The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Everyman's Library)

The Everyman’s Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the world’s greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everyman’s Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors’ lives and works.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Analects by Confucius

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy

The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Histories by Herodotus

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Iliad by Homer

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Odyssey by Homer

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

The Republic by Plato

Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Ulysses by James Joyce

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everyman’s Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everyman’s Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121—180) embodied in his person that deeply cherished, ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His Meditations are not only one of the most important expressions of the Stoic philosophy of his time but also an enduringly inspiring guide to living a good and just life. Written in moments snatched from military campaigns and the rigors of politics, these ethical and spiritual reflections reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality, and a spirit attuned to both the particulars of human destiny and the vast patterns that underlie it.

 

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121—180) embodied in his person that deeply cherished, ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His Meditations are not only one of the most important expressions of the Stoic philosophy of his time but also an enduringly inspiring guide to living a good and just life. Written in moments snatched from military campaigns and the rigors of politics, these ethical and spiritual reflections reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality, and a spirit attuned to both the particulars of human destiny and the vast patterns that underlie it.

 

A. S. L. Farquharson (1871—1942) spent a lifetime on his edition of the Meditations, which is one of the outstanding twentieth-century achievements of classical scholarship. All the notes to the Farquharson translation, amplifying the twelve books of the Meditations, are included in this volume.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born to an upper-class Roman family in A.D. 121 and was later adopted by the future emperor Antoninus Pius, whom he succeeded in 161. His reign was marked by a successful campaign against Parthia, but was overshadowed in later years by plague, an abortive revolt in the eastern provinces, and the deaths of friends and family, including his co-emperor Lucius Verus. A student of philosophy from his earliest youth, he was especially influenced by the first-century Stoic thinker Epictetus. His later reputation rests on his Meditations, written during his later years and never meant for formal publication. He died in 180, while campaigning against the barbarian tribes on Rome’s northern frontier.

Gregory Hays is assistant professor of classics at the University of Virginia. He has published articles and reviews on various ancient writers and is currently completing a translation and critical study of the mythographer Fulgentius.

From the Hardcover edition.