Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Summarized Edition)

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is the Roman emperor's private notebook, twelve books of reflections composed during campaigns in the second century CE. Aphoristic, fragmentary, and austere, it stages Stoic exercises rather than systematic doctrine: rehearsals of impermanence, assent, and the dichotomy of control; reminders of duty to the cosmopolis and of living according to nature and logos. In dialogue with Epictetus and tinged with Heraclitean flux, its rhetoric is spare and unsparing of imp ...