SOURCE: “A First Glimpse of the Meditations” and “The Meditations as Spiritual Exercises” in The Inner Citadel: The “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 21-53.

In the following excerpt, Hadot discusses the history of Aurelius's manuscript, the difficulties of assigning it to a particular genre, and the qualities Aurelius assigns to his ideal man.

The Fate of a Text

In our time, now that the printing and distribution of books are banal, everyday operations, we no longer realize to what extent the survival of any work of antiquity represented an almost miraculous adventure. If, after having been dictated or written onto relatively fragile materials, and then having been more or less disfigured by copyists' mistakes, a text managed to survive until the birth of printing, it was only because it had the good fortune not to be burned in one of the...