Summary: Meditations was not written for readers. It is Marcus Aurelius's private notebook, written in Greek during military campaigns in the 170s AD, and modern scholarship agrees he wrote it to remind himself of Stoic doctrine, not to publish a book.
The man who wrote it
Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. He spent much of the last decade of his reign fighting the Marcomannic Wars along the Danube frontier, and it was there, on campaign, that he wrote at least part of what we now call Meditations. Internal notes in the text place Book 1 in the country of the Quadi, on the Granova (the modern Hron river, in Slovakia), and Book 2 at Carnuntum, a Roman legionary base directly on the Danube.
He wrote in Koine Greek, the literary language of an educated Roman, not in Latin. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is direct about what the book actually is: "Scholars now generally agree (following Brunt 1974) that Marcus wrote for his own moral improvement, to remind himself of and render concrete the Stoic doctrines he wanted to live by." That is the scholarly consensus this page rests on: not a book written to be read, but a set of private notes written to be reread by their own author.
The earliest evidence for the text's existence is centuries after Marcus died. The SEP traces the first clear references to Byzantine writers: the 10th-century Suda lexicon calls it "a directing (agôgê) of his own life," and the bishop Arethas of Caesarea, writing before 907 AD, calls it "the [writings] to himself" (ta eis heauton), the closest thing the book has to an ancient title. "Meditations" itself is a later label. The Stanford entry notes plainly that the title is "due to the modern editor" Meric Casaubon, whose 1634 English translation gave the book the name it carries now.
What we know of his actual practice
Set aside the popular image of Marcus writing by lamplight every night. His own text is far less tidy than that, and far more specific about mornings than evenings.
Book 2 opens like this, in George Long's translation:
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil."
Book 5 opens the same way, with a different problem, waking up:
"In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?"
Both passages are rehearsals. Marcus is not recording what happened yesterday. He is naming, in advance, what he expects to deal with today, and deciding his response before he needs it. This is the pattern scholars point to when they read Meditations as a form of spiritual exercise in Pierre Hadot's sense: not philosophy as a set of arguments to hold, but philosophy as a set of moves you rehearse until they're available under pressure. The SEP entry situates this in Epictetus's own advice to write down, and rehearse, the responses one ought to have ready "at hand" (procheiron) for situations one expects to meet. Marcus was a reader of Epictetus and names him directly in Book 1.
The rest of the text reads the same way throughout: short, blunt instructions addressed to himself in the second person, or to "my soul" directly, as in the opening of Book 10:
"Wilt thou, then, my soul, never be good and simple and one and naked, more manifest than the body which surrounds thee?"
Or a private reminder to step back rather than react:
"Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains, and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself."
None of this is diary-keeping in the ordinary sense. There are no dates, no accounts of what happened at court that day, no record of decisions or people by name in any way another reader could identify. That absence is itself evidence: a writer keeping a record for others tends to supply the context a stranger needs. Marcus supplies none, because he wasn't writing for a stranger.
What the notebook physically was, and how it survived
No manuscript in Marcus's own hand exists. What we have is the result of a long chain of copying, and for most of that chain there is a gap of seven or eight centuries with no evidence at all.
The first person known to have owned and copied a text of Meditations is Arethas of Caesarea, a 9th and 10th-century bishop and manuscript collector, who wrote to a fellow archbishop before 907 AD describing his copy as "an old copy of the Emperor Marcus' most profitable book, so old indeed that it is altogether falling to pieces," which he had recopied. Arethas's own copy is lost, but per Wikipedia's account of the transmission, it is thought to be the likely ancestor of the manuscripts that survive today. The late-10th-century Suda lexicon is the first source to describe the work as divided into twelve books.
The modern text rests on two sources, both centuries removed from Marcus. One is the Codex Vaticanus 1950, a corrupt 14th-century manuscript now in the Vatican Library, missing roughly forty-two lines to accidental omission. The other is the Codex Palatinus, which no longer exists: it was the source manuscript for the first printed edition, produced by Wilhelm Xylander and published at Zurich in 1558 to 1559, and it disappeared sometime after Xylander used it for a second edition in 1568. Everything printed since traces back through those two witnesses, one of them lost.
What a modern reader can actually copy
The honest version of "journal like Marcus Aurelius" is narrower than the internet's version. His own text supports one clear, adaptable move: the morning rehearsal. Before the day starts, name specifically what you expect to be difficult in it, and decide in advance how you intend to meet it. That's what Book 2 and Book 5 are doing.
If what you want is the fuller structured practice, the three-question evening review (what did I do well, where did I fall short, what was in my control), that method exists and works well by voice or by hand, but it comes from Seneca's account of a different Stoic teacher's habit, not from Marcus's own text. The full method, with the historical caveats about what is Marcus's and what is Seneca's, is on Stoic journaling: how Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations. Use this page for the man and the notebook, that one for the nightly technique.
What we do not know
We do not know Marcus's actual daily routine: whether he wrote every day, at a fixed time, in a fixed place, or in bursts during lulls in a campaign. The text gives no dates and no schedule. We do not know how much of it he revised versus wrote once and left. We do not know whether he ever reread earlier entries before adding new ones, though the recurrence of the same handful of moves across twelve books suggests he was working from memory of his own recurring struggles rather than rereading a growing manuscript. Anyone who tells you Marcus journaled nightly, or every morning without fail, or for exactly ten minutes, is inventing detail the sources do not support. This page stops where the evidence stops.
Prompts in his style
These are written for this page. None are direct quotations. Each is built from the theme of a specific passage, cited by book and section in the Long translation, so you can check the source it's drawing from.
- What kind of difficult person am I likely to meet today, and how have I already decided to treat them? (2.1)
- What is the work I exist to do today, and why am I resisting getting up to start it? (5.1)
- What are the few basic principles I can return to right now to get my own quiet back? (4.3)
- Talking straight to myself: what do I actually want, and can I be satisfied with what I already have today? (10.1)
- What is the plain fact I'm reacting to, stripped of the story I've built around it? (8.49, on staying within first impressions)
- Someone wronged me today. What does it look like to answer that without becoming the same kind of person they are? (6.6)
- Where today did I spend my attention on what someone else said or did, instead of on my own conduct? (4.18)
- Where did I fall short of the person I claim to be trying to become? (8.1)
- What did I do today that served only me, and what did I do that served the people around me? (9.23, on the cosmopolis)
- What did I want today that isn't actually good or bad, just something I happened to prefer? (2.11, on indifferents)
- What am I discontented about right now, and what would it look like to accept it as the part I've been given? (4.3.2)
- Pick one thing bothering me right now. What caused it, what is it actually made of, and how long will it really last? (12.18)
Related:
- Marcus Aurelius and other famous journalers
- Stoic journaling: how Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations, for the structured evening-review method