ABSTRACT
Many of the secondary ideas in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations arise from the principle that human beings should act in harmony with the characteristics with which nature endows them. The ways in which Meditations tackles the question of how to reconcile individual morality and political justice suggests that Marcus disagreed with Plato on the role and obligations of the citizen. Marcus underlines more than Plato the notion that each individual has a functional role in the social structure of his or her political community, he nevertheless denies the Platonic idea of the equivalence of individual and state. Marcus, rather, advises his readers to examine certain psychological mistakes and misconceptions that seem to regularly arise. One of the attractions of Meditations for many readers today is the way in which the text recommends a reflective and even spiritual way of life without appealing to external sources of authority, such as sacred texts or the institutions of the world's great religions.
