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have had kind words for Marcus’s expository prose, and some have been inclined to attribute perceived shortcomings to deficiencies in his Greek. But in all likelihood the occasional awkwardness is due less to an imperfect grasp of the language than to roughness of composition—Marcus thinking aloud or groping for an idea. The same explanation may underlie one of the most noticeable features of Marcus’s prose—namely, his tendency to string together pairs of near-synonymous words and phrases, as if uncertain whether he has hit the target the first time. When combined with the very abstract vocabulary natural in philosophical prose, this can make for difficult reading, especially in English, which privileges concision and concrete vocabulary to a greater degree than Greek. At its best, however, Marcus’s writing can be extraordinarily effective, most of all when it strikes a balance between image and idea, as in the opening of 5.23:

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

This particular topic—the transience of human life, the constant change that shapes and informs the world—is a recurrent theme in the Meditations, and as we shall see, it is one whose treatment owes as much to literary as to philosophical models, and as much to Marcus’s own character as to Stoic doctrine.

Recurring Themes

To try to extract a sustained and coherent argument from the Meditations as a whole would be an unprofitable exercise. It is simply not that kind of work. It would be equally fruitless to try to read autobiographical elements into individual entries (to take 9.42 as referring to the revolt of Avidius Cassius, for example, or 10.4 as a reflection on Commodus)—all the more so since so few of the entries can be dated with any security. This is not to say that the Meditations has no unity or no relationship to Marcus’s own life, for it has both. What unifies it is the recurrence of a small number of themes that surely reflect Marcus’s own preoccupations. It is the points to which Marcus returns most often that offer the best insight into his character and concerns.

One example that will strike almost any reader is the sense of mortality that pervades the work. Death is not to be feared, Marcus continually reminds himself. It is a natural process, part of the continual change that forms the world. At other points it is the ultimate consolation. “Soon you will be dead,” Marcus tells himself on a number of occasions, “and none of it will matter” (cf. 4.6, 7.22, 8.2). The emphasis on the vanity and worthlessness of earthly concerns is here linked to the more general idea of transience. All things change or pass away, perish and are forgotten. This is the burden of several of the thought exercises that Marcus sets himself: to think of the court of Augustus (8.31), of the age of Vespasian or Trajan (4.32), the great philosophers and thinkers of the past (6.47)—all now dust and ashes.

This theme is not specific to Stoicism. We meet it at every turn in ancient literature. Marcus himself quotes the famous passage in Book 6 of Homer’s Iliad in which the lives of mortals are compared to leaves that grow in the spring, flourish for a season and then fall and die, to be replaced by others (10.34). He would have recognized the sentiment in other writers too, from the melancholy Greek lyric poet Mimnermus, who develops and expands on Homer’s simile, to the Roman lawyer Servius Sulpicius, writing to his friend Cicero on the death of the latter’s daughter:

I want to share with you something that brought me not a little consolation, in hopes that it might have the same effect on you. On my way back from Asia, on the voyage from Aegina to Megara, I gazed at the lands we passed. Aegina was behind me, Megara before me, Piraeus on the starboard side, Corinth to port—towns