Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [15]
Attempts to find organic unity in the remaining books or development from book to book are doomed to failure. Wherever one opens the Meditations (with the exception of Book 1) we find the same voice, the same themes; Marcus’s thought does not change or develop noticeably from one book to another. Nor can any structure or unity be discerned within individual books. It seems most likely that the division between books is a purely physical one. The transmitted “books,” in other words, represent the individual papyrus rolls of Marcus’s original, or perhaps of a later copy. When one had been filled, another was begun.10
If the books as a whole are homogenous, the individual entries show considerable formal variety. Some are developed short essays that make a single philosophical point; many of the entries in Books 2 and 3 are of this type. Others are straightforward imperatives (“Take the shortest route . . .”) or aphorisms (“no one can keep you from living in harmony with yourself”). Sometimes Marcus will list a number of basic principles in catalogue format (“remember that . . . and that . . . and that . . .”). Elsewhere he puts forward an analogy, sometimes with the point of comparison left to be inferred. Thus human lives are like “many lumps of incense on the same altar” (4.15) or like “a rock thrown in the air” (9.17). In other cases the analogy will be made explicit: “Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot . . . ? That’s what we do to ourselves . . . when we rebel against what happens to us” (8.34). Others present a kind of formal meditative exercise, as when Marcus instructs himself to imagine the age of Vespasian (4.32) or Augustus’s court (8.31) and then to compare the imagined scene with that of his own time. Portions of two books (7 and 11) consist simply of quotations. Some entries appear to be rough drafts for others; several of the raw quotations from tragedies in Book 7 are incorporated in the much more polished Meditations 11.6. The significance of some entries remains completely obscure. Few critics have known what to make of notes like “Character: dark, womanish, obstinate” (4.28) or “They don’t realize how much is included in stealing, sowing, buying . . .” (3.15).
The entries also differ considerably in the degree of artistry they display. Some entries are little more than Marcus’s notes or reminders to himself—the philosophical equivalent of “Phone Dr. re appt. Tues.?” But others are highly literary. Marcus wrote as a man trained in the rhetorical techniques of the second century. His thoughts naturally took on the impress of his training and intellectual milieu even when he was writing for himself alone.
The shorter entries often display an interest in wordplay and a striving for epigrammatic brevity that recalls both the ingenuity of the rhetorical schools and the paradoxical compression of Heraclitus:
Does the sun try to do the rain’s work? Or Asclepius Demeter’s? (6.43)
Evil: the same old thing. (7.1)
Not a dancer but a wrestler . . . (7.61)
To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. (8.33)
The philosophical tradition may have been influential on another element that we find occasionally: the intermittent snatches of dialogue or quasi-dialogue. As a developed form, the philosophical dialogue goes back to Plato, who was imitated by later philosophers, notably Aristotle (in his lost works) and Cicero. The Meditations certainly does not contain the kind of elaborate scene setting that we expect in a true dialogue, but we do find in a number of entries a kind of internal debate in which the questions or objections of an imaginary interlocutor are answered by a second, calmer voice which corrects or rebukes its errors. The first voice seems to represent Marcus’s weaker, human side; the second is the voice of philosophy.
The longer entries (none, of course, are very long) are marked by a coherent if sometimes slightly labored style. Not all critics