Meditations: The Complete Edition

Theodore Roosevelt carried it down the River of Doubt. General Mattis carried it into Iraq. The premier of China read it more than a hundred times. Frederick the Great called it "a morality for statues" - until war taught him otherwise.

For nearly two thousand years, people in hard places have carried this book. This edition was built to be carried.

A new translation. One voice.

All twelve books, translated complete by Josiah Crowell - with a promise no other edition makes: every load-bearing word is rendered the same way every time it appears. When Marcus leans on a word in Book Two and returns to it in Book Twelve, you see him return to it. The Reader's Glossary at the back shows you the Greek, the English chosen for it, and the reason - so the promise can be checked, not just trusted.

What's inside

Built around the translation is an apparatus no other Meditations offers:

• The Finder - where Marcus returns to what pressed on him: anger, mortality, motivation, obstacles - cited by book and entry.
• The Debts - the seventeen people of Book One, each keyed to the entry where Marcus names what they taught him.
• His Life in Time - a four-page timeline drawn as a single unbroken line that begins at his birth and ends, exactly, at his death.
• The Twelve - one line from each book; the Meditations on a single page.
• Fronto's Letters - ten letters between Marcus and the teacher who loved him, lost for a thousand years beneath another book and recovered from the parchment by candlelight in 1815. The boy in these letters becomes the emperor in the notebooks.
• How This Book Survived and Who Carried This Book - the story of a private notebook that should have died in 180, and of the kings, presidents, and soldiers who kept it alive by using it.

The campaign document

The design follows one idea: the austerity of a field manual, set in imperial colors, for a book written by lamplight in war camps on the Danube frontier. A full-color hardcover throughout - crimson endpapers, twelve banner pages in imperial red, his life drawn as a single unbroken line. Each book opens on its single essential line:

"We were built to pull with each other, not against each other."

"The best revenge is to be nothing like the man who did you wrong."

"Dig inside yourself. Inside you is the spring of good, and it can flow forever - if you never stop digging."

"Enough talk about what a good man is like. Be one."

He wrote it for himself, at night, in a war camp, with no thought of being read. It became the most carried book in the history of philosophy.

The book does not ask to be admired. It asks to be carried.