Read
Book by book, in any translation. Each translator's own introduction is included, along with editorial notes where the texts diverge.
Thirteen translations · One concordance
MeditationsSide by Side
Read Marcus Aurelius the way a scholar would: every public-domain English translation of a passage, aligned to the same section and set side by side, from Casaubon in 1634 to Jennings in 1917.
- 13
- translations
- XII
- books
- 487
- aligned sections
- 283
- years of English
Will the real Marcus Aurelius please stand up?
Thirteen translators, one emperor, and no two agree on the wording. Haines says “Say to thyself at daybreak”, Long says “Begin the morning by saying to thyself”, and Casaubon says “Betimes in the morning say to thyself”. Read them side by side and judge for yourself.
Settle it belowTry it here
The Concordance
Here are six passages to try, each shown in whichever translations you pick. The app has all 487 sections.
Passage
2.1
Drawing water from the aqueduct…
Concordance positions follow C.R. Haines (1916). Where a translator numbered a passage differently, their own number appears beside the name, and editorial notes explain merges and splits.
“Tell him to blame the uselessness of the most decent philosophers on those who fail to put them to use, not on the decent men themselves.”
For iPhone, iPad, Mac & Apple Vision Pro
The whole library, in your pocket
The app holds all thirteen texts offline, so you can read, compare and search without a connection.
Compare
The full concordance: all 487 sections in every translation, each in its own colour. Read them one after another, or turn your device sideways to set them in columns.
Search
Full-text search across every version at once. Find where Long says "providence" and how Casaubon put the same line.
Topics
Passages are tagged by theme: fate, duty, providence, death. Browse a theme and jump straight to the verses.
Random
A passage drawn at random. Marcus wrote these notes to himself one at a time, and they read well one at a time.
Glossary
Tap an unfamiliar name or term, from Antoninus Pius to Apathia and the Quadi, for a short gloss without leaving the page.
Meditations: Side by Side
Free of tracking and data collection. Built with SwiftUI for iOS 26, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS.
1634 – 1917
Thirteen voices
Every translation is in the public domain and was cleaned from old scans by hand. Select one to add it to the sample above.
A thought for today
“Look within. Within is the fountain of Good, ready always to well forth if thou wilt alway delve.”
How the concordance is made
Translators disagree about where one thought ends and the next begins. To make comparison possible, every version here is mapped onto the section grid of C.R. Haines's 1916 Loeb edition. Where a translator merged, split or left out a passage, an editorial note says so.
The texts were digitised from scans held by the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and Project Gutenberg. Each was cross-checked word by word against an independent OCR pass and corrected by hand. OCR errors were fixed, and each translator's own spelling was kept: thou, doth, shew, stedfast.
Public domain only
A.S.L. Farquharson's 1944 edition and later translations are under copyright and are not included.
Centonist
Compiled and edited by Adam Mills. Any remaining imperfections in the text are the publisher's alone.