Meditations — The George Long Translation (1862) (eBook)

The private notebook of a Roman emperor — in the translation that taught the English-speaking world to read it.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from A.D. 161 to 180, wrote the Meditations in Greek, in camp on the Danube frontier, for himself alone. He never meant it for publication, and it survived antiquity by a thread. This edition prints the complete twelve books in George Long's celebrated 1862 translation — the classic Victorian version, the standard English Meditations for a hundred years — verified word by word against the 1862 first printing, with the silent misprints and modernized spellings of later reprints corrected back to what Long actually wrote.

The translation is named on the cover because here it is the point: this is Marcus as Matthew Arnold's generation read him — "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial" — in Long's exact, unhurried cadence. Modern renderings (including the famous "what stands in the way becomes the way") are different books by different translators; none of their words appear here.

The Companion Classics apparatus includes:

• An introduction — the emperor's notebook, the wars and plague of the 170s, and why this edition prints Long 1862 and says so proudly

• A Who's Who of the Meditations — Antoninus Pius, Faustina, Rusticus, Fronto, Epictetus, Heraclitus, and the teachers of Book I

• Five explainers: Stoicism in one sitting · How the text survived by a thread · Why translations differ · The Rome of the 170s · How to read this book

• A short, honest life of Marcus Aurelius — the philosopher-king, the Commodus succession, and all

• A period-context note on slavery, empire, and the persecution question under his reign

• Discussion questions for every one of the twelve books, plus eight on the whole work — written for George Long's text and keyed to his sections

Complete and unabridged: all twelve books, all 487 sections, in the translation of 1862. EPUB, yours to keep, readable on any device.