Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [13]
Marcus normally seems to view Epicureanism with disapproval (as we would expect). In Meditations 6.10 he contrasts the Epicurean universe, founded on “mixture, interaction, dispersal” with the components of the Stoic system: “unity, order, design”—clearly to the advantage of the latter. Should we not be ashamed to fear death, he asks in another entry, when “even” the Epicureans disdain it? (12.34). But other entries suggest a less dismissive attitude. Marcus quotes with apparent approval Epicurus’s account of his own exemplary conduct during an illness (9.41) and twice seeks comfort in the philosopher’s remarks on the endurance of pain (7.33, 7.64). Like other late Stoics (Seneca is a notable example), he was willing to accept truth wherever he found it.
Thus far we have been concerned with the content of the Meditations: the ethical doctrine of late Stoicism, incorporating a certain amount of Platonic and Heraclitean material, and overlaid with occasional reference to other schools and thinkers. But what of the Meditations itself? How and why was it written? Who is its audience? What kind of book is it? For the answers to these questions we must turn from the book’s content to its form and origins.
The MEDITATIONS: Genre, Structure, and Style
I suspect that Marcus would have been surprised (and perhaps rather dismayed) to find himself enshrined in the Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. He would have been surprised, to begin with, by the title of the work ascribed to him. The long-established English title Meditations is not only not original, but positively misleading, lending a spurious air of resonance and authority quite alien to the haphazard set of notes that constitute the book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus’s original—the work was entitled “To Himself” (Eis heauton). This is no more likely than Meditations to be the original title, though it is at least a somewhat more accurate description of the work.6
In fact, it seems unlikely that Marcus himself gave the work any title at all, for the simple reason that he did not think of it as an organic whole in the first place. Not only was it not written for publication, but Marcus clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. The entries include a number of cryptic references to persons or events that an ancient reader would have found as unintelligible as we do. While a contemporary might have recognized some of the figures mentioned in Meditations 8.25 or 12.27, for example, no ancient reader could have known what was in the letter that Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa (1.7), what Antoninus said to the customs agent at Tusculum (1.16), or what happened to Marcus at Caieta (1.17). Elsewhere Marcus reflects directly on his role as emperor, in terms that would be quite irrelevant to anyone else. We find him worrying about the dangers of becoming “imperialized” (6.30), reminding himself to speak simply in the Senate (8.30), and reflecting on the unique position he occupies (11.7). From these entries and others it seems clear that the “you” of the text is not a generic “you,” but the emperor himself. “When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors