Why “Meditations” Needs a New Name—According to William O. Stephens

0:00Ryan Holiday: Roll the window down. Do you hear that? It's the sound of spring. So bring on the spring at the Honda Spring Event. Honda's family of hybrids and EVs are ready for wherever spring takes you. Check out the all-electric Honda Prologue, CR-V Hybrid, Accord Hybrid, and Civic Hybrid, all from the 2025 Kelley Blue Book Best Value brand. For great deals, visit your local Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana Honda dealer today. Based on 2025 Consumer Choice Awards from Kelley Blue Book, visit kbb.com for more information. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:44Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Monday is Marcus Aurelius' birthday. It's almost 2 ,000 years old. Pretty incredible. Before I get to that, two quick housekeeping announcements. I'm going on tour. I'm going to be on the West Coast, San Francisco and Portland in June, Midwest, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis in August. Then in the fall and winter, I'm doing Australia. And I'm doing Boston, Philadelphia, D.C. You can grab tickets for that at dailystoiclive.com. And then in honor of Mark Srelis' birthday, on Monday we are doing a live Q &A deep dive into meditations as part of what we've been calling Meditations Month.

1:32Ryan Holiday: I'd love to have you join us. It's not too late to sign up. You can do a leather-bound edition of Meditations to join us in the little book club. Or you can just grab the online guide that we're doing. All that's at dailystoic.com slash meditations. But that brings me to today's guest because, in honor of Meditations Month, I wanted to talk about a new biography of Marcus Aurelius. A friend of mine sent me this review of Meditations in the Wall Street Journal. Let me read this little piece. It's about William Stevens and his new biography. Mr. Stevens writes with vigor and verve, and he refrains from flaunting the expertise he clearly possesses.

2:08Ryan Holiday: It's to his credit that in this book he faces head-on the controversies surrounding Marcus's reign. But one senses his eagerness to resolve all questions in Marcus's favor and preserve the luster of the philosopher king. And this isn't true of all the biographies. Not everyone loves a Marx realist. I don't know what's wrong with these people, but some people obviously take the critical read of Marcus or they just find him uninspiring or uninteresting. That is not at all true in this new bio of Marcus, which I really, really enjoyed. But I wanted to have William on the podcast. I wanted to do a deep dive into meditations because he does have some, dare I say, heretical views.

2:45Ryan Holiday: For instance, he proposes that meditations is the wrong title for meditations. William Stevens is a philosopher who specializes in stoicism and ethics. He's taught Marx to realize for over 30 years at Crichton University. He is now a professor emeritus there. He's written extensively on the Stokes. But you can just tell that he loves Marx. He loves practical philosophy. I don't know what I was expecting, but he was just a bubbly, joyful, curious, open-minded guy. I really appreciated this conversation. I thought it was great. Anyways, really interesting conversation. So interesting, in fact, that at the end of an hour, I was like, hey, man, I think we've got to do a round two of this.

3:25Ryan Holiday: So we're going to schedule a round two. That will go up very soon as well. But in the meantime, here's part one of the deep dive. And I'd love to see you go even deeper by reading this book and joining us in our session on Marcus Aurelius and participate in this sort of Marcus Aurelius month that we are doing. You can grab that at dailystoic.com slash meditations. You can grab Professor Stephen's book, Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher King. You can also grab his biography, Marcus Aurelius, A Guide for the Perplexed, his translation of Epictetus in Caridian, and his book, Stoic Ethics. You can go to his website, williamostevens.com.

4:06Ryan Holiday: That's Stevens with a P-H. I really appreciated this conversation. I thought it was great. And I think you'll like him and the book as well. As I said, don't forget to join us on April 27th for the Meditations Month Q &A. Just head over to the show notes for that link or go to dailystoic.com slash meditations.

4:30Ryan Holiday: Let's go to this idea, which I think is one of the main arguments of your book, which is that meditation shouldn't be called meditations. It should be called memoranda. So walk me through the history of the title and why you think they got it wrong. Right. So most scholars today believe that Marcus did not write these notes with the intention of anyone else reading them. Some scholars have started to question that. Some scholars wonder why they were preserved. If Marcus wasn't okay with others reading them and reproducing them, we don't know. but the copies of the meditations the earliest that we discovered did not have any title appended to them and so these reek notes were they were collected together and they were edited and translated into various languages and so it was up to the translator the translator who produced these editions over centuries starting what in the 1400s if i have that right i could be off by a century or so they were free to put whatever title they wanted to on it how would you describe if it had no title right how would you describe these right yeah and different people appended different titles to the work and some of sometimes some people just call them reflections um others leaned into the greek and said to myself or to himself sometimes it was called the thoughts of marcus aurelius right so what's going to be you know descriptively accurate to capture the content of these writings different people put different things on there and so i'm not going to claim the memoranda as original i'm following uh gregory hayes in his introduction he says, you know, it would be more accurate to describe these as memories, memoranda.

6:42And I thought about that, and I thought about reasons for calling it that, and I decided that that is a better title. Because although meditations became a very popular, even conventional title, it's worth remembering that it's our title that we're affixing to Marcus's writings. He did not call them meditationes in Latin, right? And the themes of memory, how he's going to be remembered, the Stoic doctrines, he needs to remember and apply to his life every day. Memory is a really persistent theme in all 12 books, right? And so that's why I thought, you know, as a philosopher, when you say meditations, unless you're a Stoic fanatic, Unless you're a fan of Marcus, the first thing you think of is not this work, but Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.

7:40And so there was a tradition. I have a medievalist colleague at Creighton who was not persuaded. He said, no, Bill, you got to call it meditations because there's this long history for centuries of the medievals following this tradition. right this medieval tradition of calling it the meditationes in which they titled their works meditations but again they're not following marcus the title is not from him it's from a later editor and i think it's misleading because you have the connotation of transcendental meditation it's got this kind of eastern vibe it's a meditative work navel gazing this ain't what the emperor's doing here, right?

8:27And so the connotations really kind of deflect you. If you're not familiar with the work already, you're going to have different expectations if you pick up a book called Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, and you're looking for these meditative practices. That's not the kind of therapy that he's applying to himself here.

8:47Ryan Holiday: It's also interesting to sort of realize that, yeah, for potentially hundreds of years, it didn't have a title. Like the later Romans weren't calling it meditation. No, absolutely not. And that's why the relationship between the work and its title is much looser, right? And that's why I don't think I'd been an iconoclast by proposing a different title for it, because he didn't give it one at all. And so this is just a kind of historical accretion. This is just a residue of centuries-old decision that one editor made that several others thought, oh, okay, I'll call it that too. Oh, okay, I'll call it that too.

9:31But it's not a very deliberative way to come up with the title for a work, just as shorthand, right?

9:37Ryan Holiday: And when you're reading it, do you feel like this was the order he wrote it in, or do you feel the hand of an editor moving stuff around? That's really hard to answer. I mean, book one makes sense coming first. Why? Because it's basically equivalent to a modern day dedication. It's his list of acknowledgments, right? Here are all of his family members, teachers, mentors who have had a formative influence on him, and he's expressing gratitude to all of this. And he does a marvelous job of taking inventory of all the different character traits, positive character traits, life lessons in how to be in the world, how to respond to people, how to treat people, how to talk to people, how to dress, how to behave, how to speak, how to listen, how to be patient, all of these different virtues, dozens of them, that he ascribes to his formative influences, right?

10:45And he thanks them and gratitude to the gods too, right? So it really is a very dedicatory book. My view is that you can read the books in any damn order you want to. Start with 12, jump to six, then go to two, then go to four, then go to seven. He was repeating the same themes over and over and over again. that's where it really does sort of feel like a journal, right? He doesn't have dates corresponding to each of the entries because it doesn't matter. It's just whatever his thoughts are at the end of the day when he's leading his campaign in the forests of, you know, along the Danube, trying to keep the Roman Empire from being invaded by these displaced peoples, right?

