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Comment by vlowther | Hacker News Reader

A better (if more time consuming) option is to learn Latin and read it in the original.

I once had the same thought, only to discover (as another commenter speculated) that Marcus wrote the Meditations in the common (Koine) Greek of the day. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

Pretending you'd written "Greek"...

Then you'd only be getting one translation - yours. With the amount of context that goes into a good translation, I'm not actually certain it's better for something like this that's more philosophical than artistic.

Weren't they written in greek?

They were. But hey, learning Latin would give you the ability to read Lucretius in the original, and his "De Rerum Natura" is quite an interesting contrast to the Stoicism of "Meditations".

Definitely Latin. By the time Aurelius was emperor the Greeks had already been overtaken by the Romans.

Edit: Incidentally, a simple Google would've shown it was written in Greek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

Never trust people on the internet, even yourself.

The Romans conquered the Greeks politically, but culturally the influence went mainly in the other direction, and in fact the Meditations (per my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8580261) were written in Greek.

As Horace wrote around 14 BC:

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. - Ep. II.i.156

"Greece, once conquered, herself conquered the artless victor, and planted the banner of civilization in the farmlands of Rome."

I have translated freely and taken considerable license.

By Aurelius' time, familiarity with Greek for the ruling classes was a given; as a matter of preference, it is a more supple language and probably more comfortable to use for putting abstract reasoning to words.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, which was the language of philosophy in the ancient Mediterranean. It was not uncommon at the time for wealthy Romans to have Greek slave-teachers ("pedagoges") instruct their children in the Greek language, as well as other subjects.

Definitely Greek.

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