What it is
The Meditations (the Greek title is closer to Ta eis heauton, "to himself") is a collection of personal philosophical notes written by the emperor Marcus Aurelius during the last decade of his life, much of it on military campaign. It was never composed for publication and has no addressee but its author. There is no argument running through it and no order beyond the rough division into twelve books; it is a record of a man rehearsing, over and over, the Stoic principles by which he was trying to live and rule.
Historical context
Marcus ruled from 161 to 180 CE — the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors and the end of the long second-century peace. Much of the Meditations was written amid the Marcomannic Wars on the Danube, against the background of plague and the strain of holding the frontier. The book is therefore not the reflection of a philosopher at leisure but of a working ruler under permanent pressure, using Stoic practice as an instrument of endurance.
What it argues
The Meditations applies the Stoicism of Epictetus — whose Discourses Marcus had studied — to the specific condition of holding supreme power. Its recurring themes are the discipline of judgement (that we are disturbed not by things but by our opinions of them), the indifference of external goods, the brevity of life and the smallness of fame, the duty owed to the common good of rational beings, and the constant labour of not being corrupted by the office. The most striking feature, for the platform's purposes, is the subject: this is the inner life of the most powerful man in the known world, and almost all of it is spent talking himself out of the temptations that power offers — anger, vanity, self-pity, the belief that he is owed anything. It is the counter-text to every account of what absolute power does to the men who hold it.
Reception and influence
The Meditations survived by a thin thread and became, in the modern period, the most widely read of all Stoic texts — the practical handbook of Stoicism for readers who will never open Chrysippus. It is also read with a necessary tension the platform keeps in view: the same emperor who wrote so movingly about clemency and the brotherhood of rational beings presided over the persecution of Christians and a brutal frontier war, and his chosen heir, his son Commodus, undid much of what his reign had secured. The book is a guide to ruling well; it is not, on its own, evidence that its author always did.
Citing the Meditations
Standard citation is by book and section (e.g. Med. 2.1 on beginning each day expecting to meet the ungrateful and the arrogant). Hard's edition with Gill's notes, and Hadot's The Inner Citadel, are the standard aids. See our Sources page.