Marcus Aurelius
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome on 26 April, 121 and died on 17 March, 180. He was adopted into the imperial succession as a boy and became emperor in 161, ruling jointly at first with Lucius Verus. His reign was not a quiet one: plague came back with the armies and killed on a scale nobody could count, the northern frontier was under constant pressure, and a trusted general, Avidius Cassius, declared himself emperor against him.
He is the last of the four emperors conventionally grouped as the Antonines, and the last before the long decline.
Why he wrote it
The Meditations were never written for anyone. They were private notes, made at night, much of it on campaign in the field, by a man using writing to keep his own head straight before the next day started.
There is no audience in them and no performance. He repeats himself because the same problems kept coming back. He rebukes himself. He reminds himself that he will die and that so will everyone currently annoying him. He never meant a word of it to be published, and that is exactly why it is honest.
The book we publish, and why
We publish the Meditations unabridged because it is the best book ever written on carrying a load without being crushed by it.
The same few questions run through it. What is actually within your control and what is not. How to deal with difficult people without becoming one of them. How to get up and do the job when you would much rather not. How to accept that you will be criticized by men whose opinion you would never ask for.
The benefit is immediate and practical: you stop burning yourself on things you cannot move. For a reader under real pressure at work or at home, it is the most directly useful book in our catalogue.
How to read it
Do not read it front to back like a novel. It was not built that way and it will feel repetitive if you try. It is a notebook, so use it as one: a page or two in the morning, or on the day you need it.
Book One is the exception and is worth reading first in full. It is a list of people he learned from and what each one taught him, and it tells you more about the man than the rest of the volume does.
Expect Stoic vocabulary and unfamiliar names. You do not need the philosophy to use the book. When a passage will not open, move on; it will be waiting next time, and a different year of your life will unlock it.
Pair it with
- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. The same discipline arrived at from a different tradition, twelve hundred years later. Reading them together shows how much of this is human rather than doctrinal.
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle gives the theory of character; Marcus shows a man applying it under load, badly some days, which is the useful part.
- Plutarch, Parallel Lives. Marcus had read him. Plutarch supplies the examples Marcus is measuring himself against.
His works
One work survives, along with correspondence.
- Meditations, twelve books, written in Greek, probably in the 170s. The title is not his; the work had no title because it was not a work.
- Letters. A surviving correspondence with his tutor Marcus Cornelius Fronto, discovered in the nineteenth century, which shows him much younger and far less guarded.
General reference on Marcus Aurelius. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Marcus Aurelius