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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Meditations, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Philosophy, The Mind, and Living Well
Relationships and The City
Nature and the Gods
Mortality and Dying Well
Summary
Analysis
Marcus Aurelius thanks his grandfather and his parents for imparting virtues like self-control, integrity, religious piety, and generosity. He also thanks his great-grandfather for investing in his education by hiring private tutors.
Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 C.E. In Book I of his Meditations (divided into sections by later copyists and publishers), Marcus expresses his gratitude to various people to whom he’s indebted. The values he mentions anticipate some of the book’s overall themes of living philosophically both in a community and before the gods.
Themes
Marcus is indebted to various teachers: his first teacher taught him not to get caught up in sports rivalries. Diognetus taught him to practice philosophy and to adopt an austere lifestyle. Rusticus taught him to train his character and to study rhetoric. Apollonius taught him to pay attention to the logos and to remain steady no matter what happens; Sextus taught him how to live according to nature.
Marcus’s thank-yous provide a good introduction to the book’s themes. Marcus’s “first teacher” was likely a household slave, Diognetus was Marcus’s drawing teacher, Rusticus was a city prefect, and Apollonius of Chalcedon and Sextus were both Stoic philosophers. The logos refers to the universal divine power which also manifests in each person’s rational mind.
Themes
Severus taught Marcus to value Thrasea, Helvidius, and Cato and to imagine a society characterized by equal laws and liberty of subjects. Marcus’s adopted father taught him to consider the public good, to ask good questions, to take a measured attitude toward material comforts, and not to be self-congratulatory. Like Socrates, Antoninus Pius could both enjoy and abstain from things moderately. His self-control was “the mark of a soul in readiness.”
Thrasea, Helvidius, and Cato were all Roman practitioners of Stoicism, showing that Marcus studied philosophy from a young age.Antoninus Pius was Marcus’s predecessor as Emperor as well as his adoptive father.The reference to Socrates is to Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates is praised for his detachment and his soul’s constant “readiness” for death.
Themes
Marcus also thanks the gods for granting him a good family, teachers, and acquaintances. He thanks them for giving him a father who taught him to not to live an ostentatious lifestyle as a ruler. He’s grateful, too, that he wasn’t excessively talented in rhetoric or poetry, and that he was clearly shown what it means “to live as nature requires.” He also gives thanks to the gods for his loving wife, and that in his pursuit of philosophy, he hasn’t gotten bogged down in either quackery or obscure scholarship.
Marcus’s reverence for the gods recurs throughout the book. Surprisingly, Marcus gives thanks for the things he’s not good at because they might have occupied too much of his time, taking him away from philosophy. Philosophy—by which Marcus means “living as nature requires,” a practical pursuit rather than an abstract, academic one—will emerge as the most important thing in his life.
Themes
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