One Lesson From Each Book Of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations

Twelve powerful principles from the Roman Emperor’s journal

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is perhaps the most popular and accessible of the ancient Stoic texts we have today.

Ryan Holiday of The Daily Stoic has read the book more than 100 times. The founder of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, read it in high school and was hooked. The 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton, reads it once a year.

Between 2012 and 2019, sales of the book increased from 16,000 to 100,000 before skyrocketing further during pandemic lockdowns in 2020.

But what keeps people coming back to a Roman Emperor’s 2000-year-old journal?

To help answer that question here, I’d like to share one short lesson from each of the twelve books of the Meditations.

Before we get into the lessons, here’s a little of the lesser-known history on the Meditations if you’re interested:

• The first direct mention of the work was by Arethas of Caesarea in the early 10th century.
• The first printed edition was made in the 16th century. Today’s text is based almost entirely upon two manuscripts — the Codex Palatinus and the Codex Vaticanus 1950.