Customer Reviews

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antonius: (Forgotten Books)

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The first thing to greet me when I opened my newly arrived Forgotten Books edition of the Meditations was the following paragraph:

"...this book has been scanned and reformatted from the original, and as such we cannot guarantee that it is free from errors or contains the full content of the original."

Charming. There is no foreward from the translator as one would expect from a quality publication and the cover looks like it was done in 10 minutes in MSPaint. That combined with the above paragraph makes the whole book seem amateurish...

As for the actual text, the translator seems to sacrifice clarity for a somewhat archaic style of English which does have its appeal, however I tend to regard the former as more important in a book of philosophy. I recommend instead either the Oxford Classic or the Penguin Classics edition.

I love reading Marcus Aurelius but George Long's translation is painful. Marcus Aurelius's thoughts and philosophical concepts are complex enough without the flowery verbosity and the unnecessary King James English.

This book will give you the rare opportunity to read a book of wisdom written by a Roman Emperor. Marcus Aurelius was a well liked emperor you lived from 120 A.D. to 180 A.D. ruling in the late part of his life. The book's theme is to live your life in balance with the universe. Do your duty and fulfill the role the "Gods" put you on earth to do. Let reason be your master always doing what is beneficial to all. Do not sin because you only sin against yourself. Why worry about correcting others behaviors when you have so much uncompleted work to do on yourself. If you enjoy reading Plato, Epictetus, or philosophy in general I know you will enjoy reading this book, it is truly packed with wisdom and will take you back to Roman times and let you see how the wise among them thought before the dark ages and modern religion came on the stage of civilization. Very interesting read.