9781945186240

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’ 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 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 latefourth-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