Meditations, the Penguin Classics paperback
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius, 180 CE
- Edition
- Edition Meditations (Penguin Classics)
- ISBN
- ISBN 9780140449334
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Translated by
- Translated by Martin Hammond
The book itself, by post, in our packaging.
Posting to
Postage £3.50, tracked, 2 to 4 working days.
No more talking at all about what sort of person a good man is: be one.
In the parcel
The book, the Penguin Classics edition, in a rigid mailer.
An ex libris stamp pressed into the title page, the Daily Canon mark, with a line for your name.
A bookmark embossed with the mark, made for us by Mount Street Printers in London.
A postcard of the book’s own sky, the painted scene the app opens on.
Packed in London in one evening and posted tracked. UK postage is in the price; elsewhere by zone at checkout.
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About the book
In a campaign tent on the Danube frontier, the ruler of the known world wrote himself reminders he never meant another soul to read. Marcus Aurelius could command legions, raise temples, and end a life with a word, and the only thing he could not trust was his own character under the weight of all that power. So he kept a private notebook, in Greek, and filled it with corrections: rise though the bed is warm, do not rage at fools, remember that the man who wronged you this morning is your kinsman, remember above all that you will die and soon. There is no audience here, no pose, only an emperor talking himself back toward decency one entry at a time. That is what makes it beautiful and almost unbearable at once. Two thousand years later you are reading a powerful man's quarrel with himself, and the wisest book ever written about how to live turns out to be the one its author never meant for you to see.