A Roman emperor's private notebook became one of history's most-read books
Marcus Aurelius never meant anyone else to read the twelve books of jottings he kept in Greek while ruling Rome and fighting on the Danube frontier. The notes had no title, survived through a crumbling Byzantine copy, and now owe their text chiefly to two manuscripts, one of which has since disappeared.
Marcus ruled from 161 to 180 AD, and much of what we call the Meditations may have been composed at Sirmium, today Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia, where he spent the 170s planning campaigns. His own notes place the first book among the Quadi near the Hron River in present-day Slovakia, and the second at Carnuntum. The entries range from a single line to long paragraphs and do not follow a strict time order.
The ideas are Stoic. A rational order, the logos, runs through everything, and a clear mind lets a person live in step with it. Fame and wealth sit outside our control and so count as neither good nor bad. Others can wound us only if we let our reaction take over. One well-known entry advises sticking to first impressions: hearing that someone speaks ill of you is not the same as being harmed. Another insists that calm, not rage, is the real mark of strength.
How the book survived is a small detective story. Its first certain mention comes from Arethas of Caesarea, a bishop and manuscript collector, who before 907 sent an old copy that was falling apart to an archbishop, having had it recopied. The Suda lexicon, compiled late in the 10th century, is the first source to speak of twelve books and quotes around thirty passages. Greek scholars fleeing Constantinople after 1453 helped bring the text to western Europe.
Wilhelm Xylander produced the first printed edition at Zürich in 1558 or 1559, with a Latin translation, working from a Heidelberg manuscript that is now lost. That lost copy and a damaged 14th-century manuscript in the Vatican, missing about forty-two lines, underpin nearly every modern text. Admirers have ranged from the translator Maxwell Staniforth to Wen Jiabao, who said he had read it a hundred times.
Source: Meditations
