Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Review: The Emperor Who Had to Remind Himself How to Live

Marcus Aurelius ruled one of the most powerful empires in history, commanded armies and could make decisions affecting millions of people. Yet in Meditations he can be found arguing with himself about whether he really has to get out of bed in the morning. In Book 5.1, he acknowledges the attraction of staying warm under the covers before reminding himself that he has work to do. He even appeals to the example of ants, birds and bees getting on with their tasks.

I found that strangely endearing. We tend to imagine a philosopher emperor as someone who has already achieved a level of wisdom and self-discipline beyond the rest of us. Instead, much of Meditations consists of reminders not to be lazy, angry, vain, distracted or unnecessarily troubled by other people. Marcus clearly understood how he ought to behave. Putting that knowledge into practice was another matter.

Having previously read William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life, and with a general interest in Stoicism, I was particularly curious to encounter the reflections of someone for whom the philosophy was a living tradition rather than an ancient practice being adapted to modern needs. What surprised me was how familiar many of the problems seemed, and how foreign some of the explanations remained.

Cover image: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Penguin Classics edition. Used for purposes of review and commentary.

Power and the Fear of Becoming Caesar

Marcus Aurelius ruled from 161 to 180 CE, initially alongside Lucius Verus. His reign was far from the peaceful retirement one might imagine for a philosophical writer. The empire faced the Antonine Plague, warfare on its frontiers and internal political upheaval. He spent years campaigning near the Danube, and at least part of Meditations appears to have been written during those campaigns. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a useful account of both these circumstances and the unusual character of his writings.

Marcus is an obvious candidate when people talk about the benevolent dictator. If absolute power must rest in one pair of hands, a ruler who takes justice, moderation and personal responsibility seriously sounds infinitely preferable to someone driven mainly by vanity or ambition. Unfortunately, there is no reliable way to ensure that people who seek or inherit power will have Marcus’ qualities. Even a thoughtful ruler remains capable of poor decisions, and a Roman emperor's understanding of justice existed within a society built partly on conquest, slavery and profound inequalities. The reputation of the philosopher emperor deserves admiration without turning into sainthood.

One of the most revealing passages is Book 6.30, in which Marcus warns himself against becoming too much of a Caesar: against allowing the office to reshape his character. Here is a man who already possesses extraordinary authority and apparently recognises that authority itself can be morally dangerous. His response is not an elaborate constitutional theory but a personal instruction to remain decent, modest and reasonable.

A ruler's private restraint is an attractive ideal, but it is a precarious basis for government. Marcus could instruct himself to be modest; he could not guarantee that whoever followed him would do the same. This is where Churchill’s 1947 defence of democracy as the least bad among tried systems becomes relevant. Democratic institutions do not ensure wisdom, but they offer ways to challenge authority and replace its holders. The remarks are recorded in Hansard.

A Surprisingly Familiar Mind

Book 2.1 opens with Marcus preparing himself for the difficult people he expects to meet: the ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest and unpleasant. He reminds himself that their conduct need not determine his own. I was struck by how little has changed about the frustrations of dealing with other people, even if the moral and religious explanation for coping with them is far removed from ours.

Book 5.1 is also revealing beyond the familiar reluctance to rise in the morning. Marcus does not simply tell himself to work harder. He argues that action and rest have their proper places in a rational, social life. The ants, birds and bees remind him that fulfilling a role is part of living according to nature. The public-domain translation by George Long sounds formal, but the self-reproach beneath it needs little translation.

How much of this apparent modernity belongs to Marcus, and how much comes from translation? He wrote in Greek, not Latin, despite being Roman emperor. The language, philosophical terminology and assumptions of the text are removed from an English-speaking reader by centuries of interpretation. A translator can make the same passage sound like solemn ancient philosophy or surprisingly direct practical advice. Without reading Greek, I cannot easily tell how close the voice I encounter is to the one Marcus wrote.

