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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

You can download Marcus Aurelius' Meditations for free at my project, Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/marcus-aurelius/meditation...

The translation is good and Meditations is one of my favorite books. Super interesting to get an inside look at how the most powerful man in the world used Stoicism to deal with both the weight of an empire, and with day-to-day trivialities.

The Enchiridion is another Stoic "manual" that's very short and just as good: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/the-enchiridion/...

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For those who may be interested:

Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J.[1] (d. 1616) has sometimes been called a "Christian Seneca".[2]

I had never heard of him or his major work Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues until 2004, when someone I met on a retreat recommended that I hunt down a copy of Joseph Rickaby's[3] masterful translation from the original Spanish.[4]

I had the opportunity to read through PPCV over the period of about a year back in 2007–08, and I can only say that it leaves a remarkable and lasting impression. I would think his treatises on humility, examination of conscience, and mental prayer (meditation) would be of great interest even to those who aren't particularly religious — i.e. the practical wisdom contained therein is like a toolkit for coming to "know oneself" for true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_Rodriguez

[2] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2540029

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rickaby

[4] https://archive.org/details/PPCV-Manresa

For what it's worth, the Hays translation of Meditations is much easier reading.

I also like Robin Hard's translation quite a bit.

I surveyed a bunch of translations a few years back, comparing them to one another and to the original Greek, trying to find the best accuracy/readability balance. Landed on Maxwell Staniforth's. There's a paperback available from someone (Penguin?) and it's the translation the Folio Society used for their Meditations, if you're into above-average-quality hardbacks.

Totally agree, thats Modern Library publication.

This is quite a project, I'm very much impressed especially after having discovered the severe limitations and leaving much to be desired of the project guttenberg content https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/7438/how-does-pro.... I very much like the "technically minded reader" orientation you all espouse.

Don't confine yourself to Epictetus' Enchiridion; his Discourses are a delight, especially as translated by Oldfather:

Books I & II: https://archive.org/details/epictetusdiscour01epicuoft

Books III & IV: https://archive.org/details/epictetusdiscour02epicuoft

Off-topic, but I’m a big fan of your project. It’s an important work. Kudos for doing it so well.

Agreed, it's fantastic. A little thing, would like to browse/filter by categories (or maybe see popular books).

There is also a youtube video by the same guy that wrote the article. I found it to be quite interesting (much of the points in the video are the same as in the article, maybe in a little more depth).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seLLJP3H1FU

anybody here was surprised realizing how much of life was known to people 2000 years ago, and no matter what the society and technology .. these ideas do matter

The people then were the same human species as today, and there's no reason to think that they understood human nature any less (in fact I think people today have a lot of trouble understanding human nature).

sure, but how many have this feeling that we're progressing, we're modern, we have everything but still some very important notions are hidden in antique books in your library

whats two thousand years to a species of over a hundred thousand? even considering the time from the last ice age only, the relative difference is that of an 8 to 10 year old. yet, it is astounding nevertheless.

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