Review: Jason Mott on a new translation of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”
An accidental masterpiece and a companion in hard times
Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), from the Villa Adriana, Tivoli (ca 160-169 CE). Palazzo Massimo, Rome
According to my father, the boy I used to be had a pretty bad temper. When he was alive, my father would delight in reminding me of the days when, angry at my older sisters, I would yell and rage or jump on my bike and ride off into the humid, sun-drenched Carolina afternoon. I would be gone for hours, off in the forest, calming down, and would return home in the evening exhausted, hungry and, usually, apologetic. “I was worried about you for a long time,” he once told me. I don’t remember this boy that I was, but my father was always straight with me so I took him at his word and I have filed his version of me into the Personal Lore & Legend section of the well-manicured hero’s tale that I, like all of us, keep stored in my head.
Fast forward to nineteen-year-old me—whom I have some memory of—wandering through the philosophy section of a musty bookstore in the hopes of solving the riddle of mankind—amongst other nineteen-year-old arrogant dreams—and that’s when I first came across Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. And it is not an overstatement to say that this world of Stoicism changed my life.
My first introduction to the text was via the 1964 Penguin Classics translation by Maxwell Staniforth. It was, and still is, a direct, terse interpretation of a text in which we are given access to the personal thoughts and musings of one of Rome’s greatest emperors. Meditations is not a philosophical treatise. It was never intended to be. In fact, for those who don’t know, it was never meant to be read by anyone other than the emperor himself.
