Inner citadel

The inner citadel is a modern phrase, not an ancient one. It is the title Pierre Hadot gave in 1992 to his introduction to Marcus Aurelius, La Citadelle intérieure, translated into English in 1998 as The Inner Citadel. Marcus never writes “inner citadel”. The phrase condenses one sentence of the Meditations, VIII, 48, where the Greek word is akropolis, the fortified height of a Greek city, and George Long, in 1862, renders it plainly as “a citadel”.

In Long’s wording of Meditations, VIII, 48, the ruling faculty is invincible when self-collected and satisfied with itself; therefore the mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for refuge. He who has not seen this is ignorant, and he who has seen it and does not fly to this refuge is unhappy. The citadel is not a place apart from the ruling faculty, the hegemonikon: it is that faculty in a given condition, free from the passions, the state the Stoics called apatheia.

The same movement appears in Meditations, IV, 3: men seek retreats in the country, on the shore, in the mountains, but it is in one’s power to retire into oneself whenever one chooses. The retreat consists of a few brief and fundamental principles, and it sends the reader back free from discontent to the things he returns to. Hadot read the Meditations as a series of spiritual exercises. The image of a wall around a private interior belongs more to the modern title than to the text, where the refuge is a judgment kept clear of passion and the city is not left behind.