The Best Meditations Audiobook (and the One to Skip)

The short answer: the Gregory Hays translation, narrated by Duncan Steen, is the best Meditations audiobook available. The long answer explains why four other versions fall short in ways that matter when you’re listening instead of reading.

Meditations is already a strange reading experience — repetitive by design, written in Greek by a Latin-speaking emperor, never meant for anyone else’s eyes. Audiobook format exaggerates every translation decision. Clunky syntax that you can reread in print becomes unbearable on a commute. Lofty Victorian diction, tolerable in a paperback, sounds like a sermon at 1.5x speed. The narrator’s job is to make private journal entries feel private, not declamatory. Most narrators get this wrong.

The Hays/Steen Recording

The Hays translation (Modern Library, 2002) is the benchmark for readable Meditations. If you want to know why, the translation review covers it in detail — short version: Hays cuts the Victorian scaffolding and makes Marcus sound like a man arguing with himself rather than a statue inscribing wisdom.

Steen’s narration matches that register. He reads quietly. He doesn’t perform. The self-directed passages — Book 2’s relentless reminders about death and distraction — land as exactly what they are: a man talking himself back into line.

This is the one to buy.

The Other Options, Ranked

Conrad Kemp narrating the Hays translation is a separate recording available on some platforms. Kemp is technically proficient but reads warmer and more rhetorical than Steen. For Book 9, where Marcus is most defeated and honest, Kemp’s delivery feels slightly too composed. Personal preference will decide this one.

The George Long translation, narrated by various human readers on commercial platforms — Long’s 1862 translation is public domain, so it gets picked up cheap. The prose is accurate but dated: “Hasten then to the end, and throwing away idle hopes, come to thine own aid, if thou carest at all for thyself.” Heard once, it’s stately. Heard through twelve books, it’s exhausting. Long was working before modern translation principles existed; he renders Marcus in a register Marcus never used. The narrators on these recordings tend to match that register — big, serious, Masterpiece Theatre.

The Maxwell Staniforth translation (Penguin Classics) is better prose than Long but hasn’t been given a major commercial audiobook release. If you find one, the translation handles the self-address passages well. Availability is inconsistent depending on your region and platform.

The Robin Hard translation (Oxford World’s Classics) is scholarly and accurate — the version to read if you want footnotes and introduction. As an audiobook it’s available but infrequently recommended. Hard’s priority is precision over rhythm, and rhythm is everything when you can’t reread a sentence.

The LibriVox Version

Free. Public domain. Recorded by volunteers. These are the good things.

The LibriVox Meditations is often the first result when someone searches for a free audiobook, and it consistently frustrates new readers. Two problems:

The translation is George Long’s, which as described above can feel punishing in audio. More damaging is the recording quality — LibriVox uses volunteer narrators of varying skill and equipment, and for Meditations specifically, the narrators tend toward the reverent end of the dial. When Book 5 opens with Marcus complaining about getting out of bed in the cold, it should sound grumpy and human. In the LibriVox version, it sounds like a Scripture reading.

First-timers who bounce off it sometimes conclude that Meditations is difficult or dull. It isn’t — it’s genuinely worth reading, but the experience is fragile, and a mismatched narrator breaks it fast.

Why Translation Matters More in Audio

In print, you can reread. You can pause at a confusing passage, check a footnote, look up a word. In audio, the sentence is gone before you’ve decided whether you understood it. Translations that stack subordinate clauses inside subordinate clauses simply don’t work. Long does this constantly. Hays almost never does.

There’s a specific test I apply to Meditations translations: how do they handle Book 2, Chapter 1? The passage lists types of difficult people Marcus might encounter that day and argues he should treat them with patience. In Long: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.” In Hays: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.” Heard at normal audio speed, the difference in clarity is immediate.

The translation comparison for print readers goes through this passage across six versions if you want the full breakdown.

What to Actually Buy

The Hays/Steen recording is on Audible and most other major platforms. If your library system carries audiobooks through Libby or OverDrive, check there first.

Don’t start with the free LibriVox version unless you’ve already read Meditations in print and you’re returning to it. For a first listen, it’s the wrong translator read in the wrong voice — and Marcus Aurelius, who spent considerable effort arguing against wasted time, would probably agree that’s a poor use of yours.