Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Meditations
    The Meditations
    The Meditations
    Ebook160 pages2 hours

    The Meditations

    By Marcus Aurelius

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A series of meditations, divided into 12 books, written as an inner testament to remember the most important people in his life but with a dominant thought about the meaning of existence and the superficiality of human representations. In these pages, tragically lucid, a fire is ignited and burns which gives consciousness of how, in truth, only what is resolved within us has value. Introduction by Laura Maninchedda.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGAEditori
    Release dateMar 8, 2019
    ISBN9788832534313
    Author

    Marcus Aurelius

    Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. Born to an upper-class Roman family in 121, Aurelius was adopted by his uncle, the emperor Antoninus Pius, in 138. Aurelius studied Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and law, and was especially influenced by the Stoic thinker Epictetus. After Pius’s death, Aurelius succeeded the throne alongside his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus. His reign was marked by plague, numerous military conflicts, and the deaths of friends and family—including Lucius Verus in 169. Despite these struggles, the Empire flourished under Marcus’s rule as the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an era from 27 to 180 of relative peace and prosperity for the Roman Empire. Aurelius wrote his Meditations as spiritual exercises never intended for publication, and died at fifty-eight while on campaign against the Germanic tribes.

    Read more from Marcus Aurelius

    Related to The Meditations

    Related ebooks

    Essays, Study, and Teaching For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Joys of Being a Stoic

      Nov 4, 2020

      In September, a writer for HBO’s Watchmen series, Cord Jefferson, was awarded an Emmy. I enjoyed the show’s first season, a sequel to arguably the best movie (and graphic novel) about superhero vigilantism. The plot involves the protagonists combatti

      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Live (like A Stoic)

      Jan 23, 2018

      How To Live (like A Stoic)
      4 min read

    • Article

      Searching For A Why

      Aug 10, 2020

      Searching For A Why
      1 min read

    • Article

      Seek And You Shall Find

      Dec 1, 2020

      Seek And You Shall Find
      6 min read

    • Article

      Thus Spoke Jordan Peterson

      Apr 9, 2018

      Thus Spoke Jordan Peterson
      7 min read

    • Article

      7 Stages Of Meaningful Change

      Mar 3, 2021

      • Review your life Start by identifying what brings you joy, what you’re most proud of, what you wish you had more of, times you’ve felt stressed and things you can’t live without.• Decide what’s important Score each area of your life: Home surroundi

      1 min read

    • Article

      I’m More Fatty

      Sep 21, 2020

      “When lockdown ends, I’m more fatty.” I had to laugh at this wordplay comment on amor fati below Daily Stoic’s excellent Youtube video. Amor fati is a Latin phrase, and one of the central teachings of Stoicism. It can be translated as “love fate” or

      1 min read

    • Article

      Identity

      Sep 6, 2021

      Two millennia ago, Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch wrote about a thought experiment on identity, The Ship of Theseus, in which every plank of wood on a ship is replaced over time. Philosophers were divided: some claimed that the ship “remain

      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

      Jul 14, 2017

      I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else. The post Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Trans: The Middle Ages Had Another Word For It

      Oct 29, 2020

      HISTORY ECHOES. Sometimes, it’s a place that echoes across time. Sometimes, it’s a turn of phrase. Consider these two statements. The first is by John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century philosopher and heresiarch: So about this white and round priest-c

      4 min read

    • Article

      Lewis The Prophet

      Oct 26, 2023

      ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963 — A FRIDAY — John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died within hours of each other. Sixty years on, it is surely Kennedy and Huxley who are most remembered as men who saw the bend of history’s arc: JFK the radical ref

      8 min read

    • Article

      Beyond the Veil

      Feb 27, 2020

      The woman known as “Mother Julian of Norwich” lived from around 1342 to 1416 and wrote the first known surviving book in the English language by a woman: Revelations of Divine Love. During a period of terrible health at age 30, where she was consider

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Celestial Memory Palace

      Dec 7, 2018

      The Celestial Memory Palace
      8 min read

    • Article

      Henry Vaughan’s Eternal Alchemy

      Apr 16, 2021

      What faith teaches is that we're all exiles from that Zion that is eternity, to which we shall one day return. What Vaughan understands is that if we seek eternity, it is now. The post Henry Vaughan’s Eternal Alchemy appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Be: Lessons From The Early Greeks By Adam Nicolson Review – Ancient Wisdom For Today’s World

      Jul 18, 2023

      There was a wonderful, revelatory moment in Adam Nicolson’s last book, Life Between the Tides, where he suddenly telescoped out from the Scottish rock pool he was describing in order to meditate on the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Dec 7, 2021

