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

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“Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world.”

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast.

Mondays is Marcus really is his 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 in 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, DC. You can grab tickets for that at DailyStoicLive.com. And then in honor of Marcus really is his birthday. On Monday, we are doing a live Q&A deep dive in the meditations as part of what we've been calling the meditations month.

I'd love to have you join us. It's not too late to sign up into a leather bound addition 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/meditations. But that brings me to today's guest because in honor of meditation's month. I wanted to talk about a new biography of Marcus Reelist. Friendmind 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 biologists.

His Mr. Stevens writes with Vigler and Verve. And he refrains from flaunting the expertise he clearly possesses. It's to his credit that in this book he faces head on the controversies surrounding Marcus's reign. But one senses his evenest to resolve all questions in Marcus's favor and preserve the lustre of the philosophy king.

And this isn't true of all the biographies. Not everyone loves Marcus Reelist. I don't know what's wrong with these people, but some people obviously take the critical read of Marcus.

So they just find him uninspiring around an interesting 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. 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 Marcus Reelist for over 30 years at Creighton University. He is now a professor emeritus there.

He's written extensively on the soaps. But you can just tell that he loves Marcus. 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.

“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 around two of this."”

So we're going to schedule around 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 Reelist. We participate in this sort of Marcus Aurelius month that we are doing. You can grab that at dailystoke.com/meditations. You can grab Professor Stevens book, "Marx Reelist Philosopher King." You can also grab his biography, "Marx Reelist" and guide for the perplex. His translation of Epictetus is "Incredion." And his book, "Stolic Ethics."

You can go to his website, William O. Stevens.com. It's Stevens with a PH. 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 27 for the Meditations month of Q&A.”

Just head over to the show notes for that link. We're going to dailystoke.com/meditations. 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.

And so these Greek notes were, they were collected together and they were edited and translate into various languages. And so it was up to the translator, the translator who produced these additions 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 depended different titles to the work and some of sometimes some people just call them reflections.

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. And so I'm not going to claim the memoranda as original. I'm following Gregory Hayes. In his introduction, he says, you know, it would be more accurate to describe these as memories memoranda. And 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 Meditatione is in Latin, right?

“Yeah. 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 Renee Daycard's Meditations on First Philosophy. And so there was a tradition, I have a Medivalist colleague at Crayton who was not persuaded. He said, no Bill, you got to call it Meditations because there's this long history for centuries of the Medivals, following this tradition, right, this Medieval tradition of calling it the Meditatione is 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, naval gazing. This ain't what the emphors do in here, right? And 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 Surrealius, the Meditations.

And you're looking for these meditative practices, that's not the kind of therapy that he's applying to himself here. 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.

“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've 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." But it's not a very deliberative way to come up with the title for a work, just as short hand, right? 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 had had a formative influence on him.

Positive character traits, life lessons in how to, you know, 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.

“It doesn't sub them, that he describes to his formative influences, right? And he thinks them, and a 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 6, then go to 2, then go to 4, then go to 7. Reverse 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?

I really don't know how heavily it was edited after Book 1 at all. I don't see a real narrative art from Book 2 through 12, do you? It does seem to end with him dying, you know? Like those seem like they're writing out their door. No, no, I mean, I mean, the last passage in meditation in 12? Yeah, and Book 12 is, let me, it's because it's worth reading, it's so good.

“You've lived as a citizen in a great city, 500, 5 years or 100, what's the difference the laws make no distinction?”

And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or dishonest judge, but by nature, who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible?

Like the impressor, 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 direct your dissolution, neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace the same grace shown to you. Either that was 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. Right. It's as good a place to end as any.

But of course, he's talked about, you know, hurrying up and dying anyway, pages earlier. Right, but I mean, but yeah, so he's talked about how to get his head on straight when it comes to death. Or for 11 books. Right. And death and it's epic titan. The philosophy is very epic titan. Right. Death is change.

