How Meditations by Marcus Aurelius changed Ryan Holiday's life

Executive overview

Ryan Holiday encountered a Portuguese edition of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations — with his own name on the cover — in a Brazilian airport. That moment crystallised a 25-year relationship with a book he first read as a 19-year-old college student.

The private diary of the most powerful man in the world survived by accident — and its very specificity is what makes it universal.

Why Meditations should not exist

• Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire of tens of millions; absolute power corrupts, yet every sentence is decent
• Written in Greek on papyrus, primarily for himself — never intended to be published
• Survived by luck; who first found it, when it was first published, remains unknown
• Its specificity — one man's private struggle — creates a kind of universality that reaches prisoners, generals, athletes, activists, entrepreneurs

What makes it still readable 19 centuries later

• Marcus was not like us: arranged marriage, 13 children, half buried, owned slaves, fought brutal wars
• Yet his concerns are identical — getting out of bed, dealing with annoying people, managing temper, fear of death, trying to be good
• Stoicism was already ancient philosophy by Marcus's time; the problems he catalogues (marriage, sickness, war, ambition, falling in love) have not changed
• No one ever reads the same Meditations twice — new passages land differently at different life stages
• Holiday couldn't understand Marcus on losing children until he became a parent; shrugged off plague references until 2020

The chain of transmission

• Marcus credits his philosophy teacher Rusticus for introducing him to Epictetus's lectures — a future emperor changed by a Greek slave's wisdom
• Holiday bought the Gregory Hayes translation on Amazon at 19, guided only by the algorithm
• He later interviewed Hayes, wrote about Stoicism in his college newspaper, and built a career popularising the philosophy
• Finding his wife's copy — bought after their first date when he talked about the book too much — closed another link in the chain

Reading it again and again

• Holiday has read Meditations over 100 times; his copy is taped together, every page marked
• Walking streets in Aquincum (Budapest) where Marcus wrote parts of the book made the distance collapse: "this man was just a man"
• The Hayes translation removes barriers that keep readers from ancient philosophy
• Holiday's advice: don't just read it — read it again and again, put the lessons into practice, pass it on