Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: A War-Tent Diary That Nearly Vanished

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Marcus Aurelius was born into the Roman aristocracy to Marcus Annius Verus and Domitia Lucilla and drafted into the succession when Antoninus Pius adopted him, a tie sealed by his marriage to Faustina the Younger. Herodes Atticus and Fronto trained him in rhetoric, but the Stoic Rusticus taught him to separate what he could control from what he could not. After taking the throne in 161 AD, at first with co-emperor Lucius Verus, he faced the Parthian War, the Antonine Plague carried home by returning soldiers, and the Marcomannic Wars. From 170 to 180 AD he ran the empire from frontier camps such as Sirmium and Carnuntum.

In those camps he wrote private notes to himself in Greek, now published in 12 books as Meditations, with the first book noted as written among the Quadi on the River Granua. He reframed prized things in raw terms, describing imperial purple as sheep's hair soaked in shellfish blood and a banquet as dead fish and birds. After his death in 180 AD the text disappears from view for about 700 years until Arethas of Caesarea, a Byzantine bishop, acquires a worn copy in the 10th century and has it transcribed. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, scholars carried Greek manuscripts west, and in 1558 Wilhelm Xylander and publisher Conrad Gessner printed the first edition in Switzerland. The manuscript they used was then lost.

• The hosts weigh the critique that a Stoic emperor led bloody wars against his view of rule as an assigned duty.
• The text had no title and was likely known as To Himself.
• A 14th century historian suggested he wrote it to educate his son Commodus.
• The Vatican manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 1950 is known for textual corruptions and missing lines.
• Bill Clinton and former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao have both cited the book as important to them.