How to Apply Meditations

Name: Meditations
Author: Marcus Aurelius

The private notebook a Roman emperor never meant the world to read

Marcus Aurelius

8 Key Insights

About This Book

A man who ruled the Roman world at its height once described himself in five plain words: a male, mature in years, a statesman, a Roman, a ruler. Marcus Aurelius, emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote that description in a private notebook kept largely during plague, war, and a general's attempted coup, and seems never to have intended anyone else to read it. Inside it he pictures his own funeral from far above the earth, reduces a banquet to a corpse and grape juice, and argues that losing your temper is closer to cutting off your own hand than to justice. This is that notebook, unpacked for a life far removed from ancient Rome.

About the Author

Marcus Aurelius was born Marcus Annius Verus in Rome in AD 121, adopted as heir by the emperor Antoninus Pius, and ruled as Roman emperor from 161 until his death on the northern frontier in 180. Trained from boyhood in Stoic philosophy, he was introduced as a young man to the teachings of the freed slave Epictetus by his tutor Rusticus. He spent much of his reign fighting wars on the Danube frontier and managing plague and famine at home, setting down his private reflections, written in Greek rather than Latin, in the margins of that life, with no apparent plan to publish them.

Biggest Takeaway

Work through this and you gain a small set of tools for the moments that currently knock you off balance: the sting of criticism, the setback that wrecks a plan, the rude stranger on your commute, the grief that outlasts the loss itself. You will know how to separate what actually happened from the story you are telling about it, how to treat an obstacle as raw material instead of ruin, and how to shrink a humiliation or a fear of being forgotten down to its real size. None of it asks you to believe anything you cannot test for yourself in your next difficult hour.