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Ah I had a far better review in my mind, but it has, like morning mist, cleared out from my mind leaving a jumble of words and impressions, so you will have to endure that, or skip to another GR update instead :)

The weaknesses of Marcus Aurelius's jottings and musings, his inconsistencies, vaguenesses, intellectual messiness, the lack of exploration of any particular idea in detail are it's strengths. There is a Marcus Aurelius for everyone, or perhaps for everyday of the year (Selections from the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius for every day in the year) (and I suspect there are Marcus Aurelius day by day calendars). I wondered if at some point the real Marcus Aurelius would stand up, and of course he does, just like Spartacus at the end of the Stanley Kubrik .

The work known variously as Meditations or the Golden Book was originally written in Greek and entitled 'To Himself', it is divided into twelve 'books' each perhaps fifteen or so printed pages in length. The first book is a listing of to whom and for what Marcus Aurelius is grateful - for things like his upbringing and character rather than that people pay their taxes and, by and large, obey the laws. The other eleven books don't have any thematic unity. At the end of the first book he writes: 'Among the Quadi, on the river Gran' this is the only indication of time and place in the entire work which is good from the point of view of approachability, Yes, you too, and me, have direct access to the personal musing of a Roman Emperor you can read his blogging, indeed in places almost his tweets, there is no barrier you can approach him with out prior knowledge - people have approached him with out prior knowledge for almost 2,000 years, so much so that I fear there is little novel here: be grateful, practise serenity, be kind to others, appreciate the order and structure of life, do your duty (like a Roman). The downside is you don't learn much about Marcus Aurelius, it is somehow so personal, private and interior that it has become indistinct and universal, suitable for fridge magnets or motivational posters anywhere.

I believe that formally Marcus was a a stoic, if his reflections in his book represent cutting edge stoic philosophy or the ponderings of a well educated individual of his day I don't know. In book eleven particularly he quotes Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato, but he never mentions the famous Roman stoic Seneca. Perhaps Seneca was already forgotten by Aurelius' time or perhaps the issue of how to behave under the rule of an emperor was a bit too close to the bone for the Emperor.

As I mentioned in updates it reminded me in its stress on duty of what I have heard of the Bhagadvad Gita and I felt that Aurelius' : Worldnature, nature, world reason, cosmic purpose, gods, universal nature,mind of the universe, god... (a sample of the terms he seems to use for some kind of ordering principle in the universe) could all have been expressed as, or were reaching towards ideas of Dharma or Dao. Since this is a philosophical work, of sorts, or perhaps a religious one, I wondered if the translation was unhelpful - perhaps all these terms might have been rendered by one expression in the original, perhaps Logos (most famous now from the opening of the Gospel of Saint John), yet I think I read in the introduction that Marcus did use all these different terms even though, contextually they all appear to mean something similar if not identical.

Given this and the Tao Te Ching, I would have imagined that the Tao Te Ching was the one written by a canny Emperor, Marcus somehow often manages to sound like a harassed corporate drone forced to share a workbench with people who don't brush their teeth and who wash and change their clothes regularly - meaning once every nine weeks - (5:28) I could imagine it as the basis for a new US Sit-Com, maybe Aurelius: the customer service years, a slight change from his previous appearances in the films The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator both of which downplay quite how odd Marcus' son the Emperor was (view spoiler)[ he enjoyed dressing up (or down?) as Hercules and clubbing people with his club, he had all the months renamed after himself, still it was only after twelve years that he was strangled by his personal trainer (view spoiler)[ I have long been of the opinion that sport is bad for you, but in truth maybe it is just personal trainers (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)].

Marcus says that he thinks praying for three hours a day is sufficient, but it was unclear to me quite what he would be praying to, his universe otherwise seems fairly deterministic and the gods a part of that as much as the fig trees, horses and people, perhaps his prayer was more his spiritual practise to encourage the serenity, kindness, and indifference to death that he speaks of rather than requests to the gods.

Walking wet pavements observing (stoically of course) the flashes of lightening over the sky, I wondered if death and being forgotten (everybody who ever knew you also dying) was such a constant preoccupation in these writing because it was a prospect that he really feared, as it has happened this has preserved his memory fairly effectively.

Everything he says is created for some duty (8:19) even if we accept that this is so and easily definable for his examples of a horse and a vine, the question that he does not address is what about an Emperor? Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero were all emperors and all acted as though they had different conceptions of duty. But Marcus while exposing his innermost thoughts does not want to reveal what he thought his own duty as an Emperor was. For me it was not a case of Howards end is no the landing but Marcus Aurelius was on the dusty shelf, picked up for two GBP I don't recall when, probably in disreputable company.

At the same time I can not be completely comfortable with him. Mine [my concern], to be in friendship and charity with all men (11:13) he writes while fighting wars against the Marcomanni, Quadi and Samatians, so friendship and charity with not quite all men, I flicked through the relevant pages of Empires and Barbarians and saw that war began because they asked if they could enter the empire and had been refused, perhaps I am missing something here, also this was a period when punishments for crimes became harsher for those of lower social status, his self cultivation and personal serenity did not come into conflict with a conception of imperial duty that seems in practise to have been heavy handed (kindness is irresistible but he is partial to the decapitation of his enemies), perhaps for him there was no contradiction, he was no Ashokha (he says somewhere that you either have to improve people or put up with them, he does not seem to have tried improving them, that was not his duty). But his writings don't clarify his approach to authority and rule to me (view spoiler)[ my guess would be that for him non-Romans and lower class Romans - humiliores as they were called in distinction to the higher class honestiores did not count as full people but were a lower type of thing like horses and vines and therefore to be broken or pruned, but since few of us these days are Roman emperors we can maybe misread his words with a fraternal spirit, if a fig tree will (in good conditions) produce figs, so too a Roman Emperor will be a Roman Emperor (hide spoiler)].

I see here Marcus Aurelius for business: Meditations: Thoughts for Corporate Dominance this from the man who wrote (5:33) "all that men set their hearts on in this life is vanity, corruption and trash..."