  Marcus’ Meditations reads very differently from other ancient Greek and Roman  philosophical texts. Outside of Book I, which acknowledges various relatives and teachers for benefiting Marcus by being exemplars of some virtue or bearers of some useful lesson (and concludes by acknowledging the gods for providing him with such exemplars and with other circumstances conducive to his moral development), it is difficult even to tell how the work is organized, for instance whether the order of the books and chapters is evidence of the order of events in Marcus’ life or follows some logical or topical order, or whether the chapter divisions reflect breaks in Marcus’ thought. Marcus returns insistently to issues that must have arisen from his experiences, such as the imminence of death and his irritation with his associates’ faults. Our own perennial concern with these topics, Marcus’ gift for vivid imagery, and the apparent extractability of individual sentences from the text given its lack of clear structure, have all contributed to making Marcus among the most quotable of philosophers. But the reader who wants to understand Marcus’ thought as a whole is bound to be frustrated; sometimes reading Marcus feels like reading the sententiae-spoofing lines given to Hamlet’s Polonius. Philosophical treatments of Marcus have to bring their own structure to the work. 