There is also a deeper problem with the idea that Meditations gives us direct access to the private mind of someone from antiquity. These notes were almost certainly written for Marcus’ own moral improvement, not as a diary intended to document his spontaneous thoughts for future historians. The work's familiar title was not his own, and we cannot confidently reconstruct exactly how the twelve books were assembled. We are reading exercises in self-correction, not an unfiltered transcript of his consciousness.

That need not make the insights less valuable. When Marcus repeatedly reminds himself not to be angry or vain, we can reasonably suspect that anger and vanity were temptations worth guarding against, although not how frequently he succumbed to them. What survives is a portrait of the person he was trying to become. In some respects that may be more revealing than a diary of daily events.

Stoicism as Practice Rather Than Theory

As a conventional reading experience, Meditations can be rather dense. It circles repeatedly around the brevity of life, the futility of reputation, the need to accept what lies beyond our control and the duty to behave justly towards other people. Some reflections are only a sentence long; others are extended arguments. Many cover ground that seemed familiar from a few pages earlier.

I might have found that irritating in a book designed to introduce Stoicism or systematically defend its principles. But Marcus was not writing either kind of book. He already knew the philosophy. He was using repetition to make its lessons available to himself when he actually needed them. Knowing that someone else's rudeness should not make me angry is easy in the abstract. Remembering it in the middle of an unpleasant encounter is considerably harder.

In Book 10.16 he gives himself an unusually terse instruction. In George Long's translation: "No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such." There is something almost impatient about the line, as though Marcus is tired of rehearsing principles that he should already be practising. Philosophical discussion is not a substitute for behaving well.

The contrast with my earlier review of Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life is helpful. Irvine organises Stoicism for contemporary readers, explaining its principles and proposing exercises to make life less anxious or frustrating. Marcus shows us someone who has accepted those principles and still needs to rehearse them. He is not explaining why Stoicism is useful; he is trying to use it.

There is an important qualification to modern presentations of Stoicism as a set of techniques for becoming calmer or happier. Ancient Stoics held that virtue was the only true good. Health, wealth, comfort and reputation might reasonably be preferred, but they did not determine whether a person lived well. That is a considerably stronger position than saying that we should worry less about things we cannot control. It also helps explain why Marcus keeps returning to duty, justice and conduct rather than concentrating solely on personal tranquillity.

Book 1 adds another dimension that can be lost in the modern image of the solitary, self-sufficient Stoic. Marcus begins by acknowledging what he learned from his grandfather, mother, teachers and other influential people. His character is not presented as a private achievement created through willpower alone. Even an emperor who constantly instructs himself recognises how much of what he values came from others. I found that a welcome counterweight to the more individualistic versions of Stoicism often encountered today.

Death, Duty and the Good Life

Marcus returns to mortality so often that it would be difficult to separate the subject from his philosophy as a whole. Emperors die, famous people are forgotten, and events that once appeared enormously important disappear into the past. Wealth and status cannot make anyone exempt. Remembering this is supposed to change the way we spend the time still available to us.

I found his attitude remarkably healthy. There is something of carpe diem in it, although not in the popular sense of seeking as many pleasures as possible before life ends. Marcus is concerned with using the present to behave well. If life is short, spending it on resentment, vanity and trivial ambitions is a particularly poor bargain.

It is tempting to relate this outlook to the greater fragility of life in the Roman world. Disease, violence and early death were more immediate dangers, and even an emperor could not rely on modern medicine. Perhaps frequent exposure to mortality made it easier to accept. But it would be a mistake to conclude that life was less valued simply because it was more precarious. Familiarity with death does not necessarily reduce grief or fear, and Stoic acceptance was a discipline rather than an automatic consequence of living in dangerous times.

Marcus’ insistence that life is fleeting seems instead intended to make conduct more important. He cannot determine how long he will live or whether his reputation will endure. He can attempt to meet the responsibilities of the present day. That is an attractive position even for someone who does not accept all the philosophical premises behind it.

The Gods, Nature and Ancient Explanations

For all the familiar observations about human behaviour, Meditations repeatedly reminds the reader that Marcus lived within a very different understanding of the universe. He writes about gods, providence, piety, cosmic order and the elements. Nature is more than the physical world outside the city. In Stoic thought it is also an organising principle, and living according to nature involves fulfilling our roles as rational and social beings.

