The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written in Greek to steady himself — now word by word in the language he actually used.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Meditations, and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like. A few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Book 1 and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Meditations’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
The private notebook of a Roman emperor, writing to no one but himself. Marcus Aurelius kept it in Greek, the language of philosophy, while he was the most powerful man alive, and he never meant a line of it to be read.
He wrote most of it in the 170s AD, in his fifties, on the northern frontier during the long wars against the Germanic tribes along the Danube. The first book is a list of debts: what he owed his mother, his tutors, his adopted father the emperor Antoninus. The rest is a man arguing himself back to calm, night after night. The Greek was printed for the first time in 1559, from a manuscript that has since disappeared.
The book has no real title. The Greek heading is τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, ta eis heauton, ‘to himself.’ The same few words come back on almost every page: the ἡγεμονικόν, the part of you that governs, and the ὅλον, the Whole you are a small piece of. Translations spread these into smooth sentences. In the Greek they stay clipped, the way a tired man writes to keep his footing.
Reading it word by word, the emperor of the quotation posters fades and you are left with the man at the desk, telling himself the same handful of things over and over because he needs to hear them again.
The words that carry the book. Learn these and most of the text opens up; each links, in the reader, to its full entry. Counts are how often the word appears.
Making an interlinear Meditations is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 1 gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy; you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Meditations that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the Meditations opens. No other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.