Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Marcus Aurelius

Description

The private notebook of a Roman emperor has become, after two thousand years, the handbook of the thinking life. The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius — the book we variously call the Meditations — was never intended for publication. It is a journal kept by the most powerful man in the world to school his own character, written in Greek, in the intervals of the wars and the plague and the endless business of empire. That privacy is precisely its authority: here is a sovereign arguing with himself about the futility of praise, the shortness of fame, and the duty of patience toward fools.

The book belongs to Stoicism, the great Roman school of self-command, but Marcus’s Stoicism is a lived one. He measures every precept by the question of how to act in the morning, in the council chamber, at the bedside of a dying child. The aphorisms have the quality of stone worn smooth by centuries of use, and they are quoted — by soldiers, by philosophers, by presidents, by anyone who has faced a badly-run world — more than almost any other pagan text.

This edition follows the classic translation chosen for its fidelity and its flowing Victorian clarity, and it is framed by the biographical and philosophical essays that place the emperor and his school in history, along with a full index of the text’s terms.

Why readers still come back to it

• Timeless, practical wisdom: the ancestor of every modern self-help book.
• A portrait of power trying to stay honest, with rare shapeliness of thought.
• The perfect stopping-place for anyone entering Stoicism for the first time.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader, so the aphorisms can be opened at any page and still reward.