His imagery makes that worldview accessible even when its cosmology is foreign. In Book 5.23, the substance of things is compared to a river in constant motion, while the affairs of people vanish into the immense stretches of past and future. It gives tangible form to the repeated warnings against being consumed by temporary pleasures, grievances or acclaim. In Book 5.1, the industrious insects and birds serve another purpose: Marcus reminds himself that living things have activities appropriate to their nature, and he must attend to his own.

I initially wondered whether the frequency of metaphors reflected the limits of ancient scientific understanding. There were many processes Marcus could not explain as we would today. But metaphor is hardly something that disappears with scientific progress. We still use it to describe time, emotion, thought and moral responsibility, often because a technically accurate explanation would do less to communicate what an experience feels like or why it matters.

It is also revealing that Marcus sometimes considers whether the universe is governed by providence or by atoms and chance (among other places, Books 4.3 and 9.39). He is not developing a modern scientific account of either possibility. Rather, he tries to establish how he ought to behave even if the ultimate explanation differs. His ethical concern survives the alternative cosmologies.

This mixture of alien assumptions and recognisable insight is one of the book's pleasures. I would not describe Marcus as a modern thinker born in the wrong century. His ideas about virtue, duty and nature are inseparable from a particular ancient philosophical tradition. Yet one can disagree with the cosmology while finding his attempts to manage anger, ambition and fear remarkably persuasive.

Commodus and the Problem of the Good Emperor

Marcus’ son Commodus offers an uncomfortable ending to the story of the philosopher emperor. Marcus made him co-emperor in 177; Commodus became sole ruler after his father's death in 180. His subsequent reign acquired a reputation for vanity, violence and unstable government that contrasts sharply with his father's ideal of personal restraint. Ancient descriptions of emperors are not neutral, and hostile sources can exaggerate, but the contrast in their historical reputations is difficult to ignore. The British Museum's biographical summary gives a useful outline of Commodus' rule.

His succession invites an analogy with regression to the mean. If someone is exceptional on a trait that is imperfectly shared between generations, we should not expect their child to be equally exceptional. In statistical settings, an extreme observation is typically followed by a less extreme one when the two observations are correlated but not identical. That is a useful warning against assuming greatness can be inherited along with office.

Commodus is hardly proof of a statistical rule. We are comparing two historical individuals, not repeated measurements of a well-defined quality, and his notoriously poor reputation reflects choices and political circumstances as well as temperament. He was not merely an average emperor after an excellent one. The point is institutional: hereditary succession transfers authority far more reliably than judgment, character or self-discipline.

Several of Marcus’ predecessors had adopted heirs, though it would be misleading to call that system consistently meritocratic; political circumstances and family relationships shaped those choices too. Marcus’ decision to advance his biological son illustrates the fragility of a government that depends on the next ruler resembling the last. Churchill’s argument returns here with more force: institutions able to withstand mediocre leaders have an advantage over those needing an uninterrupted sequence of exceptional ones.

Final Thoughts

Meditations is not an especially smooth book to read. It is repetitive, sometimes obscure and full of references to a cosmology that differs sharply from our own. Translation adds another layer of uncertainty, and its fragmentary character makes it difficult to reconstruct the person behind the advice. I would not recommend approaching it as a tightly argued introduction to Stoicism. Reading a few passages at a time may suit it better.

Still, I found the book unusually rewarding. Marcus’ reflections bring someone living nearly nineteen centuries ago unexpectedly close, while never allowing us to forget how distant his world really was. His worries about difficult people, getting up to do his work, wasting time and failing to live according to his principles remain familiar. His gratitude to his teachers and his insistence on social obligations also give the philosophy a warmth that some modern accounts of Stoicism lack.

What stayed with me was the distance between understanding a principle and managing to follow it. Marcus had wealth, education, soldiers and administrative power, but those advantages could not spare him the everyday work of controlling his anger, overcoming inertia and treating other people justly. Meditations records a ruler practising the kind of self-government no imperial title could confer.