Meditations

Macronized. Every long vowel in the Latin is marked.

Marcus Aurelius’s personal notes and musings on Stoic philosophy, commonly known as his Meditations, were written in Greek and survived from antiquity in only a handful of manuscripts. Wilhelm Xylander put them into Latin for the first printed edition (Zurich, 1558), and for nearly a century his Latin was the version through which European readers knew the book.

This new edition aligns Xylander’s Latin translation to Leopold’s Greek text. This book is great for those who want to immerse themselves in the Meditations without relying extensively on their native language. Long marks have been added to the Latin, along with an English introduction by Matthew Arnold.

Intrō respice: intus est fōns bonī, semper scaturiēns, siquidem semper fodiās.
Look within: within is the fountain of good, ever ready to bubble up, if you will ever dig.
Meditations VII.59

First edition, 2026. Paperback, 6 × 9 inches, 252 pages.

The Greek text follows Jan Hendrik Leopold’s edition, M. Antoninus Imperator Ad Se Ipsum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1908). The Latin is Wilhelm Xylander’s translation, from the first edition of the Greek and Latin, De seipso seu vita sua libri XII (Zurich: Andreas Gesner, 1558), in the copy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. The introduction is from Matthew Arnold’s essay “Marcus Aurelius,” in Essays in Criticism (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865). The edition is listed on our Sources page, with a link to a scan of the original.