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Book by book, in any translation. Each translator's own introduction is included, along with editorial notes where the texts diverge.
Thirteen translations · One concordance
MeditationsSide by Side
Read Marcus Aurelius the way a scholar would: every public-domain English translation of a passage, laid out side by side and aligned to the same section. From Casaubon in 1634 to Jennings in 1917, set out in columns.
- 13
- translations
- XII
- books
- 487
- aligned sections
- 283
- years of English
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The Concordance
Pick a book and section, then choose which translators to read. Every column shows the same passage. Use the arrow keys to move between sections.
Passage
2.1
Drawing water from the aqueduct…
Concordance positions follow C.R. Haines (1916). Where a translator numbered a passage differently, their own number appears beside the name, and editorial notes explain merges and splits.
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The whole library, in your pocket
The app holds all thirteen texts offline, so you can read, compare and search without a connection.
Compare
Tap a section to see every translation of it at once, each in its own colour, so you can follow one thought across three centuries.
Search
Full-text search across every version at once. Find where Long says "providence" and how Casaubon put the same line.
Topics
Passages are tagged by theme: fate, duty, providence, death. Browse a theme and jump straight to the verses.
Random
A passage drawn at random. Marcus wrote these notes to himself one at a time, and they read well one at a time.
Glossary
Tap an unfamiliar name or term, from Antoninus Pius to Apathia and the Quadi, for a short gloss without leaving the page.
Meditations: Side by Side
Free of tracking and data collection. Built with SwiftUI for iOS 26, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS.
1634 – 1917
Thirteen voices
Every translation is in the public domain and was cleaned from old scans by hand. Select one to add it to the concordance.
Every word, every version
Search the Meditations
A thought for today
…
How the concordance is made
Translators disagree about where one thought ends and the next begins. To make comparison possible, every version here is mapped onto the section grid of C.R. Haines's 1916 Loeb edition. Where a translator merged, split or left out a passage, an editorial note says so.
The texts were digitised from scans held by the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and Project Gutenberg. Each was cross-checked word by word against an independent OCR pass and corrected by hand. OCR errors were fixed, and each translator's own spelling was kept: thou, doth, shew, stedfast.
Public domain only
A.S.L. Farquharson's 1944 edition and later translations are under copyright and are not included.
Centonist
Compiled and edited by Adam Mills. Any remaining imperfections in the text are the publisher's alone.