Meditations

Long before "Stoicism" became a self-help buzzword, an English scholar named Meric Casaubon sat down in 1634 and gave readers their first-ever English translation of Marcus Aurelius's private notebook — the emperor's own reminders to himself on facing hardship, anger, and death without losing his composure.

This is that original translation: denser and more formal than modern renderings, closer in spirit to the 17th-century readers who first discovered these words in English. A different way into a text people have been returning to for almost four centuries — for readers who want the history of the book as much as the philosophy in it.