About This Edition

This edition pairs Charles Reginald Haines’s 1916 Loeb Classical Library translation of the Meditations, which is in the public domain, with a modern annotation layer built for this edition. Haines’s translation, section numbering, and original footnotes are reproduced as he wrote them; nothing in his English text has been altered apart from the correction of transcription errors described under The Source Text. What follows describes what has been added or changed, and how.

The Source Text

The English text, Haines’s footnotes, and his front and back matter are taken from Wikisource’s transcription of the 1916 volume, in which volunteers correct optical character recognition (OCR) of the printed pages against the page scans. That transcription was chosen over raw OCR of the kind found on the Internet Archive because of this proofreading. Proofreading on Wikisource proceeds page by page and is uneven, however, and some recognition errors survive in the transcription, concentrated in three places. Haines’s Greek is polytonic, with breathings, accents, and iota subscripts often stacked on a single letter, and recognition software trained mainly on Latin script misreads these marks or the letters beneath them: ῳ, an omega with iota subscript, can come out as φ. Footnotes that move between English, Latin, and Greek within a line lead the software to substitute look-alike letters from the wrong alphabet, as in a Cyrillic “ср.” standing in for the Latin “cp.,” an error invisible on screen. And a misread Latin word that happens to form another real word passes both spell-checking and a proofreader’s glance, and is detectable only by reading the sentence for its sense. Errors of all three kinds are also less likely to be caught by volunteers proofreading an English translation, many of whom do not read Greek. Every such error identified in the course of preparing this edition has been corrected where the intended reading is clear; corrections within Haines’s footnotes are described under De-Abbreviating Haines’s Footnotes. The Greek text of the Meditations, J. H. Leopold’s Oxford Classical Text via the Perseus Digital Library, was used to confirm the book-and-section structure.

Haines’s English

Haines’s older English is reproduced unchanged. Most of the Meditations is Marcus addressing himself in the second person singular, and Haines renders that singular “you” as “thou,” “thee,” “thy,” and “thine,” with the verb forms that go with them: “thou art,” “thou hast,” “thou wilt,” “thou canst.” Other forms are older spellings or usages, such as “shew” for “show,” “to-morrow” for “tomorrow,” and “hath” and “doth” for “has” and “does.” The modern translations compared under Choosing a Translation render the text in current English.

De-Abbreviating Haines’s Footnotes

Haines wrote his footnotes for a 1916 reader trained in classical scholarship, and leaned on abbreviations that reader would have recognized without a second thought: “cp.” for “compare,” “Capit.” for the historian Capitolinus, “Vit. Mar.” for the Life of Marcus, and so on. A century later, those abbreviations are the main obstacle between a general reader and a footnote that is otherwise perfectly clear. Rather than rewriting or paraphrasing Haines’s footnotes, this edition expands the abbreviations themselves, spelling out authors, titles, and Latin shorthand in full while leaving everything else — the numbering, the citations, the substance of each note — exactly as printed. A footnote reading “Capit. Vit. Mar. vi. 1” becomes “Capitolinus, Life of Marcus vi. 1”; nothing is added, and nothing is removed.

A few conventions governed this pass across all twelve books:

• Numbering is untouched. Footnote numbers, section references, and citation formats (roman numerals, “§” clause markers, and the like) are reproduced exactly as Haines printed them. Only the words identifying an author, title, or Latin term are expanded.
• Greek and direct quotations are untouched. Any Greek text or directly quoted Latin passage in a footnote is reproduced as printed. Only Haines’s own abbreviated English and Latin shorthand — the citation apparatus around a quotation, not the quotation itself — is expanded.
• Ambiguous references were checked, not guessed. Haines sometimes cites two different people under the same short form — “Dio” for both Cassius Dio and Dio Chrysostom, “Zeno” for both the Stoic founder and the much earlier Zeno of Elea, “Arist.” for both Aristotle and Aristophanes depending on the work named. Each of these was resolved by checking which author actually wrote the work cited, not by pattern-matching the abbreviation.
• Disputed authorship is noted, not flattened. A handful of works Haines cites under one name are now attributed differently by modern scholars — the Epitome de Caesaribus traditionally credited to Aurelius Victor, or the De Placitis Philosophorum traditionally bound with Plutarch’s works. These are rendered with the traditional attribution marked as such (“attributed to...”) rather than stated as settled fact.
• Transcription artifacts were corrected. A small number of footnotes contain characters that are plainly scanning or transcription errors rather than anything Haines wrote — a Cyrillic “с” and “р” standing in for the Latin “c” and “p” of “cp.,” for instance. These are corrected as errors, not treated as part of the text being decoded.
• Bare cross-references gained “See.” Many footnotes are nothing but a string of section numbers with no introductory word at all. Where a footnote is entirely a bare cross-reference like this, “See” was added for readability; nothing else about the footnote was changed.

In total, 403 of the 812 footnotes across the twelve books of the Meditations contained an abbreviation and were expanded under these rules. The same expansion was applied to the footnotes of Haines’s Introduction, his essay on Stoicism, the Speeches, the Sayings (with their source headings), and his Note on the Christians. His Glossary and two Indexes, compact reference lists, keep his abbreviations as printed; Haines’s Footnote Key decodes them.

Haines’s Cross-References

A large share of Haines’s footnotes consist only of references to other places in the Meditations, in the form book and section: a lowercase roman numeral for the book, a number for the section, and a “§” for a clause within a long section, so that “ix. 4, 38” points to Book IX, sections 4 and 38, and “i. 17, § 6” to the sixth clause of Book I, section 17. Following the usual practice of classical commentaries, such a reference marks a related passage without saying how it is related. Most often the passage restates the same idea, sometimes in nearly the same words: “The wrong rests with him” in IV.26 is referred to “If he did wrong, with him lies the evil” in IX.38. A reference may instead point to a recurring image, to another use of the same Greek word, or to another appearance of the same person. Where the other passage qualifies or runs against the one annotated, Haines says so in words (“but see,” “contrast”); a bare reference does not signal disagreement. The “See” added in this edition before bare references directs the reader to the passage; like Haines’s references themselves, it leaves the relation unstated.

Haines’s Biblical Parallels

Fifty-three of Haines’s footnotes cite the Bible, most often Paul’s letters and the Gospels, and at times the wisdom books of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Like his internal cross-references, these mark a parallel, a passage in which the same idea appears: Marcus’s “Nothing befalls anyone that he is not fitted by nature to bear” (V.18) is set beside 1 Corinthians 10:13, “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able.” They do not claim that Marcus knew Christian writings. The practice has a long history in editions of the Meditations: Thomas Gataker, the Puritan clergyman whose 1652 edition Haines cites throughout, filled his commentary with parallels from Scripture as well as from classical authors, and Haines wrote for readers to whom the King James Bible was the most familiar body of moral writing.

The Footnote Commentary

Beyond de-abbreviating Haines’s own footnotes, this edition adds a layer of commentary. Many footnotes carry an additional paragraph directly beneath Haines’s own note, setting out what the note cites: who wrote each source and when, what the cited passage contains, what a Greek or Latin word means, and, at first mention, who a person was or where a place lay. The commentary adds exposition only; it does not restate the footnote or offer interpretation. It is unlabeled and unnumbered, set in blue immediately under the footnote it addresses; each of Haines’s footnotes begins with its number.