half-conscious awareness that the answer Stoicism offered
was not in every respect satisfactory.
Later InfluenceHow or by whom the Meditations was preserved is
unknown. The late-fourth-century Historia Augusta paints a
picture of Marcus lecturing on the Meditations to a
spellbound audience at Rome—one of the charming fantasies
in which that peculiar work abounds, but certainly an
invention. The passage does suggest, however, that the text
was in circulation by the fourth century, when it is also
mentioned by the orator Themistius. It was very likely
familiar also to a contemporary of Themistius’s, the neo-
pagan emperor Julian (known to later ages as Julian the
Apostate), in whose dialogue “The Caesars” Marcus is
pictured as a model for the kind of philosopher-king that
Julian himself aspired to be.
The century that followed Themistius and Julian was one
of decline, at least in the West—decline in political
institutions, and also in the knowledge of Greek. For the next
thousand years Marcus’s work, like that of Homer and
Euripides, would remain unknown to Western readers.
Copies survived in the Greek-speaking East, of course, but
even there the Meditations seems to have been little read.
For centuries, all trace of it is lost, until at the beginning of