Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

At a later stage he would have been handed over to private tutors to be introduced to literature, especially, no doubt, Vergil’s great epic, the Aeneid. But literature served only as a preparation for the real goal. This was rhetoric, the key to an active political career under the empire, as it had been under the Republic.

Marcus would have read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedies of Euripides side by side with the Aeneid, and studied the speeches of the great Athenian orator Demosthenes as intensively as those of the Roman statesman Cicero. It was Greek writers and artists who constituted the intellectual elite at the capital;

That Marcus composed his own Meditations in Greek is natural enough.

Hadrian’s death the following year left Marcus first in line for the throne. His education and that of the younger Verus were now matters of still greater concern, and it is clear that no expense was spared.

But the two poles that would govern the remainder of his life—the court and philosophy—seem by this point to be fully established. There is no evidence that Marcus experienced anything like the “conversion” to philosophy that some ancient figures experienced (or affected), but it is clear that by the middle to late 140s philosophy was becoming increasingly central to his life.

Born in 121, so n his 20s.Main point that philosophy was baked into him through education

Christianity had been illegal since the early second century when a query from Pliny the Younger (then governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor) prompted the emperor Trajan to establish a formal policy: While Christians were not to be sought out, those who confessed to the faith were to be executed.

Rome still remembered the catastrophe of A.D. 9, when the Roman general Varus and three legions had marched into the forests of Germany, never to return.

The composition of the Meditations is normally dated to the 170s—Marcus’s last decade. That this was a dark and stressful period for him can hardly be doubted. In the ten years between 169 and 179 he had to cope with constant fighting on the frontier, the abortive revolt of Cassius, and the deaths of his colleague Verus; his wife, Faustina; and others.

~50 while writing Meditations

But philosophy also had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a “design for living”—a set of rules to live one’s life by. This

Of the doctrines central to the Stoic worldview, perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way. More specifically, it is controlled and directed by an all-pervading force that the Stoics designated by the term logos.

Can summarize these next 3 into one point, summary of Stoicism outlook

All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Stoicism is thus from the outset a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility. In

According to this theory, man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged. In the same way, humans are responsible for their choices and actions, even though these have been anticipated by the logos and form part of its plan.

Looking back on the rapid Hellenization of the Roman aristocracy between 200 B.C. and his own day, the poet Horace famously observed that “conquered Greece was the true conqueror.”

that quote

Nowhere is the influence of Greece more obvious than in philosophy. Greek philosophers, including the Stoics, Panaetius (c. 185–109 B.C.), and Posidonius (c. 135–50 B.C.), visited Rome to lecture. Many spent extended periods there. In the first century B.C. it became the fashion for young upper-class Romans to study in Athens, in an ancient version of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.

Grand tour. Follow the instructors

the major philosophical schools, it was Stoicism that had the greatest appeal. Unlike some other sects, the Stoics had always approved of participation in public life, and this stand struck a chord with the Roman aristocracy, whose code of values placed a premium on political and military activity. Stoicism

In the process it became a rather different version of the philosophy from that taught by Zeno and Chrysippus. Perhaps the most important development was a shift in emphasis, a narrowing of focus. Early and middle Stoicism was a holistic system. It aimed to embrace all knowledge, and its focus was speculative and theoretical. Roman Stoicism, by contrast, was a practical discipline—not an abstract system of thought, but an attitude to life. Partly

Men’s lives are not always consistent with their ideals, and some critics have found it hard to reconcile Seneca’s fabulous wealth and his shameless flattery of Nero with his philosophical views.

that first line

The late Stoicism of Epictetus is a radically stripped-down version of its Hellenistic predecessor, a philosophy which “had learnt much from its competitors and had almost forgotten parts of itself.”

In many cases Marcus’s logic is weak—the logic of the rhetorician, not of the philosopher; it is rare to find a developed chain of reasoning like that in Meditations 4.4.

To him it was ethics that was the basis of the system: “just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others …” (7.67).

first line

It may be worthwhile, however, to draw attention to one pattern of thought that is central to the philosophy of the Meditations (as well as to Epictetus), and that has been identified and documented in detail by Pierre Hadot. This is the doctrine of the three “disciplines”: the disciplines of perception, of action and of the will.

