It Is Not the Thing That Disturbs You

The story

Marcus Aurelius wrote the notes later called Meditations in Greek, to himself. He did not publish them. The Greek title is closer to “things to himself.” The books are generally placed in the last years of his reign, the 170s, while he was emperor and often on campaign along the Danube. A single section such as 8.47 cannot be pinned to a day.

Book 8, section 47, draws a line he keeps coming back to: the outside event, and the judgment added to it. George Long’s 1862 translation opens the section with the sentence quoted above. A plain restatement, which is not itself a translation: if something outside hurts, the disturbance is in the judgment, and that judgment can be dropped.

The section does not stop at the famous idea. If the pain comes from your own character, Long has Marcus ask who is stopping you from correcting the opinion. If you are pained because you are not doing what you think is right, act instead of complaining. If an obstacle really cannot be moved, the cause does not depend on you, so grieving it does not help. The last lines even consider leaving life contentedly when the thing you believe you must do cannot be done. Quoting only the first two sentences leaves that harder ending out.

He was not writing this in retirement. From 161 he ruled the Roman Empire, at first with Lucius Verus and, after Verus died in 169, on his own. Commodus was co-emperor with him from 177. The reign included the Parthian war, the Antonine Plague, and years of war on the northern frontier. The notebooks are reminders written against that pressure.

The shorter modern sentence about “power over your mind” and “outside events” has no passage in Meditations that matches it. Treat it as a paraphrase. The citable text is Meditations 8.47, in a named translation.

The picture on this page is a different object from the notebook. Eugène Delacroix’s Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (1844) imagines the death on 17 March 180. Ancient writers agree on that date and disagree on the place: Vindobona, modern Vienna, and Sirmium both have a claim. The canvas shows a deathbed. The quotation shows a private note from the campaigns. They meet in one life, and they are not the same sentence.