John Sellars

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (b. 121–d. 180) was the author of a series of philosophical reflections that are best known in the English-speaking world under the title Meditations. In the Meditations Marcus reflects on a range of philosophical topics as well as challenges in his own life. The book is unlike any other philosophical text that has come down to us from Antiquity, taking the form of a collection of notebook jottings that were probably never intended for wider circulation. With the exception of Book 1, which reflects on Marcus’s debts to various people that have been important in his life, the remaining eleven books of philosophical and personal reflections are in no particular order and display no obvious structure. Many of the philosophical positions that Marcus holds, and the arguments underpinning them, remain unstated but various remarks in the text and elsewhere (especially Marcus’s correspondence with his rhetoric tutor Fronto) make it clear that Marcus was committed to Stoicism. The Meditations contains numerous examples of someone trying to respond to problems in everyday life in the light of not just Stoic ethics but also Stoic physics and Stoic logic. Although Marcus quotes often from Plato and occasionally uses Platonic terminology his philosophical worldview remains thoroughly Stoic. He often quotes from the Stoic Epictetus, whom he explicitly acknowledges as an important influence, and he also quotes from Heraclitus, whose image of nature as everlasting fire influenced Stoic physics. How the Meditations were preserved after Marcus’s death and through the Middle Ages remains obscure, and the text did not attract any significant number of readers until the first printed edition in the 16th century. Since then it has proved especially popular with general readers although less so with professional philosophers. In the 17th and 18th centuries Henry More, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson were all avid readers of Marcus. More recently he has been an important influence on Pierre Hadot’s account of philosophy as a way of life, which, in turn, influenced the late work of Michel Foucault.

In the 1st century BCE, the previously unknown lecture notes that we now know as Aristotle’s works were rediscovered, and from then until the end of antiquity they received close attention from philosophers. Both committed followers of Aristotle and Platonists who held that Aristotle was broadly in agreement with Plato wrote commentaries on his works. For the later Platonists in particular, writing commentaries on Aristotle (as well as Plato) became an established way of doing philosophy. Although some commentaries are lost and others survive only in fragments, a substantial number of often lengthy commentaries survive, filling twenty-three large volumes in the standard collection of the Greek texts. To these we can add the Latin commentaries of Boethius and more recent discoveries both in Greek and in Arabic translation. The commentaries are valuable for a number of reasons: for their interpretations of the fine details of Aristotle’s texts, for the philosophical contributions they make to the topics they discuss, and for the information they preserve about earlier philosophers whose works are otherwise lost.