By Marcus Aurelius
A new translation, with an creation, via Gregory Hays
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121–180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161—and Meditations is still one of many maximum works of non secular and moral mirrored image ever written. With a profound knowing of human habit, Marcus presents insights, knowledge, and functional tips on every little thing from residing on the earth to dealing with adversity to interacting with others. therefore, the Meditations became required analyzing for statesmen and philosophers alike, whereas generations of standard readers have answered to the easy intimacy of his kind. In Gregory Hays’s new translation—the first in a generation—Marcus’s ideas communicate with a brand new immediacy: by no means prior to have they been so without delay and powerfully presented.
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Extra resources for Meditations: A New Translation
Sample text
43) Evil: the same old thing. 1) Not a dancer but a wrestler . . 61) To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. 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.
Perhaps the best description of the entries is that suggested by the French scholar Pierre Hadot. They are “spiritual exercises” composed to provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life: a self-help book in the most literal sense. ” On this reading, the individual entries were composed not as a record of Marcus’s thoughts or to enlighten others, but for his own use, as a means of practicing and reinforcing his own philosophical convictions. Such an interpretation accounts for several aspects of the entries that would otherwise be puzzling.
In the process it became a rather different version of the philosophy from that taught by Zeno and Chrysippus. Perhaps the most important development was a shift in emphasis, a narrowing of focus. Early and middle Stoicism was a holistic system. It aimed to embrace all knowledge, and its focus was speculative and theoretical. Roman Stoicism, by contrast, was a practical discipline—not an abstract system of thought, but an attitude to life. Partly for historical reasons, it is this Romanized Stoicism that has most influenced later generations.