- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
In Meditations, Marcus almost never refers directly to his own life or his role as Roman emperor. So it’s interesting that, in this quote, he tersely contrasts the tenor of famous emperors’ lives with that of philosophers’ lives. Alexander the Great ruled one of the world’s largest empires in the 300s B.C.E.; Julius Caesar and Pompey ruled the Roman Republic much closer to Marcus’s own day, dying in 48 and 44 B.C.E., respectively. Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates were all ancient Greek philosophers of the 400s and 300s B.C.E. The big difference between these two groups, as Marcus sees it…