11:30I really don't know how heavily it was edited after book one at all. I don't see a real narrative arc from books two through 12. Do you?

11:41Ryan Holiday: It does seem to end with him dying, you know? Like, those seem like his last words. You mean the writing of it? No, no, no. I mean, the last passage in Meditation. Oh, in 12? Yeah, in book 12, it's because it's worth reading. It's so good. You've lived as a citizen in a great city Five years or a hundred What's the difference? The laws make no distinction And to be sent away from it Not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge But by nature who first invited you in Why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain On an actor, but I've only gotten through Three acts Yes, this will be a drama in three acts The lengths fixed by the power that directed your creation And now directs your dissolution Neither was yours to determine So make your exit with grace The same grace shown to you Either that was Written as he lay dying Or he wrote it after A health scare and they moved it Back towards the end when they knew How the story ended It's as good a place to end as any But of course he's talked about Hurrying up and dying anyway Pages earlier That's what I mean So he's talked about how to get his head on straight When it comes to death for 11 books.

12:58And it's Epicteton. The philosophy is very Epicteton, right? Death is change. Death is change. Birth is change. Teeth coming in is change. Wrinkles are change. Your hair turning gray is falling out. It's change. So there's birth, growth, maturation, decline, and death in everything, in all plants, in all animals, in all human beings, in all civilizations, every house right every structure has a life and it comes to an end and you know that's nature recycling its bits its parts and your parts are the whole so his muriology that's something I try to emphasize when I write about the memoranda parts and holes this is very very stoic right see yourself as a part within the whole what are the different holes of which you play a part And it gives you a holistic perspective, the view from above, right?

13:55Ryan Holiday: Well, one of the things I think is so remarkable about meditations, and obviously you see it highlighted better in different translations. You know, the better the translator, the better he comes off. But I was reading last year. Yeah, exactly a year ago. The estate of Joan Didion published this thing called Notes to John. And what they'd found after she had died is that she had written after every one of her therapy sessions, she'd written a series of notes about what she just talked about with her therapist. She was struggling with some stuff with her daughter who was drinking herself to death.

14:29Ryan Holiday: She wrote these notes to her husband about what they talked about so he could sort of help as a parent. You're reading this thing that Joan Didion never intended to publish. And you read some of these sentences and you go, she just cannot write poorly. Here she is scribbling some notes to herself, not, you know, intended only for one other person's eyes. And you just see the Joan Didion, you know, bursting through. Right. And there is something remarkable about meditations that it's there's no other way to say this. It's so fucking well written that it almost defies belief that he could have written this not intending other people to look at it.

15:10Ryan Holiday: Absolutely agree. And yet, if you read different translations, it's remarkable how the texture and the flavor, how different it is. I've been participating in a Stoic meetup for several years now, and it's a wonderful group. And sometimes there are only three of us there, and sometimes there are 15 or 20 of us there. We meet every other week, right? And the decision was made when we decided to read the memoranda, or as you persist in calling it, despite my good arguments, Ryan, you still insist on referring to it as the meditations, even though that's a distortion. It's all right. I'm dead naming meditations to borrow a modern term.

15:53We could be neutral and just say his notebook, or Marcus's notes, right? The decision was made to use the Gregory Hayes translation. And I'm very familiar with the Hayes because I taught it for years at Creighton. And it's got a kind of poetry to it. And the introduction is good. And it's translated by a classicist, but he's not primarily a philosopher. So it's really more of a kind of literary. He likes to be rather telegrammatic. He likes to keep his Marcus short rather than a more expansive. What is he really saying with these few Greek words here? So I was familiar with the Hays, but we would compare it with other translations.

