Some time around the year 141 CE, Junius Rusticus gave Marcus Aurelius a gift. “The remembrances of Epictetus,” as Marcus would refer most gratefully to the book Rusticus gave him, “which he supplied me with out of his own library.”

How well-worn this copy must have become! As Marcus would say, Rusticus had taught him to never be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things he read, but encouraged him to read deeply, repeatedly, and forcefully. Considering how many times Marcus quotes Epictetus from memory in Meditations, it’s likely that he treated this copy of Discourses like a bible, returning to it time and time again. Perhaps it is even this book that Marcus was referring to when he half-seriously said he needed to ‘throw away [his] books’ because they were consuming all his attention. Certainly, it would have been one of the books Marcus was seen reading as the rest of Rome eagerly watched the gladiators fight.

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