Meditations: living, dying and the good life, by Marcus Aurelius, trans. Gregory Hays

Meditations: living, dying and the good life

See the movie, read the book. Hard on the heels of Richard Harris's portrayal of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator comes a new translation of that ruler's celebrated Meditations. The final days of Marcus's reign (AD161-180) formed the backdrop to Ridley Scott's film, in which Richard Harris played Marcus as a deeply troubled man, aware that his son Commodus had too many character flaws to run the empire. Scott's movie enlarged on the historical record, casting Russell Crowe as the hunky gladiator who brought an end to Commodus's dissolute reign.

If Marcus had such doubts about his son, they do not appear in his Meditations; nor are they evident from his actions in the years before his death, when he broke with tradition – his immediate predecessors had selected an heir by adoption – and showered Commodus with promotions. Indeed, it could be argued that the immediate legacy of the second-century emperor was a disaster for Rome, the catalyst for power struggles that were to last the best part of the next 100 years.

Whether this fact has been known to all his admirers – an eclectic bunch, ranging from Frederick the Great and Goethe to Bill Clinton – is unclear. But it is easy to see why Marcus's philosophical writings, gathered together in 12 books, have appealed to so many writers and politicians.

His concerns – how to live a decent life in the face of worldly temptations – are familiar enough and offer solutions based on the tenets of Stoic philosophy. The Stoics believed in a world governed by a rational principle, the logos. As Marcus's latest interpreter, the American scholar Gregory Hays, observes in his introduction, the Greek word defies translation, but can be identified very roughly with nature, providence and God – a beneficent organising force, mirrored in human beings by the faculty of reason.

Followers of Stoicism were required to maintain objectivity at all times, rejecting facile emotional reactions to outside events, and always attempting to discern a larger purpose. Marcus certainly had a great deal to put up with in his last decade, which was spent in a prolonged war with the tribes on his northern border, principally the troublesome Marcomanni. He also had to put down a revolt by one of his most successful generals, Avidius Cassius, governor of Syria, and come to terms with the death of his wife, Faustina.

It was not a tranquil end for a man fond of quoting Plato's observation in The Republic that "states will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers", and almost certainly accounts for the gloomy tone of much of the meditations. They reveal someone searching for a distancing mechanism that can sustain him in the face of apparently cataclysmic events, and may explain why Marcus is currently enjoying a little renaissance.

If Machiavelli was a touchstone for the late Eighties, when naked self-interest was the order of the day, our era of terrorist attacks and apparently never-ending catastrophes surely calls for more thoughtful guides. Who better than Marcus, whose latest publisher portrays him writing by candlelight, in a period of similar uncertainty, in the frontier towns of modern-day Austria, Hungary and Romania?

This portrait is as romanticised, in its own way, as Ridley Scott's version of Marcus. His writings certainly reveal him to have been a deeply anxious man, but one as much obsessed with his own personal demons as great questions of state. These include his fear of death and change, which is the most frequently recurring theme of the Meditations.

Why are we here, Marcus wanted to know, why do we grow old and die, and how can we believe in God or the logos if annihilation is all that awaits us after death?

Allied to this is a palpable distaste for the body and for pleasure – Bill Clinton, please take note – that frequently expresses itself in sexual disgust. "Human lives are brief and trivial," Marcus asserts in Book Four. "Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash." Again, in Book Nine: "Disgust at what things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth". And in Book Eight, in a terse entry that follows a meditation on the transience of emperors: "The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag./ Look at it clearly. If you can".

It would be something of an understatement to suggest that Marcus was not a happy bunny. On the contrary, what is so striking about the Meditations is the complete absence of anything like development. What we have here is not so much a great man's emerging philosophy as a continuing – and, I suspect, doomed – attempt to stave off depression, bad temper and existential despair.

In Book 11, he is still struggling with the same irritation towards other people that he expressed in Book Two, when he reminded himself that "the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly". I imagine that many emperors, presidents and prime ministers have felt the same, which may be why they find him so comforting.

In his defence, Marcus was not writing for publication and would not have recognised the title under which his private jottings have come down to us. In fact it is possible to argue that the Meditations have been mis-sold down the ages, for they are much more an insight into Marcus's internal world than a philosophical tract. This is no mean feat, for how many Roman emperors have offered us access to private preoccupations?

His chief characteristic, a perpetual state of anxiety, may make him seem a peculiarly modern figure. But he is not so much a guide to the perplexed as a reflection of their neuroses. Even in this workmanlike contemporary translation, it is hard to resist the conclusion that it was not so much Stoicism that the philosopher-emperor needed but Prozac.

Joan Smith's latest book, 'Moralities', is published by Penguin