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He would have been surprised, to begin with, by the title of the

work ascribed to him. The long-established English title Meditations is not
only not original, but positively misleading, lending a spurious air of
resonance and authority quite alien to the haphazard set of notes that
constitute the book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed
edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus’s original—the
work was entitled “To Himself” (Eis heauton). This is no more likely than
Meditations to be the original title, though it is at least a somewhat more
accurate description of the work.6
In fact, it seems unlikely that Marcus himself gave the work any title at
all, for the simple reason that he did not think of it as an organic whole in
the first place. Not only was it not written for publication, but Marcus
clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. The
entries include a number of cryptic references to persons or events that an
ancient reader would have found as unintelligible as we do. While a
contemporary might have recognized some of the figures mentioned in
Meditations 8.25 or 12.27, for example, no ancient reader could have
known what was in the letter that Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa (1.7), what
Antoninus said to the customs agent at Tusculum (1.16), or what happened
to Marcus at Caieta (1.17). Elsewhere Marcus reflects directly on his role as
emperor, in terms that would be quite irrelevant to anyone else. We find him
worrying about the dangers of becoming “imperialized” (6.30), reminding
himself to speak simply in the Senate (8.30), and reflecting on the unique
position he occupies (11.7). From these entries and others it seems clear that
the “you” of the text is not a generic “you,” but the emperor himself.
“When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors” (10.31).
How are we to categorize the Meditations? It is not a diary, at least in
the conventional sense. The entries contain little or nothing related to
Marcus’s day-to-day life: few names, no dates and, with two exceptions, no
places. It also lacks the sense of audience—the reader over one’s shoulder
—that tends to characterize even the most secretive diarist. Some scholars
have seen it as the basis for an unwritten larger treatise, like Pascal’s
Pensées or the notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Yet the notes are too repetitive
and, in a philosophical sense, too elementary for that. The entries perhaps
bear a somewhat closer resemblance to the working notes of a practicing
philosopher: Wittgenstein’s Zettel, say, or the Cahiers of Simone Weil. Yet
here, too, there is a significant difference. The Meditations is not tentative