A Year with the Emperor: Daily Readings from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius with Commentary, Analysis, and Questions for Personal Growth and Insight - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Imagine how much you could learn - about life as well as yourself - by spending a few minutes every day reading the private thoughts of the most powerful emperor in Ancient Rome. Although Marcus Aurelius lived nearly two millennia ago, he speaks to us as a contemporary dealing with the same problems we all face throughout life:

What should I be doing with my life and the time I have left?

What do we owe to our family, our friends, and our community?

How do you make your “best life” a reality?

How should you make decisions in complex situations?

How should you deal with criticism?

How do you live knowing that we all inevitably die?

It can be daunting to undertake reading the Meditations from start to finish, especially if you haven’t had a classical education and knowledge of Greek and Roman history and philosophy. What are you missing by not knowing the context of Marcus’s time? Compounding this problem is the fact that Marcus wrote the Meditations for himself rather than the public, and so doesn’t bother to explain the identities, philosophy, or history of the people he talks about. That’s the purpose of A Year with the Emperor - to provide a daily reading from the Meditations with an explanation of the context, along with questions you can apply to your own life.

For example, Marcus describes Sextus of Chaeronea as someone who had “a knack for accepting everyone without judgment, and a normal conversation with him was better than any flattery.” Okay, but who was Sextus of Chaeronea? He was a nephew of the famous Roman historian and biographer Plutarch, and was so esteemed by Marcus that he would visit Sextus for instruction even after he became emperor, and would consult him about legal questions too. The historian Philostratus described an occasion where someone asked Marcus where he was going and he replied “It’s good even for an old man to learn. I’m on my way to visit Sextus the philosopher to learn what I don’t already know!”. Obviously, this provides more information and understanding than Marcus’s brief description, and this is included as “Commentary” after each daily selection, and is followed by questions for personal growth in the “Analysis” section. For this passage, the question is “Who in your life provides (or has provided) a ‘normal conservation’ that is ‘better than any flattery?’ What was it about the conversations that made them so special?” In this way, every daily entry (this one, from Book 1, Verse 9, is the entry for June 4th) follows the pattern of passage, commentary, and analysis, allowing the reader to apply Marcus’s thoughts to their own life.

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