      FIRST PUBLISHED in 2001 when the author was seventy-eight, Setouchi Jakucho’s memoir Places (Hawai’i) has finally been translated into English, by Liza Dalby. Setouchi, now ninety-nine, is perhaps Japan’s most famous Buddhist nun; before she was orda

      4 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Books About Online: An Excerpt from ‘Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction’

      Aug 13, 2018

      1. The Catalog of Nibru (Various, circa 21st to 20th Centuries B.C.) I, the king, was a hero already in the womb I am a king treated with respect Not only did the lord make the world appear in its correct form Lady of all the divine powers These line

      8 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Cope With Adversity

      Mar 15, 2024

      city-journal.org Marcus Aurelius, who once ruled the Roman Empire, may have been dead for more than 1,800 years, but he remains a “learned ghost at our decadent 21st-century feast”, says Darran Anderson. His Meditations, a collection of notes to him

      1 min read

    • Article

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Big Picture

      May 26, 2022

      IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demo

      7 min read

    • Article

      Building A fortean Library

      Nov 4, 2021

      It’s 50 years since Random House first published Colin Wilson’s The Occult: A History, and it’s still in print. Time for a re-assessment, then? Wilson believed himself to be a genius, and notoriously had no qualms about saying as much to all and sund

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Meditations

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

      BOOK

      Marcus Aurelius

      The Meditations

      Originally translated by

      GAEditori

      Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

      The Meditations

      © GA Editori

      Sede legale: via Basilicata, 15 – 94100 Enna Sicily island

      www.gaeditori.it – gaeditori@gmail.com

      First edition: march 2019

      Graphics:

      relegosplende communication

      https://relegosplendecommunication.tumblr.com/

      This work is protected by the Copyright Law.

      Any duplication, even partial, unauthorized is prohibited.

      About this edition

      Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus was Emperor of Rome from 161 to his death, the last of the Five Good Emperors. He was nephew, son-in-law, and adoptive son of Antonius Pius. Marcus Aurelius was one of the most important Stoic philosophers, cited by H.P. Blavatsky amongst famous classic sages and writers such as Plato, Euripides, Socrates, Aristophanes, Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates, Diodorus, Cicero, and Epictetus.

      1

      This edition was originally translated out of the Greek by Meric Casaubon in 1634 as The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius.

      Cf. Blavatsky Collected Writings, (THE ORIGIN OF THE MYSTERIES) XIV p.257

      LIVING THE LIFE SERIES MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS AURELIUS

      Chief English translations of Marcus Aurelius

      Meric Casaubon, 1634;

      Jeremy Collier, 1701;

      James Thomson, 1747;

      R. Graves, 1792;

      H. McCormac, 1844; George Long, 1862;

      G.H. Rendall, 1898; and

      J. Jackson, 1906.

      Renan’s Marc-Aurèle — in his History of the Origins of Christianity, which appeared in 1882 — is the most vital and original book to be had relating to the time of Marcus Aurelius. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean forms another outside commentary, which is of service in the imaginative attempt to create again the period. ²

      [Brought forward from p.xxiii.]

      Introduction

      Some books can be considered as a constant reference for our life, as friends whose voice may reach us from afar, but that we feel close to our problems and questions. This is the case of the Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Written over 1800 years ago, has always had a remarkable attraction to the most diverse places and people, who recognized themselves in the experience and existential reflections of its author. The book is still very topical for the attitude of research and self-analysis, of touch with inner life, which makes it an exceptional human document, rather than a historical and philosophical one. Within what actually is a spiritual diary, I wanted to find some reading paths that will highlight its fundamental themes. The work, which certainly was not written for publication and that we received divided into 12 short books of notations, notes, loose considerations, looks, at least superficially, unorganized, except for the first book, devoted to recalling the debt of gratitude towards men and gods.

      This book can be read as an inner biography of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD); it outlines his life remembering the relationships and events that more influenced his education and his conception of the world. At the margin of this and of the next book, that, according to scholars, were the last to be written, two notations allow us to date with good accuracy the composition of the book, dating back to the last decade of Marcus Aurelius’s life. His inclination was to devote himself to philosophy, in the sense of research and practice of truth, but he found himself living in a situation of overwhelming responsibilities in a troubled and dramatic period of continuous wars against the barbarians who threatened the empire, of insurrections and calamities. Taking up the tasks that derived from his position, he always reiterates the primacy of interiority, the choice of what really matters: not glory and approval of others, but the awareness of doing one’s duty and safeguarding one’s soul from any pollution and ugliness.

