THE MEDITATIONS: GENRE, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE

I suspect that Marcus would have been surprised (and perhaps rather dismayed) to find himself enshrined in the Modern Library of the World's Best Books. He would have been surprised, to begin with, by the title of the work ascribed to him. The long-established English title Meditations is not only not original, but positively misleading, lending a spurious air of resonance and authority quite alien to the haphazard set of notes that constitute the book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus's original—the work was entitled "To Himself" (Eis heauton ). This is no more likely than Meditations to be the original title, though it is at least a somewhat more accurate description of the work. 6

In fact, it seems unlikely that Marcus himself gave the work any title at all, for the simple reason that he did not think of it as an organic whole in the first place. Not only was it not written for publication, but Marcus clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. The entries include a number of cryptic references to persons or events that an ancient reader would have found as unintelligible as we do. While a contemporary might have recognized some of the figures mentioned in Meditations 8.25 or 12.27 , for example, no ancient reader could have known what was in the letter that Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa (1.7 ), what Antoninus said to the customs agent at Tusculum (1.16 ), or what happened to Marcus at Caieta (1.17 ). Elsewhere Marcus reflects directly on his role as emperor, in terms that would be quite irrelevant to anyone else. We find him worrying about the dangers of becoming "imperialized" (6.30 ), reminding himself to speak simply in the Senate (8.30 ), and reflecting on the unique position he occupies (11.7 ). From these entries and others it seems clear that the "you" of the text is not a generic "you," but the emperor himself. "When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors" (10.31 ).

How are we to categorize the Meditations ? It is not a diary, at least in the conventional sense. The entries contain little or nothing related to Marcus's day-to-day life: few names, no dates and, with two exceptions, no places. It also lacks the sense of audience—the reader over one's shoulder—that tends to characterize even the most secretive diarist. Some scholars have seen it as the basis for an unwritten larger treatise, like Pascal's Pensées or the notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Yet the notes are too repetitive and, in a philosophical sense, too elementary for that. The entries perhaps bear a somewhat closer resemblance to the working notes of a practicing philosopher: Wittgenstein's Zettel , say, or the Cahiers of Simone Weil. Yet here, too, there is a significant difference. The Meditations is not tentative and exploratory, like the notes of Wittgenstein or Weil, and it contains little or nothing that is original. It suggests not a mind recording new perceptions or experimenting with new arguments, but one obsessively repeating and reframing ideas long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.

Perhaps the best description of the entries is that suggested by the French scholar Pierre Hadot. They are "spiritual exercises" composed to provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life: a self-help book in the most literal sense. A revealing comment in this context is Meditations 5.9 , where Marcus reminds himself "not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment." On this reading, the individual entries were composed not as a record of Marcus's thoughts or to enlighten others, but for his own use, as a means of practicing and reinforcing his own philosophical convictions. Such an interpretation accounts for several aspects of the entries that would otherwise be puzzling. It explains the predominance of the imperative in the text; its purpose is not to describe or reflect (let alone to "meditate"), but to urge, direct, and exhort. 7 And it explains also the repetitiveness that strikes any reader of the work almost immediately—the continual circling back to the same few problems. The entries do not present new answers or novel solutions to these problems, but only familiar answers reframed. It was precisely this process of reframing and reexpressing that Marcus found helpful.

The recognition that the entries are as much process as product also accounts for the shapelessness and apparent disorder of the work. We do not know by whom or on what basis the individual books of the Meditations were arranged; the order may be chronological, or partly chronological, or wholly arbitrary. The arrangement of the individual entries may or may not be Marcus's own, though its very randomness suggests that it goes back to the author (a later editor would have been tempted to group together thematically similar entries, and perhaps to tie up some of the more obvious loose ends). Nor can we always be sure where individual entries begin and end; in some cases this is a question Marcus himself might not have been able to answer. 8

A special position is occupied by Book 1 , which is distinguished from the rest of the work by its autobiographical nature and by the greater impression of conscious design and ordering apparent in it. It consists of seventeen entries in which Marcus reflects on what he learned from various individuals in his life, either directly or from their example (hence the title I have given the section here, "Debts and Lessons," which has no warrant in the transmitted text). The entries roughly mirror the chronology of Marcus's early life, from his older relatives to his teachers to his adopted father, Antoninus, and ultimately to the gods. 9 This logical schema, as well as the increasing length of the entries, suggests deliberate arrangement, presumably by Marcus himself. If so, then this book, at least, was conceived as an organic whole. It may be among the latest portions of the text, if scholars are correct in thinking (as most do) that the short sketch of Antoninus Pius in Meditations 6.30 was the starting point for the longer memoir in 1.16 .

