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