47 pages • 1 hour read
Marcus AureliusMeditations
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 180A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
What does Marcus believe it means to be a virtuous person? What is virtue in Marcus’s conception more generally?
Across Meditations, Marcus repeatedly returns to the transience of human experiences, writing in Book 4, “All is ephemeral, both memory and the object of memory” (30). What is the relationship between transience and the life of virtue? How does it relate to other key aspects of the Stoic worldview?
Discuss the purpose of Marcus’s Meditations in relation to his definition of free will. What does having “free will” consist of? Is it active or passive? Can it bring about meaningful change, on an individual level and/or on a wider scale? Why or why not?
