Why did I love this book?
There are numerous translations of the Meditations available at the moment? Which one is best? And given there are so many, surely there’s no point in anyone translating it again. Well, there’s now another, brand new version available, and I think there are good reasons for it to become people’s first choice. It’s by Robin Waterfield who is a highly experienced and accomplished translator of both Greek history and philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Herodotus, Plutarch, and more). Robin doesn’t just know his Greek; he has a thorough command of Greek philosophy too. What this volume gives, then, is an excellent translation informed by the latest scholarship on Marcus along with a substantial introduction and detailed notes that are helpfully printed as footnotes on the page. While there are other translations out there that are just fine, this is now the one I’d recommend.
3 authors picked Meditations as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the sixteenth emperor of Rome -- and by far the most powerful and wealthy man in the world. Yet he was also an intensely private person, with a rich interior life and deep reservoirs of personal insight. He collected his thoughts in notebooks, gems which have come to be called his Meditations. Never intended for publication, the work survived his death and has proved an inexhaustible source of wisdom and one of the most important Stoic texts of all time. In often passionate language, the entries range from essays to one-line aphorisms, and from profundity to…
