A Second-Rate Philosopher I Cannot Read in His Original Greek: REGRET OF THE DAY
Epictetus provide a better guide to stoicism. Seneca writes better prose. So Why is it that Marcus Aurelius’s private, repetitive, nagging-himself notebook endures and influences more than all the other stoics put together? “Don’t turn into just another Caesar,” Marcus warned himself. But how could he stop that? He already was the Caesar. Thus the Meditations reads less like a philosophy lesson than like a man arguing with himself, losing, and then picking himself back up off the floor and trying to man-up to argue with himself again":
This AM, from across 1850 years of time, history now comes to speak to me.
It comes to speak to me through the person of the one and only Imp. Caesar M. Aurelius Antoninus Augustus…
…Armeniacus, Parthicus Maximus, Medicus, Germanicus, Sarmaticus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuniciae Potestatis XXXIV, Imperator X, Consul III, Pater Patriae:
Marcus Aurelius (ca. 175): Meditations V.1: ‘Can’t get out of bed this morning?
Tell yourself: “I’m getting up to do a human being’s job.” So why complain about doing the thing I was born to do, the reason I’m here at all? Was I made to lie under the covers and keep warm?
“But it feels nice.” Nice? You were born to feel nice? Or to get up and do things?
Look around. Trees, plants, sparrows, ants, spiders, bees: every one of them is busy doing its part to keep the world running. And you won’t do yours? You won’t hurry to do what your nature asks of you?
“But I need rest.” Sure you do. Nature gives you a ration of rest, the same way it gives you a ration of food and drink. But you take more rest than you need, and less action than you could manage.
So you don’t really love yourself. If you did, you’d love your nature and what it’s aiming at. People who love their trade wear themselves out at it. They skip meals and forget to eat. Do you respect your own nature less than a carpenter respects carpentry, or a dancer respects dance? Less than a miser loves money, or a show-off loves applause? Those people give up food and sleep for what they care about. And working for the common good gets less from you than that?…
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations has long spoken to me. Yet it is an extremely odd book. It was not written for us. The title it was given was Ta eis Heauton: “Things to Himself”. But that is perhaps a label imposed on it by a later librarian.
It nags, scolds, consoles and nags again.
Mark was the most powerful man in the Mediterranean world. Yet he wrote much of it not in luxury in Rome in his palaces, but rather in tents along the Danube frontier. Notes like “Among the Quadi, on the Gran” and “At Carnuntum” were left as datelines. And his role among those tents was, well, primarily as a figurehead: showing that the emperor cared while his professional generals went about their jobs of trying to stabilize the situation and secure the safety of the cities and farmers of the Danube Valley.
Yet for more than half a millennium it has been one of the most widely read works of ancient philosophy.