16:39And I really started poking through the Greek more closely. Hays is not true to the Greek. Oh, no, don't tell me this. It's true. I know you like the Hays translation, but we compared it to more recent translations. And the Waterfield, also great. It's really good. He's got the great notes. He knows his Greek inside out. He knows the idioms in Greek. He knows how to present them in a graceful way in readable English, right, in smooth English. So the water field, wonderful. One thing I have noticed, I don't know, I want to get too deep in the weeds with philology, unless you want to. But the Farquhararson is really favored by a number of scholars.

17:28I was a little surprised by that because it's older. But if you read the Farquharson, it's got its own kind of literary poetry to it, too. And of all my ancient texts that I have, even including Plato, I have more different translations of this work than I have of any other. More than the Republic, more than the Symposium, other marvelous pieces of literature, right? Because each decade, each few years, for centuries, different translators have taken a whack at rendering Marcus's Greek into English or Italian or French, right? Yeah. Or German, right? And so there's so many different English translations that it's really neat to see how they've changed over decades and even over centuries.

18:19Ryan Holiday: Well, it's much easier to compare, you know, book 536 and book 536 and book 536 because you're able to put these little snippets side by side. So it also lends itself quite easily to be translated and retranslated. And, of course, illustrating that idea that nothing is really stable, everything is changing, everything is subjective, all of life is opinion. Ironically, the book itself becomes kind of an illustration of that idea. Yes, it just doesn't get old. Fresh translation, you know, to make certain, it really changes how you see his thoughts, how you feel the ideas that he's conveying. and it's good.

19:08It'll keep translators employed for a long, long time because in another 10, 20 years, maybe sooner than that. In fact, oh my gosh, I was asked to take a look at this book proposal where this guy was offering a new translation, but he wasn't translating the Greek. He was repackaging an earlier English translation, changing the English, making it fit what he wanted Marcus to say. And I thought this was odd, right? I mean, because you're translating the translation. Yeah. It's a picture of a picture. Exactly. If you want to get as close to Marcus's thoughts as you can, then take a course in ancient Greek, get yourself a big fat Greek to English lexicon, and man up, learn ancient Greek, and then read it in Greek.

20:04But for many of us, you know, many of us want to be classicists, such as myself. I'm a philosopher. I'm not a classicist. I can't pick up Herodotus or Thucydides and read it fluently. But I know enough philosophical Greek to puzzle through the sentences. And so we rely on translators. And that's understandable, right? Because reading Greek is hard. It takes a lot of hard work to learn how to read Greek. But reading Marcus in Greek, I'm sure it's a joy.

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23:09Ryan Holiday: So moving on from the memoranda, there's a line in this book, Marcus Aurelius, a great man or the greatest man? I would say none of the above. Yeah, you say Marcus is neither a villain nor a hero. Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for asking me this question, because I will confess that there was a review of my book written by, to my respect, in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, James Rump. He's a good guy. Yeah. He's a good guy. He faults me for treating Marcus as a sage throughout my book. And in the last chapter, as you know, because you've read my book closely, I explicitly say that Marcus was not a sage.

23:50He was not a sage. Because there are no sages. Epictetus was not a sage. Seneca was not a sage. Marcus was not a sage. And he knew that he wasn't a sage. He was a good man. Yeah. Based on the historical record, my judgment is that he was a good man. Was he a great man? Well, he was maybe a good emperor, but he wasn't faultless in that regard because there were Christians who were brutally executed during his reign. Not directly by him, but as a result of the policies that he inherited from Antoninus Pius and the actions of provincial governors who treated Christians who refused their religious faith, which was against the law, right?

24:40They were enforcing Roman law. They were given chances to, three chances apparently, to say, no, I'm not a Christian. And if they refused to do that three times in a row and make a little sacrifice to the emperor, who was divine, and to the gods, then they would be executed and executed sometimes in brutal, brutal fashion. And Marcus, you know, his other warts include, as we know from the memoranda, his admission that, you know, he was glad that he didn't take sexual advantage of a couple of his slaves. Wow. Good job. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, talk about no informed consent, right? The bar is on the floor.

