One of my favorite movies of the past few years is The Holdovers. In it, a curmugeonly history professor played by Paul Giamatti, is stuck at the boarding school he works at over the holiday break with one of his students and the cook. On Christmas day he gives both of them a gift, a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In his words “For my money, it’s like the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita all rolled up into one.” High praise, and I certainly get why his character identified with it so strongly, though I cannot quite do the same.
The book begins with an introduction by the translator, who gives some notes on his method, but mostly provides historical context on the life of Marcus Aurelius. Which is beneficial, because it turns out he wasn’t strangled by his son and later avenged by a Roman General-turned-Gladiator. They also establish that this book is mostly a collection of notes that Marcus wrote to himself. Not only did he never intend them to be read by others, he would probably have been mortified that they had been published and distributed across the world. I am still not quite sure how I feel about that. It does not feel at all like a diary and we are uninvited voyeurs into his life, or anything like that. But it still is a bit messed up to take someone’s private philosphical writings and expose them to the world.
As to the actual content of the philosophy, I think Marcus makes a lot of good points, but I also think he says a lot of things from the very privileged position of being the ruler of an entire empire. You get the sense that he does care about the plights of common people (it’s the Senate and buerocrats that draw his ire) but that does not mean he really understands them. A lot of his beliefs can essentially be boiled down to “Good and bad things happen as they are supposed to, so there is no sense in complaining about them” which is easy to say when you’re not starving each day, or fighting in a war for your Emperor.
Overall though, it was a very interesting insight into the mind of Marcus Aurelius and it makes him seem much more human than you would expect of someone of his time and position. It’s also very short and goes by quickly despite some elements being pretty repetitive.
