Journaling with Marcus Aurelius

Here is the strangest fact about the most famous book of Stoic philosophy: it was never meant to be read. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are not a treatise. They are a private notebook — the diary of the most powerful man in the world, writing to himself, at night, in an army camp on the frozen frontier, trying to talk his own soul into behaving.

That is why it still helps people two thousand years later. There is no system to master, no argument to follow. There is a tired, decent man reminding himself of the same few things over and over, because he keeps forgetting them: that other people will be difficult and you must be patient; that you cannot control events, only your response to them; that you will die, so do not waste the day you have on anger and vanity. He is not preaching. He is coaching himself — and, by accident, us.

Read the Meditations not as a book to finish but as a practice to keep: a page in the morning, a single thought carried into the day. It is the original of every self-examination journal, written by an emperor who found that power solves nothing the soul has to solve for itself.

For the ancient world that formed him, see our essay on Plutarch’s Lives.

Read Meditations — the Erato Press edition →