25:19Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, the big one he's faulted for is anointing Commodus to be his co-emperor and successor. But there, I mean, he didn't have a crystal ball. He didn't know how bad Commodus was going to be. And it was the first chance to have a biological succession in several generations because Hadrian didn't have a son and Antony Spius did not have even his own biological son. So it had been quite a while before there could be succession from father to son, emperor to emperor. And Thomas was, you know, his son or at least his wife's son. What should he have done? Depending on what you want to believe about the rumors.

26:10So getting back to your question, he was a good man. He was sanctified for centuries by Christian writers. They embraced him as a proto-Christian, even though he was a pagan and a polytheist and above all believed in Stoic theology, right? Zeus is the active principal organizing the cosmos. He didn't know much about the Christians at the time. And the same happened with Epictetus, right? St. Jerome thought Epictetus was just wonderful. And so they appropriated these pagan philosophers who expressed gratitude for the gods and following God's will, both Epictetus and Marcus. So they lent themselves to that kind of Christian tradition, even though they themselves were pagans.

26:57And so he was sanctified and treated as a saint. But Marcus wasn't a saint. He had faults. He had a temper. You know, there were things that we could criticize about how he ruled, but he managed as well as he could through the plague and the wars and being separated from his wife. And, you know, whether she was unfaithful or not, we don't know. And then the big blow for him was the revolt, right, when Cassius tried to usurp the throne. And that didn't go too well for him. So if you can't even trust your generals, if you can't trust your most competent, successful general as someone you could handpick to be your successor, who are you going to pick when you got a son right here?

27:47Ryan Holiday: That's a really interesting. I didn't think about it that way. Right. There would have been a sort of a paranoia, rightfully so. You know, they say it's not paranoia. People really are out to get you. There is a reason that that he might have had to try to keep it within the family after something like Avidius Cassus. Exactly. His most trusted general. And this guy wielded, you know, the most military power. He was in charge of the entire Eastern Empire in terms of the military. And so he would have been a natural choice if he didn't decide to, you know, overthrow Marcus, allowing others to egg him on, maybe through letters from Faustina.

28:25You know, Marcus's health is bad. And my son is too young. And, you know, maybe she was worried that she and the young Commodus, boy Commodus, would have been killed if somebody strong didn't, you know, take over from Marcus. And maybe he had a health scare. and so she encouraged Ovidius Cassius to make his play. That was common in Roman history, too. If you've got the military cojones to go for it, and you've got thousands of troops that are going to carry your standards for you, you can declare yourself emperor, and then you duke it out on the battlefield, and whoever wins is in control.

29:05Ryan Holiday: It's interesting you were making this distinction between good and great. And I sometimes compare Marcus Aurelius, who I think is actually an underrated president, but someone like Jimmy Carter, where the greatness is the fact that given the vast majority of the people who hold the job are not good, to be good and find yourself in the job and to remain good while you're in a job that we know absolutely is corruptive, that is a form of greatness. Yes, yes. I agree with that. Absolutely. And Carter's humility, right? He was a wise man, but he was humane. He recognized, he appreciated people's strengths and weaknesses.

29:53And it's Marcus's humanity that I really try to bring out in the book. He knows his own weaknesses. He knows his own frailties and he sees them in other people. And yet he recognizes his kinship with them. He's not some sort of demigod above them. He didn't believe he was a god. That was more kind of political trapping, I think, for Marcus. But their understanding of the divine and ours is, it's really a different world, right? This notion of the talks to Orem, peace with the gods, and you give these sacrifices to keep them happy and this sort of thing. This is not acute philosophical metaphysics and theology here.

