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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
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 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.” 12
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 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: