A Summary of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

This is a summary of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Meditations is essentially a scrapbook of thoughts written over a 19-year period, it’s not ordered and it repeats itself frequently as ideas reoccurred to the author at different times. For this reason, it can be hard for a casual reader to extract the myriad messages contained within. This summary helps in that by interpreting Meditations and reducing it from around 50,000 words down to 4,400.

While it has been interpreted the author has done his best not to embellish it. If you ever wish to read the original, the modern Gregory Hays translation on Amazon is excellent as are the two public domain translations: A. S. L. Farquharson, 1944 and George Long, 1862, which are available for free on Wikisource.