Abstract

This is the translation of Pierre Hadot’s La citadelle Interèrieure: Introduction aux Pensèes de Marc Aurële. Professor Hadot seeks to provide an introduction to the reading of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. As a general recommendation for the understanding of ancient works, Hadot suggests relocating them within their context and encourages the reader to let the author speak and stand close to the text. In this vein, representative pieces of the Meditations are cited at length and commented on. The aim of Hadot is not to write a biography of Marcus Aurelius but to ask how he came to write the Meditations which, in his view, is the same as asking how he became a philosopher. The author reminds us that a philosopher in antiquity was not necessarily a theoretician of philosophy but someone who lived like a philosopher. Cato the Younger, he argues, was a philosopher but he did not write any philosophical treatise. Both Cato and Marcus Aurelius, however, considered themselves philosophers since they had adopted a philosophical way of life. At first sight this claim seems reasonable; it is certainly true that in antiquity writing philosophical treatises was not a condition for being a philosopher. Indeed a clear example of this is Socrates, but it would not be fair to compare Socrates with Cato the Younger.