Marcus Aurelius Writes the Meditations on the Danube Campaign
The Meditations — in Greek, Ta eis heauton, 'Addressed to Himself' — is unique in ancient literature: a philosophical journal, entirely private, in which a reigning emperor subjects himself to relentless moral self-examination. Marcus wrote in Greek because Greek was the language of philosophy; Stoicism had been codified by Epictetus, whose Discourses were Marcus's primary spiritual guide. The work was composed in multiple sittings over the course of the Marcomannic Wars, largely in the military camps along the Danube — at Carnuntum, Vindobona (modern Vienna), Aquincum (Budapest). Book I is a catalogue of debts: every teacher, relative, and emperor who had shaped Marcus's character, recorded with meticulous gratitude. Books II through XII are the journal proper: brief meditations, exercises, arguments to himself. The Stoic framework is everywhere. The universe is a rational whole governed by logos; the individual soul participates in this logos and finds its highest expression in reason and virtue; external goods — health, wealth, reputation, even life — are 'indifferents.' What makes the Meditations different from other Stoic texts is the gap between the philosophy and the man. Marcus does not write like a man who has achieved Stoic equanimity; he writes like a man who has to argue himself back to it every day. He died at Vindobona on March 17, 180 CE. The Meditations were not published in his lifetime. The first printed edition appeared in 1558. Since then, they have been continuously in print and continuously rediscovered: by Renaissance humanists, by Enlightenment deists, by Victorian stoics, and in the twenty-first century by practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy and the contemporary Stoic revival.
- Year: 170 CE
- Category: Cultural
