Marcus Aurelius

The Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (b. 121–d. 180) wrote a series of philosophical reflections that are best known in the English-speaking world under the title Meditations. In the Meditations Marcus reflects on a range of philosophical topics as well as challenges in his own life. The book is unlike any other philosophical text that has come down to us from Antiquity, taking the form of a collection of notebook jottings that were probably never intended for wider circulation. With the exception of Book 1, which reflects on Marcus’s debts to various people that have been important in his life, the remaining eleven books of philosophical and personal reflections are in no particular order and display no obvious structure. Many of the philosophical positions that Marcus holds, and the arguments underpinning them, remain unstated but various remarks in the text and elsewhere (especially Marcus’s correspondence with his rhetoric tutor Fronto) make it clear that Marcus was committed to Stoicism. The Meditations contains numerous examples of someone trying to respond to problems in everyday life in the light of not just Stoic ethics but also Stoic physics and Stoic logic.

For a brief but informative introduction to Marcus Aurelius see Kamtekar 2010. An older and slightly longer introduction, highly recommended, can be found in Brunt 1974. Hadot et al 1998 offers an important and philosophically rich reading of the Meditations. Giavatto 2008 and van Ackeren 2011 both offer thorough scholarly studies, in Italian and German respectively. The collection of studies in van Ackeren 2012 covers many important topics and is accessible. For an annotated guide to further work on Marcus see Sellars 2015.