In an address to the emperor Valens, On Brotherly Love, he says: "You do not need the exhortations ( Greek: παραγγέλματα) of Marcus. The meditations are short snippets of advice and insights into the nature of reality and how humans can best navigate their way through life. It is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization, and strength. I picked up both Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius and translated by Gregory Hays and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.

A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, it remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. Not prone to go off on tangents, or pulled in all directions, but sticking with the same old places and the same old things. The first challenge with reviewing an ancient work such as this is to clarify WHAT is being reviewed. I could find no listing on Goodreads that I'm confident is a fair reflection of what I actually read. Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it.But it remains unclear how much of the policy is due to Marcus himself, and how far it differs from that of Marcus’s predecessor, Antoninus.

We tend to see the same themes and metaphors popping up over and over again–time is like a river; this will only affect you if you let it, and so on. Marcus immediately acted to carry out what appears to have been Hadrian’s original intention (perhaps ignored by Antoninus) by pushing through the appointment of his adopted brother, Lucius Verus, as co-regent.Marcus often describes the world as being in a process of constant change, yet he sees an underlying unity and direction in the way it works. He claims that the only way a man can be harmed by others is to allow his reaction to overpower him. Not expecting his friends to keep him entertained at dinner or to travel with him (unless they wanted to). They could hardly have guessed that he was destined for the imperial purple, or seen in their mind’s eye the lonely bronze horseman whose upraised hand greets us from the Capitoline hill in Rome across two thousand years. To recognize the malice, cunning and hypocrisy that power produces, and the peculiar ruthlessness often shown by people from "good families.