Death is change. Birth is change. Teeth coming in is change. Rinkles are changed. Your hair falling, turning gray falling out.

It's change. So there's birth, growth, maturation, decline, and death in everything, and all plants in all animals and all human beings. And all civilizations. Every house, right, every structure has a life, and it comes to an end. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, that's nature recycling its bits, its parts, and your parts of the whole. So his myriadology, that's something I tried to emphasize when I write about the memoranda. Farts 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 of you from above, right? Well, one of the things I think is so remarkable about medications. 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 the last year, yeah, exactly a year ago.

This state 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 everyone 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. She wrote these notes to her husband about what they talked about.

So if you could, you could sort of help as a parent.

And 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. Like, 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.

Absolutely great.

Yeah, 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 they is, is you persistent calling it despite my good arguments right?”

And you still insist on referring to it as the meditations, even though that's a distortion. Yeah, it's all right. I know that naming meditations. To borrow the water. We could be neutral and just say his notebook, the mark is his notes, right?

Yeah.

The decision was made to use the Gregory Hayes translation.

Yeah. And I'm very familiar with the Hayes because I taught it for years at great. And it's got a kind of poetry to it. Yeah. 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 key 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?”

Yeah. So I was familiar with the Hayes, but we would compare it with other translations.

And I really started poking through the Greek more closely.

Hayes is not true to the Greek. He doesn't tell me this. It's true. I know you like the Hayes translation, but we compared it to more recent translations and the waterfield. Also great. And it's really good.

He's got the great notes. He knows his Greek inside out. He knows the idioms and Greek. He knows how to present them in a graceful way in readable English, right in smooth English. So the waterfield wonderful. One thing I have noticed, I don't know. I want to get too deep in the weeds with the phylogy.

Unless you want to. But the Farqua Harrison is really favored by a number of scholars. I was a little surprised by that because it's older. Yeah. But if you read the Farqua Harrison, it's got its own kind of literary poetry to it too.

And if all my ancient texts that I have, even including Plato, I have more different translations of this word 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. But 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.

“You know, everything is subjective. All of life is opinion. I radically, 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, it really changes how you see his thoughts, how you feel the ideas that he's conveying. And it's good. It'll keep translators, you know, employed for a long, long time, because in another, another 10, 20 years, it'll be maybe sooner than that, it'll be. In fact, oh my gosh, I was, I was asked to take a look at this book proposal where the sky 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, right? And I thought this was odd, right? I mean, because you're translating the translation. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a bit weird. 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-off, learn ancient Greek, and then read it in Greek. But for many of us, you know, many of us want to be classes such as myself.

Yeah. I'm a philosopher. I'm not, I'm not a classist who, I can't pick up Herodotisters through cities and read it fluently.

But I know enough philosophical Greek to, you know, 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.”

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Is it what not dot com slash sell to start selling WHATNOT dot com slash sell? What not dot com slash sell? So moving on from from the memoranda, there's a line in this book. Marcus is really a great man or the greatest man. Because you say he's doing anything about.

Yeah, you say Marcus doesn't need their 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 two.”

I respect the walls of the journal. Yeah, James room. 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. He was not a sage. Because there are no sages.

Sure. If a tedious was not a sage, Senika 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. What's 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 Antonina's Pius and the actions of provincial governors who treated Christians who refused their religious faith. Which was against the law, right? They were enforcing Roman law.

They were given chances to pre-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 defined and to the gods, then they would be executed and executed. Sometimes in brutal brutal fashion. And Marcus, you know, his other words 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. I mean, talk about no informed consent, right? The bar is on the street, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, the big one he's faulted for

But there, I mean, he didn't have a crystal ball. He didn't know how bad cometus 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 Anthony Spies did not have even his own biological son. Right. So it had been quite a while before there could be succession from father to son, emperor to emperor. And cometus was, you know, his son, or at least his wife's son.