30:35But Marcus was comfortable moving in that kind of popular religious sphere because he recognized that that was meaningful to his subjects. And he's got to, you know, keep people living together. Sure. it's Rome. So it's not like, you know, he's a peacemonger. Yes, he's going to defend the empire. He's going to defend it. It is an empire. And so that's his responsibility too. But yeah, like you said, he resisted the ubiquitous corrupting forces, all the different sycophants who were trying to poison him into thinking, he's a god. He's got all this power. He can make the world any way he wants to.

31:15Marcus recognized his limitations because he ran up against them again and again every day he was ruling.

31:21Ryan Holiday: Although it also might be worth considering, or sometimes I think like, you know, Carter was a good man and perhaps that goodness hampered him a little bit as a president. You could argue, you know, with Truman, maybe with Grant also, where the decency, the loyalty, assuming the best about the people around you, sometimes that as a personality style isn't always well suited to the ruthlessness or the binary nature of being a head of state. Like, obviously, at some level, Marcus Aurelius needed to cut ties with Commodus or perhaps, you know, sharing power with his loser stepbrother. Well, a magnificent gesture, You know, what wasn't necessarily the best move?

32:14Ryan Holiday: So so there is something interesting, I think, about this idea of like the test case of the philosopher king. Maybe philosophers aren't always so well suited to power. It's a question of whether the cynicism helps or hurts. Yeah. Right. I mean, the Marcus passage, of course, is, you know, when he's wrestling and his opponent jabs him in the eye. right that's against the rules and so marcus says okay now how am i going to respond he says distance you don't get angry you don't hate the guy for in the heat of the moment in the competition jabbing you in the eye or pulling your hair but if he bites you well come on then you want to keep your distance from people like that so so how does a humane president deal with ruthless people Yes.

33:03That's a tough question because you don't want to become like your enemy. And another Marcus passage, right? Sure. Don't become like your enemy. Why is he your enemy? Because you and he have different values. You have different judgments about what's good. Right. And if ruthlessness is bad and mercy is good, then don't let yourself become ruthless. That doesn't mean being naive. It doesn't mean being a patsy, right? How do you remain strong and open to diplomacy? it.

33:36Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think it's interesting that the first thing that Athena Doris and Arius Didymus, the two Stoic teachers of Octavian, tell him to do is to murder Caesarian. Your use of the word ruthlessness there is interesting because, yeah, there is a certain amount of that perhaps required or certainly required in a ruthless world like Rome. And maybe the Stoics just weren't cut out for that. And that itself was a virtue. I mean, you know, Cato was a pretty mediocre politician himself. Yes. But think about, I mean, again, with Marcus's biography, think about how he treated his fallen enemies. He would not have executed Avidius Cassius if he captured him.

34:20He would have just exiled him. He exiled his political enemies. He did not execute them when he could have. They showed him, according to the report from the story Augusta, they showed Marcus the severed head of Avidius Cassius. He said, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that. Right. The guy's already lost. He made a bad decision. Because remember, the Stoic doctrine, people do bad things believing that it's good and right for them to do it at the time. It's the Socratic platonic dictum. To know the good is, you know, to seek it. Everyone seeks the apparent good. So all moral failing is a result of ignorance.

35:08It's a kind of moral blindness. You don't punish a blind person for being blind. Right. Right. And so when you defeat an enemy, you can still treat them with dignity, strength, not ruthlessness. Yes. Justice, but fairness too, right? You don't have to go for the most hurtful punishment, right? Prison, okay, instead of execution. And Rome was a brutal place and corporal punishment was par for the course, absolutely. But Marcus, he had them put buttons on the swords so that the gladiators would not always suffer the most grievous mortal wounds, right? Because they didn't have the National Football League and they didn't have soccer and college football.

35:59They didn't have, you know, the kind of more benign, less violent sports that we enjoy today.

36:07Ryan Holiday: I feel like we are just getting started. Would you be open to doing a round two on this? I feel like I got a million more questions about this book. Yeah, yeah.

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