of which the last two are relevant to Marcus).
Although composed and collected a generation before
Marcus’s birth, the Letters of Pliny the Younger,  trans. Betty
Radice (2 volumes, 1969), are a rich and illuminating source
for upper-class society in the mid-empire. Insight into the
intellectual life of the period can be gained from the Attic
Nights of the antiquarian Aulus Gellius, trans. J. C. Rolfe (3
volumes, 1927), the works of the satirist Lucian, trans. A. M.
Harmon, K. Kilburn and M. D. MacLeod (8 volumes, 1913–
1967), and Philostratus’s entertaining Lives of the Sophists,
trans. W. C. Wright (1921). Finally, mention should be made

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of two modern novels set in the Antonine period, Walter
Pater ’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Marguerite
Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Neither should be
mistaken for a primary source, but each is, in its different
way, a masterpiece.
Recent work on Hellenistic philosophy has done much to
illuminate the philosophical background of the Meditations.
A clear and helpful introduction to both Stoicism and
Epicureanism can be found in A. A. Long, Hellenistic
Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1974); on a much larger
scale is Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes and Jaap Mansfeld,
eds., The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On
Stoicism see also F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1975), and J. Rist, Stoic Philosophy
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969). The
works of the two most important Stoics, Zeno and
Chrysippus, are largely lost; their surviving fragments are
translated in the first volume of A. A. Long and David
S e d l e y, The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), which also includes
much material on Epicureanism. An important source for the
history of both schools is Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the
Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, in the Loeb series (2
volumes, 1925).
13
For Stoicism under the empire, the most important sources

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are the works of Seneca the Younger and Epictetus. The best
introduction to Seneca is probably the Letters to Lucilius, of
which a selection is available in Letters from a Stoic, trans.
R. Campbell (New York: Penguin, 1969). Epictetus’s
Discourses and the Encheiridion are available in the Loeb
series in a translation by W. A. Oldfather (2 volumes, 1925).
T h e Encheiridion has also been translated by T. W.
Higginson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955).
For the Meditations itself the indispensable resource
(though long out of print and difficult to obtain) is A.S.L.
Farquharson’s The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus
Antoninus, 2 vols. (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press,
1944). I have derived benefit from a number of earlier
English translations, notably those of Farquharson (recently
reprinted with a new introduction by R. B. Rutherford);
George Long (1862); C. R. Haines (Loeb, 1916); G.M.A.
Grube (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) and Maxwell
Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), as well as from W.
Theiler’s German translation (Zurich: Artemis, 1951) and the
French edition of Book 1 by Pierre Hadot (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1998). The best modern edition of the Greek text is
that by J. Dalfen (2d ed., B. G. Teubner, 1987), though in
vexed passages I have sometimes preferred different
readings.
Among scholarly studies of the Meditations, three in