Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation)

There are a dozen English translations of Marcus Aurelius. Most people quit the first one they pick up — not because Marcus is hard, but because Victorian prose is. This review exists to save you from that fate: start with Gregory Hays.

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What it is

The Meditations aren’t a book Marcus wrote for you. They’re his private notebook — reminders to himself, written in Greek in army camps during the Marcomannic Wars. He repeats himself, contradicts himself, and scolds himself. That’s the appeal: it’s the most powerful man alive practicing, not preaching.

Why the Hays translation

• It sounds like a man talking to himself. Hays renders the notes in short, punchy modern English. Where older translations give you “Let it be thy earnest and incessant care…”, Hays gives you “Concentrate every minute like a Roman.”
• The introduction earns its pages. Fifty-odd pages on Marcus’s life and Stoic ideas that make the notebook make sense — read it first, not after.
• It’s readable in bed. This matters more than accuracy debates. The best translation is the one you’ll actually read nightly, a page at a time.

The honest criticisms

Purists note that Hays is loose — he favors force over literal fidelity. Fair. If you later want precision, Robin Hard’s Oxford translation is excellent, and Farquharson for the scholars. But those are second books. Nobody falls in love with Marcus through a footnote.

How to read it

Not cover to cover. Open Book 2, read one entry each morning after the morning question, and stop when something lands. A page a day beats a binge — this is a book of reps, not chapters.

Verdict: the only version I hand to beginners. If Stoic Primal has a required text, this is it. Start here for how it fits the bigger practice.