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Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

 
“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.”
 
“Love nothing but that which comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny. For what could more aptly fit your needs?”
 
“Everything—a horse, a vine—is created for some duty. This is nothing to wonder at: even the sun-god himself will tell you, ‘This is a work I am here to do,’ and so will all the other sky-dwellers. For what task, then, were you yourself created? For pleasure? Can such a thought be tolerated?”
 
 
In a nutshell
Don’t get caught up in trivia or pettiness; appreciate your life within a larger context.
 
 
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was emperor of Rome from 161AD until his death 19 years later. By the time he came to power, Rome was under threat: constant warring with “barbarians” on the frontier, disease brought back by soldiers, pestilence, and even earthquakes. Try to imagine the President of the United States being so philosophical in the midst of such crises. Yet despite the circumstances, after his death Marcus Aurelius would come to be idealized by the Romans as the perfect emperor, a genuine philosopher-king who provided the last real nobility of rule before the savagery of his son Com- modus’ reign and the anarchy of the third century.
 
A student of Stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius refused to be made miserable by the difficulties of life. Stoicism was a Greek school of thought originating around 300BC. In simple terms, it taught that sub- mission to the law of the universe was how human beings should live, and emphasized duty, avoidance of pleasure, reason, and fearlessness of death. Stoics would also have full responsibility for their actions, independence of mind, and pursue the greater good over their own. The emperor would have been comfortable with today’s United Nations and other world bodies that stand for cooperative effort: Stoics had an international outlook and believed in universal brotherhood. As well as the world, the thoughts of the Stoics spanned time, as this excerpt from the Meditations demonstrates:
 
“All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion. Even to men whose lives were a blaze of glory this comes to pass; as to the rest, the breath is hardly out of them before, in Homer’s words, they are ‘lost to sight alike and hearsay’. What, after all, is immortal fame? An empty, hollow thing. To what, then, must we aspire? This, and this alone: the just thought, the unselfish act, the tongue that utters no falsehood, the temper that greets each passing event as something pre- destined, expected, and emanating from the One source and origin.”
 
This was written over 19 centuries ago, yet it is somehow even more relevant when we know how ancient it is. Marcus Aurelius’ life itself bears the statement out; not many now will have cause to remember his skill or otherwise as a leader, but his Meditations, quiet thoughts written by firelight in the midst of campaigns, live on in hearts and minds.
The Meditations are alive with perceptiveness about the basic unity of all things in the universe, including its people. They tell us that the effort to see through another’s eyes is nothing less than an expansion of one’s world—and a unifying of it. To despise, avoid, or judge a person is simply an obstruction of Nature’s law. The realization that to move human relations to a higher level we must do the opposite of these things formed the basis of the emperor’s thought.
On every page of the Meditations is this theme of accepting things and people how they are, not how we would like them to be. There is sadness in this view, as the following brief comment suggests: “You may break your heart, but men still go on as before.” One does get the impression of reading the thoughts of a lonely man, but then Marcus Aurelius’ ability to see life objectively saved him from any real disillusionment:
 
“Be like the headland against which the waves break and break: it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest. ‘How unlucky I am, that this should have happened to me!’ By no means; say, rather, ‘How lucky I am that this has left me with no bitterness; unshaken by the present, and undismayed by the future.’”
 
The great worth of Stoic philosophy is its ability to help put things into perspective so you can remember the things that matter; the Meditations is, if you like, an ancient and noble Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. The person who can see the world as it really is also carries the ability to see beyond that world. We are here and we have a job to do, but there is a feeling that we came from another place, and will eventually go back to it. Life can be sad and lonely, seemingly one thing after another, but this should never dull our basic wonder at our existence in the universe:
 
“Survey the circling stars, as though you yourself were mid-course with them. Often picture the changing and rechanging dance of the elements. Visions of this kind purge away the dross of our earth-bound life.”
 
 
 

Final comments

We make of the fact that Marcus Aurelius was the father of Commodus, whose accession and brutal reign broke the tradition of non-hereditary kingship? If the philosopher was such a great man, how could he have fathered such a brute?
The Meditations is not just another self-help book with easy answers—its very theme is imperfection. We can never know exactly why things happen, why people act the way they do, but it is not up to us to judge anyway; there is a larger meaning to events and lives that escapes us. This knowledge itself is a comfort.
This is a short book that is a source of sanity in a mad world, and today’s reader will also love the beautiful prose that makes it stand out against modern philosophical and self-help writings (Maxwell Stani- forth’s translation is particularly good). Buy a copy and you will make use of it for life.
 
 

Marcus Aurelius

When Hadrian, one of Rome’s most successful emperors, died in 138AD, he appointed as his successor Antoninus Pius, who in turn, on Hadrian’s instructions, adopted the 17-year-old Marcus Aurelius as his successor. The young man’s future was confirmed when he was married to Faustina, a daughter of Antoninus Pius. As well as carrying out courtly duties, he devoted himself to the study of law and philosophy. Taking power at age 40, Aurelius voluntarily divided rule with his brother Lucius Verus, who was to die eight years later.
Though peaceful by nature, Aurelius was forced continually to defend the Empire’s territories against the Germanic tribes, including the Marcomanni and the Quadi. A single manuscript, now lost, is the source of the Meditations. Marcus Aurelius had never intended that it be published. The year 155y saw its first printing, almost 14 centuries after the emperor’s death in 180. While Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator portrays the emperor being murdered by Commodus, there is no historical evidence for this.
The Bigger Picture >Meditations
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