Meditations

Picture the author of Meditations and you probably see a serene old man in a marble study, with nothing more urgent on his desk than the nature of the soul.

Now look at how two of the books end. One carries the line "Among the Quadi at the Granua", a river on the Danube frontier. Another says only "This in Carnuntum", the legionary town where the emperor spent three years at war with the Marcomanni.

These are not lecture notes. They are reminders written in a war camp, by a man with an empire to hold together, who once warned himself not to be turned into a Caesar.