      Precisely because the vicissitudes of life and his responsibilities prevented him from devoting his time to study and meditation, Marco Aurelio feels the need to keep always in mind, by thinking, questioning, recalling the thoughts of philosophers and maintaining contact with his interiority, what the task of human being is, its place in the universe, its relationship with the gods and more specifically what are the duties of a person living, with precise responsibilities, in a society and in a particular historical moment. As physicians and chirurgeons have always their instruments ready at hand for all sudden cures; so have thou always thy dogmata in a readiness for the knowledge of things, both divine and human: and whatsoever thou dost, even in the smallest things that thou dost, thou must ever remember that mutual relation, and connection that is between these two things divine, and things human. III 13 The regret that often arises from being unable to feed with reading and study his inclination to philosophy as a fundamental resource to orient himself and pursue his task of man and emperor, is almost certainly the reason that induced him to write his reflections as a space devoted entirely to his interiority, in the midst of so many cares and worries. Actually, there is no mention of the dramatic events of the period, but a constant attention and vigilance over his emotions, a continuous asking himself about the rightness of his acts, a constant invitation to awareness and to serene and grateful acceptance of what is happening, because what the gods have established can not be evil. This is a rigorous commitment to what at times he feels unequal to, but that he always reaffirms, in a journey of growth and purification, that we can follow in its difficulties and in the confidence that it is the only thing that makes life worth living.

      What is thy profession? to be good. And how should this be well brought to pass, but by certain theorems and doctrines; some concerning the nature of the universe, and some concerning the proper and particular constitution of man? XI 5 Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper. VII 59 His conception of life is profoundly unitary and providential, in the sense that everything has its own order and function and that the purpose of man is to fully realize the divine potential inherent to him, and what Marcus Aurelius often calls, with a Socratic term, daemon, or the sovereign royal faculty. To live with the Gods. He liveth with the Gods, who at all times affords unto them the spectacle of a soul, both contented and well pleased with whatsoever is afforded, or allotted unto her; and performing whatsoever is pleasing to that Spirit, whom being part of himself Jove hath appointed to every man as his overseer and governor. V 27 For all things are ranked together, and by that decency of its due place and order that each particular doth observe, they all concur together to the making of one and the same world. For all things throughout, there is but one and the same order; and through all things, one and the same God, the same substance and the same law. There is one common reason, and one common truth, that belongs unto all reasonable creatures, for neither is there save one perfection of all creatures that are of the same kind, and partakers of the same reason. VII 9 " There is but one light of the sun, though it be intercepted by walls and mountains, and other thousand objects.

      There is but one common substance of the whole world, though it be concluded and restrained into several different bodies, in number infinite. There is but one common soul, though divided into innumerable particular essences and natures. So is there but one common intellectual soul, though it seem to be divided. XII 30 Thanks to this deep sense of unity, he sees no contradiction or incompatibility between his task and his commitment to self-realization. Now that unto every one is most profitable, which is according to his own constitution and nature. And my nature is, to be rational in all my actions and as a good, and natural member of a city and commonwealth, towards my fellow members ever to be sociably and kindly disposed and affected. My city and country as I am Antoninus, is Rome; as a man, the whole world. Those things therefore that are expedient and profitable to those cities, are the only things that are good and expedient for me. VI 44 He feels, however, its difficulty and weight and also the danger of being put off. When he recalls his dignity and power, he always appeals to his sense of responsibility, to the awareness of the brevity of life. ... take heed, lest of a philosopher thou become a mere Caesar in time ... Keep thyself therefore, truly simple, good ... Endeavour to continue such, as philosophy ... would have made, and secured thee. Worship the Gods, procure the welfare of men, this life is short. Charitable actions, and a holy disposition, is the only fruit of this earthly life. VI 30 His attitude towards political action, which he feels as a primary duty, is disenchanted. Do what thy nature doth now require. Resolve upon it, if thou mayest. Yea, but sayest thou, I must not expect a Plato’s commonwealth. If they profit though never so little, I must be content; and think much even of that little progress. Doth then any of them forsake their former false opinions that I should think they profit? For without a change of opinions, alas! what is all that ostentation, but mere wretchedness of slavish minds, that groan privately, and yet would make a show of obedience to reason, and truth? XII 2 Alexander, Caesar, Pompeius; what are these to Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? These penetrated into the true nature of things; into all causes, and all subjects: and upon these did they exercise their power and authority. But as for those, as the extent of their error was, so far did their slavery extend. VIII 3 As the spider, when it hath caught the fly that it hunted after, is not little proud, nor meanly conceited of herself: as he likewise that hath caught an hare, or hath taken a fish with his net: as another for the taking of a boar, and another of a bear: so may they be proud, and applaud themselves for their valiant acts against the Sarmatai. For these also, these famous soldiers and warlike men, if thou dost look into their minds and opinions, what do they for the most part but hunt after prey? X 10 ‘They kill me, they cut my flesh; they persecute my person with curses.’ What then? May not thy mind for all this

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1