The Logos Scripture · The Book of Marcus Aurelius
The Book of Marcus Aurelius 7 · Notes to himself. Written by his own hand, and not for any reader
Marcus Aurelius, born at Rome in 121, died in 180 with the army on the Danube. Emperor from 161 for nineteen years, through plague, flood and war on the frontier, and he spent most of them in camp. The notebooks are in Greek, twelve of them. He wrote his own, but not for publication. These are private notes: written in a camp, at night, for himself. He gave them no title and did not mean them to be read. So they repeat themselves, and much of them is a man talking himself into things; the Order deletes none of it — that is precisely the use of this book: it is not being explained to you, it is a man being watched at the work. He was the most powerful man alive. Another in this scripture was a slave (cf. The Book of Epictetus). What the two of them say is very nearly the same thing. The Order holds that this fact is worth more attention than either man’s sayings: one doctrine, tested from the very bottom and from the very top. Chapter six matters most: his pages are full of gods, and he never once closes an argument with one — he puts it as providence or atoms, works out both, and arrives at the same conclusion. That is the thing the Order takes him for.