Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hourglass: An Hour with Marcus Aurelius

Hourglass: An Hour with Marcus Aurelius

Paperback

PhilosophyHistorical FiguresAncient Rome

ISBN13: 9798188223113
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 20 2026
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.20 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
He is quoted more than any philosopher alive. Almost none of it is him.

Marcus Aurelius has become a brand - a marble profile on a thousand posters, a name stamped on ten thousand things he never said, the patron saint of a hardness he spent his life warning against.

The real man was something else entirely.

For nineteen years he was the most powerful human being on earth, and he spent them on a plague that killed by the million, a frontier that would not hold, a trusted general who declared himself emperor, and a marriage that buried child after child. At night, in a commander's tent on the Danube, he wrote notes to himself. Not for us. Not for publication. Just a tired man arguing himself back into decency one more time, and mostly failing, and beginning again the next morning.

He never imagined anyone would read them. We have been reading them ever since.

An hour with the man behind the Meditations.

This is not a self-help book and it is not a scholarly one. It is a short, honest introduction - about an hour's reading - to who Marcus Aurelius actually was, what he actually believed, and why the modern version of him is very nearly backward.

Inside:

His life - the boy an emperor chose, the reluctant ruler, the plague years, the betrayal, and the son who undid all of it.

His philosophy - what is up to us and what is not, the view from above, the discipline of the self, and why he believed you exist to be of use to other people.

The counterfeit - how a man who begged himself to be gentle became the mascot of dominance, and the one Greek word that shows exactly where the copy fails.

His words - twelve passages, every one verified against the Gregory Hays translation, given in context, with the famous fakes named.

Where to go next - which translation, which biography, and how to read him for yourself.

Written from a Christian perspective, but with no interest in claiming Marcus for a faith he never had the chance to consider. He is met on his own terms and honored on them.

Hourglass: Great minds, one hour at a time.

Volume Two of the Hourglass Series. Volume One: An Hour with Thomas Aquinas.

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