Debts owed

Book One stands alone in the Meditations. The other eleven books are bundles of fragments, sayings, exercises; Book One is a single sustained list. Each paragraph names one person and says what Marcus owes them. From his grandfather Verus, "good morals and the government of my temper." From his mother, "religious devotion, generosity, an inability not just to do wrong but even to think it." From his great-grandfather, the lesson that you should not employ tutors of bad character even if it is cheaper.

The list runs through about seventeen figures. His teachers Diognetus, Rusticus, Apollonius, Sextus, Alexander the Grammarian, Fronto, Catulus, Severus, Maximus. Then, in the longest paragraph of all, his adoptive father Antoninus Pius. From Antoninus, Marcus says, he learned "everything he did was thought through carefully, as if he had time to spare," and "to bear pain and grief without showing it," and "to do nothing for the sake of show." Antoninus is the moral model under which most of the rest of the Meditations is being written.

The book functions as a foundation. Before Marcus begins the long work of reminding himself how to live, he reminds himself where he came from and who taught him. The list is not nostalgic; it is structural. Many of the central exercises in the rest of the Meditations — the dichotomy of control, the morning preparation, the indifference to praise — appear in Book One in proto-form, attached to the teacher Marcus first heard them from. He is making sure he never forgets that the philosophy is a debt.