[null_deref]

> But they were the only people with the time, and with the access to the resources and labour, to propagate their ideas in multiple copies.

Marcus Aurelius didn't publish the book, the book contains thoughts he wrote to himself without any intent to make them public.

[retrac]

Yes, fair. Still, his writings were published after his death by men who felt that what he had to say was important, and that it should be disseminated, and they had access to the means to do so. We only have two copies of full manuscripts with the work, I believe. Without the people who owned and duplicated those books in medieval Greece, who were almost exclusively the elites or hired by the elites, we wouldn't have it today.

When pressed for scrap paper, they chose to use something they considered to be B-grade, rather than Meditations. Though who knows if what they tossed was really inferior. Julius Caesar, Aristotle and Archimedes wrote several books which were not considered quite worth preserving. Lost say 1500 years ago because no one bothered to copy and further distribute them. The great editorial filter all of our history went through.

(There has been some recent fascinating work on recovering the writing from painted over and re-used and re-scraped papyrus and parchment. Some of Archimedes's works were rediscovered this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest )

[null_deref]

Thanks for the comment, I didn't know couple of things you mentioned.

[dmarchand90]

Further I think you could make the argument that the meditations works because it's not Markus Aurelius making things up on the spot. He was a careful student of philosophy and to me the charm of the book is it's the wisdom of the ancient world filtered by a man whose later life became dominated by practical affairs.