Thomas Ballard
Hi, for this cycle
I read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I found out about this book from
a YouTube video about his life. Marcus was an emperor during the Roman empire,
who has inspired many, even after his death. The book starts with a 50-page insightful
preface. The preface is about the life of him, his relations with others, and
mostly about his philosophy and why he thought the way he did. It was creepy
how much we know about someone who died almost 2000 years ago, but it was also interesting.
My favorite part of the preface was the context it gave and more specifically
how it gave the role of philosophy in ancient life. Philosophy was expected to tell
people how to live, which is like the role that some people assign to religion currently.
At some points the preface was confusing or boring, but it was still helpful to
read before the book. Meditations is a book written not with a specific
audience. It reminded me of scripture or a manifesto. They are simply philosophy
notes that he was writing to himself, so they give an insight into his mind.
The philosophy
that Marcus is associated with is stoicism, a philosophy about accepting your
role and an idea of order in nature. A stoic ideal especially highlighted is the
Logos, a complicated concept that is explained well throughout the book.
Essentially, the Logos is how the order of nature is, how things are supposed
to happen, and how we are supposed to accept it. One of my favorite quotes from
the book are “to do harm is to do yourself harm, to do an injustice is to do
yourself an injustice—it degrades you,” from book 9, number 4. I find this quote
interesting because it is a view that many people share today, but it is, by
nature, a selfish way of thought. It says that our only purpose of not harming
others is because we must worry about ourselves.
I would recommend
the book to anyone who has heard of him, is interested in philosophy, and/or
takes Latin because many of the characters that are referred to in the text are
from our culture days in Latin. This book is one that you can always reread as more
of the meanings will come to you the more you read it. I give this book an
8/10, because I think that it was interesting to me, however some points were
harder to read than others, for example the preface, which had lots of
characters with long, ancient names that confused me many times. Thanks for
reading!
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Tom
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