9781945186240

special mention: Matthew Arnold’s “Marcus Aurelius” (originally a review
of Long’s translation) in his Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H.
Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), and Joseph
Brodsky’s “Homage to Marcus Aurelius” in his collection On Grief and
Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Karen Schwabach read through an initial draft of the translation and
suggested numerous improvements, for which I am deeply grateful. For
help of various sorts I am also indebted to Deborah DeMania, Gregory
Gelburd, Krista Kane, Charles Mathewes, Katherine Odell, Hayden
Pelliccia, Ellyn Schumacher, and Alphonse Vinh. My colleagues in the
Department of Classics at the University of Virginia, and in particular my
department chair, John Miller, made it possible for me to take course relief
during the fall semester of 2001, when much of the work was completed.
Thanks are due finally to my editor, Will Murphy, for his patience and
enthusiasm for this project.
INTRODUCTION NOTES
1. In this larger sense, rather than attempting to translate it, I have
generally left it simply as “(the) logos.” I hope that readers who have
assimilated such terms as “karma” and “the Tao” will be prepared to
welcome this one too.
2. So, too, some modern physicists have imagined a series of
universes produced by an alternation of expansions and contractions
—“big bangs” and “big crunches.”
3. Ramsay Macmullen, Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 48.
4. Earlier translators have been driven to clumsy equivalents such as
“Guiding Reason.” I have generally rendered it “mind,” as being perhaps
the least unsatisfactory English equivalent.
5. Two examples are worth pointing to. Marcus finds the gladiatorial
combat and the brutal executions of the arena a source of tedium (6.46);
that they might be morally wrong seems never to have occurred to him.