Marcus Aurelius

121-180 CE · Roman · Stoicism, Ethics, Philosophy as Way of Life, Ancient Political Philosophy

What we do now echoes in eternity.

For the last decade of his life, the most powerful man in the world kept a private notebook he never meant anyone to read. Marcus Aurelius wrote it in camp on the frozen Danube frontier, between Germanic invasions and an empire-ravaging plague, in the form of orders to himself: "Concentrate every minute on doing the task at hand." We call it the Meditations; he called it, simply, writings to himself. He had been groomed for the throne since seventeen, ruled Rome for nineteen brutal years, and buried most of his thirteen children — and the book is not a treatise but a survival manual, the same…

Topics Marcus Aurelius addresses

• the view from above
• memento mori
• the inner citadel
• the dichotomy of control
• the discipline of assent
• the discipline of desire
• the discipline of action
• the obstacle is the way
• amor fati
• apatheia
• virtue as the only good
• the cosmopolis
• the universal logos
• sympatheia
• oikeiosis
• prokope
• spiritual exercises
• writing as spiritual practice
• hypomnemata
• the second-person imperative
• repetition as practice
• dogmata
• imaginative exercises
• the philosopher-king

Converse with Marcus Aurelius on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Marcus Aurelius's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.