Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome on 26 April 121 and died on 17 March 180 on the Danube frontier, in the middle of a war. Adopted in 138 by Antoninus Pius at Hadrian’s wish, he became emperor in 161, at first jointly with Lucius Verus, who died in 169, then alone. His reign was filled by the war against Parthia in the east and by the long campaigns on the Danube against the Marcomanni and the Quadi; the plague that spread through the empire from 166 belongs to the same years.

What we read under his name is a set of private notes written in Greek, in twelve books, without a title of his own: the manuscripts call them “to himself”. Book I lists what he owed to his family and his teachers, among them Junius Rusticus, from whom he had his copy of Epictetus. In George Long’s text, Book I closes with the line “Among the Quadi at the Granua” and Book II with “This in Carnuntum”, which places at least part of the writing in the camps of the 170s. The other books are short chapters, from one line to a page, addressed to himself and never arranged for a reader.

The English text on this site is Long’s translation, published in 1862. It follows the division into twelve books and the chapter numbering still in use, so that a chapter is cited as Meditations, IV, 3; that reference is what every passage in the app carries. The modernised passages of the app are made after Long and remain free to read, which is why this page can show them in full, from Meditations, IV, 3 on the retreats a man seeks to Meditations, XII, 36 on leaving the city. The chapter pages give Long’s text entire, with the French of Auguste Couat (1904) and of Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (1876) beside it; the twelve books are listed on the page Meditations. Sentences that circulate under his name are checked against that text in Quote check, and the editions themselves are described in Sources.