A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of the notebook that Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to 180, kept for himself in Greek. It is made directly from the Greek, and no earlier English version was used as its basis; the public-domain translations of George Long (1862) and Meric Casaubon (1634) were looked at only where the sense of the Greek is in doubt. The source is the text edited by J. H. Leopold (Oxford, 1908), in the digital transcription published by the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.

The manuscripts head the work Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, “to himself.” The English title, Meditations, is the one by which the book has long been known. Its twelve books and the chapter numbers within them come from later editors, not from Marcus, and both are kept. Long chapters are divided where Leopold divides them, and each of the 533 paragraphs that result appears here as one paragraph. Two short notes of place, at the end of Books One and Two, stand on their own lines as they do in the manuscripts.

Marcus speaks to himself as “you,” to remind rather than to instruct. The English keeps his second person, his commands, his clipped notes and his long arguments, and avoids the cadence of a sermon. Book One has no verbs in the Greek (“From my grandfather Verus: decency and an even temper”), and the English keeps that form.

The key words of his Stoic vocabulary are rendered the same way throughout. The hēgemonikon, the part of the soul that judges, assents, and moves to act, is “the ruling center”; the daimōn is “the spirit within”; logos is “reason,” phantasia “impression,” hypolēpsis “judgment,” dogmata “principles,” koinōnikos “social.” Where the Greek is damaged, a gap is marked ⟨…⟩ and words supplied by editors stand in the same brackets.

Names are given in their usual English forms, and the spelling is American. The 115 notes are the translator’s. They identify people, quotations, and damaged passages, and offer no commentary.