Key Terms Glossary
Unlike some modern translations, Haines mostly avoids leaving Greek philosophical terms untranslated — “hegemonikon” does not appear printed in the English text. Instead he renders them with a recurring set of English phrases, though not always the same phrase for the same Greek word, so the Stoic technical vocabulary remains present in translated form. The counts given are of the Greek term in Marcus’s text, not of Haines’s English.
The governing part of the mind — the faculty that forms judgments, gives or withholds assent, and directs action. For the Stoics this is the one thing genuinely one’s own: the body can be constrained, circumstances can be terrible, but the ruling Reason judges freely. Most of the Meditations is Marcus coaching his own.
Not “opinion” in the casual modern sense, but the judgment the mind adds on top of a bare event. The Stoic claim that recurs constantly in the Meditations — “efface the opinion, I am harmed, and at once the feeling of being harmed disappears” (IV.7) — is that events themselves are neutral; it’s the opinion about them that causes distress.
The rational, providential order the Stoics believed runs through everything — not “nature” as in trees and weather, but the cosmos considered as a single rational, ensouled organism. When Marcus says something is “according to Nature,” this is the Nature he means.
The core Stoic ethical formula: living well means living in harmony with this rational cosmic order, which for a human being means living in accordance with reason and in cooperation with other rational beings. It’s less a rule than the book’s entire argument, compressed into three words.
The idea that the Universe is not random but rationally ordered and provident — the position Marcus sets against pure chance (“Atoms”) at IV.3, and generally assumes rather than argues for.
Not “genius” as in talent, but the indwelling divine spirit or guardian each person carries — in practice, close to a personification of the ruling Reason at its best. Keeping this “genius” undefiled is one of the book’s recurring images for staying true to one’s better judgment.
The raw perceptions and mental representations that arrive before any judgment is made about them. Stoic practice is largely about examining impressions before assenting to them — catching the gap between “something happened” and “this is bad,” which is exactly where Marcus’s advice usually lives.
Short, memorable principles kept ready for immediate use — Marcus explicitly recommends keeping these “short and elemental” (IV.3) precisely so they can be recalled instantly under pressure, rather than reasoned out from scratch each time.
The “breath” or animating principle, the second element in Marcus’s recurring three-part division of the self into body, breath, and intelligence (e.g. XII.3). More physical than “soul” in the modern sense — the Stoics thought of it as a literal substance, a warm current running through the body.
Stoic cosmopolitanism: the idea that all rational beings, human and divine, are fellow citizens of a single rational community that transcends any actual city or nation. There’s no single Greek word for this in the text — Marcus reaches for the same simile more than once, that the kósmos (universe) is itself a pólis (city), rather than coining a fixed compound term. He states the idea directly at IV.4 (“the Universe is as it were a state”), then invokes it again near the very end of the book (XII.36), where Haines’s English rendering — “this World-City” — is his own translation choice for the plainer Greek “this great city,” framing Marcus’s life as a term of citizenship in something much larger than Rome.
These terms recur constantly once identified, particularly in Book IV. The Names in the Text page identifies the philosophers who taught Marcus this vocabulary in the first place; Haines’s Footnote Key covers the classical-scholarship abbreviations in his footnotes.