Which Translation of Meditations Should You Read?
By Marcus wrote in Greek, for himself, with no intention of being read. That makes the Meditations unusually dependent on its translator: there is no argument to follow and no narrative to carry you, so if the prose does not land, the book does not work.
Which is why people who bought the wrong edition often conclude the Meditations is dry. Usually they downloaded the free one.
The short answer
Buy the Gregory Hays translation (Modern Library, 2002) if you are reading it for practice rather than scholarship. It is the one we recommend in our Library, and for most readers it is not close.
Read on if you want to know what you are trading away, because Hays does trade something.
The free version, and why it reads oddly
Almost every free ebook of the Meditations is George Long’s 1862 translation, because it is long out of copyright. It is a serious piece of Victorian scholarship and it is the reason many people believe Marcus wrote like a bishop.
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.
That is Long. It is accurate. It is also 160 years old, and the archaism is Long’s, not Marcus’s. Marcus wrote plain, urgent, sometimes ungrammatical notes to himself. Meric Casaubon’s 1634 version, also free, is further away still.
If you have tried the Meditations and found it stiff, this is very likely what happened. It is not the book.
The main modern options
Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002) — the recommendation.
Hays writes as though Marcus were talking, because he was. Short lines, contemporary English, no ornament. "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way" is his, and its afterlife tells you something about how well it works.
The trade: Hays takes liberties. He compresses, he breaks paragraphs where the Greek does not, and he occasionally sacrifices literal accuracy for force. Scholars have reservations. For a reader who wants the book to change how they act on a Tuesday, those reservations do not much matter. His introduction is also the best short essay on Marcus you can get for the price of the book.
Robin Hard (Oxford World’s Classics, 2011) — the best balance.
More faithful than Hays, more readable than Long, and the Oxford notes are genuinely useful when Marcus refers to something you do not know. If you want one edition to keep and reread, this is a strong case. Hard also translated the Epictetus we recommend, so the two sit well together.
Martin Hammond (Penguin Classics, 2006) — the scholarly middle.
Careful, well annotated, slightly cooler on the page than Hays. Excellent if you want precision without archaism.
Robin Waterfield (Basic Books, 2021) — the newest.
A fine modern translation with substantial commentary, and Waterfield is a very experienced hand with Greek philosophy. Worth considering if you like heavy apparatus.
Which to actually buy
Reading it to practice, first time: Hays. It is the only one that consistently makes people want to keep reading.
Reading it as a text you will return to for years: Hard. Better notes, closer to the Greek, still alive on the page.
Reading it for study or comparison: Hammond or Waterfield, and ideally alongside one of the others.
Reading it for free: Long is legitimate and costs nothing. Know that the distance you feel is Victorian English, not Marcus.
A reasonable approach many people land on: Hays to read, Hard to keep.
One thing to watch when you quote it
Because the translations differ so much, the same passage can be quoted in wordings that share almost no vocabulary. This is how the Meditations ends up looking like it contains far more distinct material than it does, and it is why quote collections repeat themselves without appearing to.
It is also why an unsourced Marcus quote is hard to verify: you cannot search for wording that no translator used. If a line has his name on it and no book and chapter, treat it with suspicion. Some of the most famous ones are not his at all, and we keep a list.
After the Meditations
The usual next step is Epictetus, whose Enchiridion is short and whose Discourses are better. Then Seneca’s letters, which are the most companionable prose in Stoicism.
All three, in the editions worth owning, are on our Library page, and the people behind them are on The Stoics. If you want the practice rather than more reading, start with how to keep a Stoic journal.
Marcus turns this into a daily practice for iOS: a morning preparation, a daily reading, and a structured evening examination.
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