Reading ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius is deceptively time consuming. Accounting for all of its nuts and bolts my copy amounts to a slender 256 pages – detailing a year of Harry Potter’s adolescent antics routinely fells more than double the amount of trees. However, so laden are each of its credos, so drenched are its assertions with moral implications that range from the subtle to the seismic that my reading of it became something of an ordeal. Aurelius himself won wars in less time than it took me to actually finish it, but I recommend doing so sincerely and unreservedly. He remains among the world’s most influential philosophers and one…