Oneself as Others: Aurelius and Autobiography

Scholarship finds the autobiographical Book 1 of Aurelius’s Meditations peculiar in that it (1) lacks direct enunciation of the self, and (2) focuses instead on the description of others, who (3) are themselves stripped of biographical content. Philippe Lejeune’s claim that autobiography aims to construct the account of a life whose diachronicity is completely effaced by its meaning helps make sense of these anomalies. The same aim also motivates the Late Stoic injunction to examine one’s “representations” or phantasiai, which exhibit a specular relation to the subject that has them.