The Illustrated Meditations: Life Lessons from Marcus Aurelius

Introduction

Twice in the Meditations Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from AD 161 to 180, deploys the metaphor of the dyeing of cloth. In the first of these passages (5.16), he tells himself to dye the soul with a continuous series of thoughts, the principles that will lead him toward a good life. In the second, he refers to the fact that, in his role as emperor or Caesar, he had the exclusive right to wear a robe dyed entirely purple, essentially a royal accoutrement. "Take care to not become a Caesar, he instructs himself, inventing a new Greek word (he writes in Greek, though Latin was his native language). Do not be dyed with that dye; it can happen." He urges himself to follow the model of Antoninus, his adoptive father and predecessor as ruler, whom he considers a model of monarchic virtue (6.30; see this page).

Here in these two metaphorical uses of dyeing, we see two sides of the man who today is often called by his first name, Marcus: his public role, that of ruler of a great part of the globe, and the innermost self he sought to improve by dyeing it with the ideas he expresses in Meditations. His compilation of those ideas was never intended for publication; it served instead as a purely personal set of self-exhortations. Whenever he uses the pronoun you, or puts verbs into a second-person singular form, he is talking to himself, not to an imagined reader. Indeed the title of the work is sometimes given as To Himself, a more accurate description of its contents, perhaps, than Meditations, which became affixed to it only in the 17th century.

Dyeing in the ancient world required repeated dipping of cloth into dye, and Meditations is filled with repetition. Marcus comes back again and again to its central precepts, framing them in new ways or examining them from new angles. Your habitual thoughts will shape the character of your mind, he tells himself in the first of his dyeing analogies, providing a good explanation of the goal of his work. His notebooks, as the twelve subdivisions of the work are sometimes termed, were his way of rehearsing the principles of his philosophical system. That system, inherited from the Greeks of the 3rd century BC by way of Roman intermediaries, is called Stoicism, after the Painted Stoa, a colonnade in Athens where its founding father, Zeno of Citium, used to instruct his disciples.

In his notebooks Marcus allows himself to roam freely among a wide range of topics, as though addressing day by day whatever was most on his mind. The current volume selects from this sometimes confusing jumble a small set of crucial entries, then groups them into eight thematically organized chapters. Readers will find an inviting, and beautifully illustrated, pathway into the Meditations, arranged so as to give an overview of Marcus’s system of belief. That system, Stoic philosophy, was already centuries old when he wrote and is now many times older; yet, as this collection demonstrates, the principles Marcus took from it are still as potent as ever, teaching us how to live and not merely to be.

The tenets of Marcus’s Stoicism will be explored, one by one, in the introductions to the chapters that follow, but a broad outline can be given here. For the Stoics, the good life is a life in harmony with Nature, for Nature is thoroughly rational and benign, the expression of the rational force that controls the larger cosmos. That force can be conceived of as the gods or as God, as Mind, or as Logos, a multilayered Greek word that includes ideas of reason, speech, and thought. Our human capacity for reason has been bestowed by this benevolent force, bringing us closer to divinity than any other species. To follow its promptings unswervingly would make us even more godlike, as we are meant to be.

What does our reason prompt us to do, as we go about a largely unreasonable world? Above all, to act virtuously, for virtue is in accord with the divine plan for the cosmos. We are social creatures who depend on bonds of fellowship for survival, since we lack the assets—claws, fangs, tough hides, and the like—that protect other species. Our uniquely social existence requires that we treat one another well, so virtuous behavior is in accord with Mind and with Nature. We belong to a human community, so everything that benefits that community also benefits us. False opinions, however, lead us to pursue private objectives—pleasure, or wealth, or fame—as sources of happiness. Stoics consider such things indifferent in that they conduce neither to virtue nor vice, and therefore do not affect our happiness in any real sense.

Along with the problem of false opinions, Stoic practice also means coping with the phantasiai or impressions that are constantly streaming into our souls. Sights or smells may arouse our desire for pleasure, things we hear—for example, insults—may stimulate our anger, or pain felt by our nervous system may provoke fear. These emotional responses can overwhelm our rational minds, if we allow them to do