Attempts to find organic unity in the remaining books or development from book to book are doomed to failure. Wherever one opens the Meditations (with the exception of Book 1 ) we find the same voice, the same themes; Marcus's thought does not change or develop noticeably from one book to another. Nor can any structure or unity be discerned within individual books. It seems most likely that the division between books is a purely physical one. The transmitted "books," in other words, represent the individual papyrus rolls of Marcus's original, or perhaps of a later copy. When one had been filled, another was begun. 10

If the books as a whole are homogenous, the individual entries show considerable formal variety. Some are developed short essays that make a single philosophical point; many of the entries in Books 2 and 3 are of this type. Others are straightforward imperatives ("Take the shortest route …") or aphorisms ("no one can keep you from living in harmony with yourself"). Sometimes Marcus will list a number of basic principles in catalogue format ("remember that … and that … and that …"). Elsewhere he puts forward an analogy, sometimes with the point of comparison left to be inferred. Thus human lives are like "many lumps of incense on the same altar" (4.15 ) or like "a rock thrown in the air" (9.17 ). In other cases the analogy will be made explicit: "Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot …? That's what we do to ourselves … when we rebel against what happens to us" (8.34 ). Others present a kind of formal meditative exercise, as when Marcus instructs himself to imagine the age of Vespasian (4.32 ) or Augustus's court (8.31 ) and then to compare the imagined scene with that of his own time. Portions of two books (7 and 11 ) consist simply of quotations. Some entries appear to be rough drafts for others; several of the raw quotations from tragedies in Book 7 are incorporated in the much more polished Meditations 11.6 . The significance of some entries remains completely obscure. Few critics have known what to make of notes like "Character: dark, womanish, obstinate" (4.28 ) or "They don't realize how much is included in stealing, sowing, buying … " (3.15 ).

The entries also differ considerably in the degree of artistry they display. Some entries are little more than Marcus's notes or reminders to himself—the philosophical equivalent of "Phone Dr. re appt. Tues.?" But others are highly literary. Marcus wrote as a man trained in the rhetorical techniques of the second century. His thoughts naturally took on the impress of his training and intellectual milieu even when he was writing for himself alone.

The shorter entries often display an interest in wordplay and a striving for epigrammatic brevity that recalls both the ingenuity of the rhetorical schools and the paradoxical compression of Heraclitus:

Does the sun try to do the rain's work? Or Asclepius Demeter's? (6.43 )

Evil: the same old thing. (7.1 )

Not a dancer but a wrestler … (7.61 )

To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. (8.33 )

The philosophical tradition may have been influential on another element that we find occasionally: the intermittent snatches of dialogue or quasi-dialogue. As a developed form, the philosophical dialogue goes back to Plato, who was imitated by later philosophers, notably Aristotle (in his lost works) and Cicero. The Meditations certainly does not contain the kind of elaborate scene setting that we expect in a true dialogue, but we do find in a number of entries a kind of internal debate in which the questions or objections of an imaginary interlocutor are answered by a second, calmer voice which corrects or rebukes its errors. The first voice seems to represent Marcus's weaker, human side; the second is the voice of philosophy.

The longer entries (none, of course, are very long) are marked by a coherent if sometimes slightly labored style. Not all critics have had kind words for Marcus's expository prose, and some have been inclined to attribute perceived shortcomings to deficiencies in his Greek. But in all likelihood the occasional awkwardness is due less to an imperfect grasp of the language than to roughness of composition—Marcus thinking aloud or groping for an idea. The same explanation may underlie one of the most noticeable features of Marcus's prose—namely, his tendency to string together pairs of near-synonymous words and phrases, as if uncertain whether he has hit the target the first time. When combined with the very abstract vocabulary natural in philosophical prose, this can make for difficult reading, especially in English, which privileges concision and concrete vocabulary to a greater degree than Greek. At its best, however, Marcus's writing can be extraordinarily effective, most of all when it strikes a balance between image and idea, as in the opening of 5.23 :

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

This particular topic—the transience of human life, the constant change that shapes and informs the world—is a recurrent theme in the Meditations , and as we shall see, it is one whose treatment owes as much to literary as to philosophical models, and as much to Marcus's own character as to Stoic doctrine.