How Marcus Aurelius Wrote for Eternity

Three Techniques That Make "Meditations" Timeless

How many notebooks survive 1,800 years?

Through plague, famine, and war, the fragile papyrus journal of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius endured. Byzantine scribes and Christian monks recopied it by hand. Renaissance thinkers eagerly printed it, and its modern title, Meditations, periodically appears on best-seller lists.

This makes no sense!

Marcus wasn’t writing for an audience, and his notebook is a repetitive jumble. There’s no spicy court intrigue and gossip, and we learn little of Marcus’s era or personal life. The journal, originally called “to himself,” is filled with philosophical exercises and scribblings about the type of person Marcus wants to be. 

It should be boring. It should have been lost and forgotten. 

But it’s still with us, and it’s glorious. 

There’s a reason why 60 generations labored to keep Meditations from crumbling away: they loved it.

I want to talk about why. 

An Original Book Without Original Ideas

Meditations holds no startling insights. You won’t find a single original philosophical thought in it.

The book’s power comes from mashing up and repackaging staid ideas in striking new formulations. As Einstein observed, “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought¹.”

Marcus had a way with words and a curator’s eye for collecting powerful ideas. Like a bee gathering nectar from a thousand flowers, Marcus made honey, and we get to feast on it.

So what blooms did Marcus visit to fuel his thinking?

He quotes and reformulates many plays, poems, and philosophers, including:

• Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus Rex,” and a half dozen plays by Euripides. They premiered in Athens 600 years before Meditations. 

• Plato, who lived 530 years before Marcus. 

• The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who lectured a generation before Marcus.

• Homer’s Illiad and The Odyssey, composed 1,000 years before the emperor’s birth

• Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” written 880 years before Meditations. 

• The enigmatic philosopher Heraclitus, who lived six centuries before Marcus. 

• Aesop’s fable of The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse, from 750 years before Marcus’s time. 

But we should also note who’s not in Meditations. The popular Stoic philosopher Seneca isn’t quoted, though his philosophical plays and books were “in the hands of every young man²,” in Rome 80 years before.

Though the emperor credits his mother, teachers, and adopted father, he draws on few other contemporary thinkers because he wasn’t overly concerned with the zeitgeist. Instead, he reached into the distant past for inspiration.

Modern thinkers rarely read old books; they’re stuck in the eternal now, drawing inspiration from the same shallow well as everyone else and so never find their unique voice and viewpoint.

Premodern people were less prone to our recency bias. As Geoffery Chaucer said in the 14th century:

For out of old fields, as people say,
Comes all this new grain from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Comes all this new knowledge that people learn.³”

Austin Kleon

developed this idea best in Steal Like an Artist. Every writer should read it.

We don’t need startling originality to succeed as writers and thinkers. Marcus certainly didn’t. Any two ideas can make an idea baby, and Frankenstein mashups may become timeless when polished to a gleam.

Ageless Paradoxes

You can set minds on fire by asserting seemingly contradictory truths. This is the art of paradox, and I consider it Marcus’s forte. His brief almost-contradictions become earworms that never leave us, often mentally surfacing when life is most hectic.

Some of Marcus’s best:

• “You can be happy, even in a palace.”

• “To be free of passion and yet full of love⁴.”

• “Kindness is invincible.”

One of the emperor’s famous paradoxes is, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way⁵."

He means that every setback can be used to fuel growth. This is a chief “play” of the Stoic Game of Life, and the basis of a modern best-selling book.

It’s not Marcus’s idea, but an older Stoic one reformulated many times in many ways:

“It is the crisis that reveals the man. So when it arrives, remember that God, like a wrestling coach, has put you up against a rough young antagonist. Why, you ask? So that you can be an Olympic champion; for this cannot be achieved without sweat.”

— Epictetus, Discourses 1.24.1–2

“A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.”

— Seneca, Letters on Ethics, 91.13

Seneca and Epictetus express the idea well, but it’s Marcus who inspired the modern book, and who usually gets the credit; that’s the power of the right turn of phrase.

Marcus labored over Meditations to get the lines just right. They were only for him, part of the ancient style of philosophical journaling, but he needed them to hit hard and carry truth before his eyes. These paradoxes had utility; they were for making him a better human.

As a young man, long before writing Meditations, Marcus told his rhetoric instructor Fronto, “…what a task it is to round and shape three or five lines and to take time over writing⁶.”

The work seems to have paid off.

Fresh paradoxes are just as interesting today. Assert a contradictory truth and heads will turn.

Epigrams, Maxims, And Mashups

“What is an epigram?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked, and answered, in the form of an epigram: “A dwarfish whole; its body brevity, and wit its soul.”

Epigrams — once lauded conveyers of wisdom — are now considered trite. But Meditations demonstrates that novel ones still make an impact.

Some of Marcus’s Short Phrases That Hit Hard:

• “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul is dyed by the color of your thoughts.⁷”

• “Life is warfare, and a sojourn in a foreign land. Fame after life is nothing more than oblivion⁸.”

• “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one⁹.”

One of Marcus’s most memorable lines is, “The universe is change and life is opinion¹⁰.”

It combines the chief ideas of two philosophers Marcus respected: the Stoic Epictetus and the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclius emphasized that impermanence was the only constant. “No man steps into the same river twice,” he said. Epictetus insisted no external thing could be good or bad; our thoughts make the world what it is.

Editing is the Writing Strategy

Meditations is repetitive for a reason. Marcus returned to the same ideas because they reminded him of philosophical truths that are easy to lose amid the hubbub of life.

But each repetition is composed slightly differently, and you get the sense that Marcus was hunting for just the right composition to make it timeless. This is what his rhetorical instructor Fronto told him to do decades before:

“You must turn the same maxim twice or thrice, just as you have done with that little one. And so turn longer ones two or three times diligently, boldly. ..

…For the greater the thoughts, the more difficult it is to clothe them in words, and no small labour is needed to prevent those stately thoughts being ill-clothed or unbecomingly draped or half-naked.¹¹”

Even though Meditations is a jumble, there are diamonds in it. Those diamonds are the result of dozens of reformulations in search of the perfect words, just the right striking combination of ideas.

The result stood the test of time, and explains the unlikely survival of Marcus’s journal.

1. Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions.

2. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 10.126-121

3. Chaucer, Geoffery. The Parliment of Fowls, 1:22-25.

4. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 1.9

5. Ibid, 5.20.

6. Marcus Cornelius Fronto. Correspondence.

7. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.16

8. Ibid 2.15

9. Ibid. 10.16

10. Ibid 4.3

11. Marcus Cornelius Fronto. Correspondence.