It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.

We were made, Marcus tells us over and over, not for ourselves but for others, and our nature is fundamentally unselfish. In our relationships with others we must work for their collective good, while treating them justly and fairly as individuals.

Marcus, like most of his contemporaries, took it for granted that human society was hierarchical, and this is borne out by the images he uses to describe it. Human society is a single organism, like an individual human body or a tree. But the trunk of the tree is not to be confused with the leaves, or the hands and feet with the head.

Stoicism’s emphasis on the orderliness of the universe implies a similar orderliness and harmony in its parts, and part of its appeal to upper-class Romans may have been that it did not force its adherents to ask difficult questions about the organization of the society they lived in.

accept willingly as natural and proper. Together, the three disciplines constitute a comprehensive approach to life, and in various combinations and reformulations they underlie a large number of the entries in the Meditations.

Marcus Aurelius is often thought of and referred to as the quintessential Stoic. Yet the only explicit reference to Stoicism in the Meditations (5.10) is phrased in curiously distant terms, as if it were merely one school among others.

Only makes one explicit reference to Stoicism, interesting

If he had to be identified with a particular school, that is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would have been not “Stoicism” but simply “philosophy.”

Of the predecessors Marcus invokes, the most important is surely Socrates, the great Athenian thinker who had helped redirect philosophy from a preoccupation with the physical world to a focus on the role of man in society and the nature of human morality.

Marcus quotes Plato repeatedly (especially in Book 7), and Socratic or Platonic elements can be discerned elsewhere too.

“We cannot step twice into the same river,” Heraclitus had said, and we see Marcus expanding on the observation: “Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone” (4.43; and compare 2.17, 6.15).

first quote

“Eat, drink and be merry” was popularly supposed to be the Epicureans’ motto, though Epicurus himself had been quite explicit in identifying pleasure with intellectual contemplation rather than the vulgar enjoyment of food and sex.

Yet the notes are too repetitive and, in a philosophical sense, too elementary for that. The entries perhaps bear a somewhat closer resemblance to the working notes of a practicing philosopher:

It suggests not a mind recording new perceptions or experimenting with new arguments, but one obsessively repeating and reframing ideas long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.

The entries do not present new answers or novel solutions to these problems, but only familiar answers reframed. It was precisely this process of reframing and reexpressing that Marcus found helpful.

What unifies it is the recurrence of a small number of themes that surely reflect Marcus’s own preoccupations. It is the points to which Marcus returns most often that offer the best insight into his character and concerns.

Marcus may have been a Stoic, but he was also a Roman, influenced not only by Zeno and Chrysippus but by Homer and Vergil.

“No role [is] so well suited to philosophy,” Marcus tells himself, “as the one you happen to be in right now” (11.7).

And there is your Philospher King, crowned

“Reason told Marcus that the world was good beyond improvement, and yet it constantly appeared to him evil beyond remedy.”

As one scholar has observed, “reading the Meditations for long periods can be conducive of melancholy.” And even those who love the book cannot deny that there is something impoverishing about the view of human life it presents.

The Stoicism of the Meditations is fundamentally a defensive philosophy; it is noteworthy how many military images recur, from references to the soul as being “posted” or “stationed” to the famous image of the mind as an invulnerable fortress

For Marcus, life was a battle, and often it must have seemed—what in some sense it must always be—a losing battle.

How or by whom the Meditations was preserved is unknown.

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 dialogue “The Caesars” Marcus is pictured as a model for the kind of philosopher-king that Julian himself aspired to be.

The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to an exodus of scholars, bringing with them the Greek texts that inspired the Italian Renaissance. The Meditations must have been among them.

The only complete manuscript to survive is a fourteenth-century codex (now in the Vatican), which is riddled with errors. The first printed edition did not appear until 1559, when Wilhelm Holzmann (known as Xylander) produced a text from what seems to have been a more reliable manuscript. That manuscript, unfortunately, has not survived.

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.”

Love that last line of quote

But it has been a generation since his last English incarnation, and the time seems ripe for another attempt.

Rule of thumb? A new slice/attempt/view on something if a generation has passed? (Thinking biographies)