What should he, and he don't want you to believe about the rumors. So 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 principle organizing. Sure. Because he didn't know much about the Christians at the time. And the same happened with Epicetus, right? Saint Jerome thought Epicetus was just wonderful.

And so they appropriated these pagan philosophers who expressed gratitude for the gods and following God's will, both Epicetus and Marcus, so they lent themselves to that kind of Christian tradition. Even though they themselves were, were pagans. And 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 on faith or not, we don't know.

“And then the big blow for him was the revolt, right?”

Yes, yes. Try to use the throne. Sure. 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 handpicked to be your successor, who are you going to pick when you got a son right here? That's a really interesting thing. I didn't think about it that way, right? There would have been a sort of a paranoia rightfully so. When, you know, they say it's not paranoia. People really are out to get you.

There is a reason that he might have had to try to keep it within the family after something like a video's cases. Exactly. Exactly. His most trusted general. And this guy wielded, you know, the most military power. He was in charge of the entire Eastern Empire. And so he would have been a natural choice if he didn't decide to, you know, over through Marcus,

allowing others to egg him on, maybe through letters from Faustina. You know, Marcus has helped his bad. And my son is too young and, you know, maybe she was worried that she and caught the young comedist. Boy comics 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 a video's cases to, to make his play. That was common in Roman history, too. If you've got the military, Cahonez, to go for it. And you got thousands of troops that are going to carry your standards for you. You can declare yourself emperor and then you do cut out on the battlefield and whoever wins is in control.

It's interesting you're making this distinction between good and great.

“And I sometimes compare Marcus to really a send, who I think is actually an underrated president,”

but, 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 justice. Yes, I agree with that, absolutely. And Carter's humility, right? He was a wise man, but he was humane.

Yeah. He recognized, he appreciated people's strengths and weaknesses, and it's Marcus' 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. Yeah. He's not some sort of denny god above them. He didn't believe he was a god.

That was more kind of political trapping, I think, for Marcus.

“But they're understanding of the divine and ours, it's really a different world, right?”

This notion of the talks to Oram, he's with the gods, and you give these sacrifices to keep them happy, and this sort of thing.

But 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 keep people living together. Sure. It's wrong. So it's not like, 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 anyway. He wants to Marcus recognized his limitations because he ran up against them again and again. Every day he was rolling.

“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 can argue, you know, a 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 ahead of state.

Like, obviously at some level, Marcus really needed to cut ties with comedists, or perhaps, you know, sharing power with his loser step brother. Well, a magnificent gesture, you know, what was it necessarily the best move? 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, OK, 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 and 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 person and deal with ruthless people?”

Yes. That'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 Paxy, right? How do you remain strong and open to diplomacy? Yeah.

I think it's interesting that the first thing that Athena Doris and Arias did in this, the two stoic teachers of Octavian,

tell him to do is to murder cesarean. Your use of the word ruthlessness there is interesting. Because, yeah, there is a certain amount of that perhaps required or certainly required, you know, ruthless world like Rome. And, you know, 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, again, with Marcus's biography, think about how he treated his fallen enemies. He would not, he would not have executed a videoscassious if he captured him. Right.

He would have just exiled it. He exiled his political enemies. He did not execute them when he could have. Right.

“They showed him the set according to the report from the story Augusta, right?”

They showed Marcus the severed head of a videoscassious. He said, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that. Right. The guys 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 secratic, platonic dictum to know that good is, you know, to seek it. Everyone seeks the apparent good.

So all moral failing is the result of ignorance. It'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. Just this.

But fairness, too. Right. You don't have to go for the the most hurtful punishment.

Prison. Okay. Instead of execution.

And Rome was a brutal place.

And 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.

“They didn't have the kind of more benign.”

Sure. Less violence sports that we enjoy today. I feel like we are just getting started. Would you be open to doing around two on this?

I feel like I got a million more questions about this book.

Yeah.