Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) was Roman emperor from 161 until his death and the last of the rulers Machiavelli called the Five Good Emperors. He wrote the Meditations in Greek, in camp on the Danube frontier, during years consumed by war and by a plague that killed millions across the empire — not as a book but as private notes, reminders to himself of what a Stoic already knows and keeps forgetting. Nothing suggests he meant anyone to read them. They survived by an accident nobody has explained and were first printed in 1559, fourteen centuries after he made them.