Marcus Aurelius's Self-Help Notes Survived in One Damaged Vatican Manuscript

Marcus Aurelius wrote what we now call the Meditations between roughly 170 and 180 CE, mostly while on campaign against Germanic tribes along the Danube — at Sirmium, at Carnuntum, at the encampment whose name in his own text he gives as "the country of the Quadi." He addressed them to himself. The Greek title, Ta eis heauton, means literally "things to one's self." There is no evidence he ever expected another reader. The whole book is in Koine Greek, the language of late-classical philosophy, even though Marcus's first language was Latin and Greek was, for an emperor, the slightly affected choice — like a modern American writing a journal in French because that's where the philosophical vocabulary lives.

The text we have is patchwork. Twelve books survive, of unequal length and unequal coherence, organized thematically rather than chronologically; whoever first edited the imperial papers seems to have grouped passages by motif. The earliest definite reference to the work is from the Byzantine scholar Arethas of Caesarea, in the early tenth century, suggesting the text passed quietly through more than seven centuries before becoming part of the public record. The chain narrowed further from there. The first printed edition, in 1558, was based on a Codex Palatinus that has since been lost. The other major manuscript witness — Codex Vaticanus 1950, a fourteenth-century copy in the Vatican Library — survives, but in what scholars charitably describe as a "very corrupt" state. Modern critical editions stitch the two together.

Readers take from the Meditations what they bring to it. Bill Clinton has called the book a favorite. Wen Jiabao, in his last term as Chinese premier, told reporters he had read it "a hundred times."