The thing that took me longest to notice about Book 1 is that it's the only part of the Meditations pointed outward. Everything after it is Marcus talking to himself; Book 1 is Marcus keeping accounts with other people, and he never once records what he contributed.

The second thing is that it's almost entirely free of abstract virtue words. He doesn't write "my grandfather taught me temperance." He writes down behaviours specific enough to imitate: not to be a partisan of the Greens or the Blues at the races. Not to correct someone's mispronunciation in public, but to work the right word into your own next sentence. To read carefully rather than nod along at the gist. To write letters plainly and to answer an angry one without heat. Those are instructions. "Temperance" is not.

And the long entry on Antoninus is really a portrait of a man who is never performing his own restraint — he just stops working at a reasonable hour, doesn't need an audience, and does the same job whether or not anyone is watching. That's the hardest one in the book and Marcus buries it in a list.

If anyone wants to get something out of Book 1 beyond having read it: write your own. Name five actual people and, for each, one concrete behaviour you copied off them — not the virtue it exemplifies, the behaviour. It's much harder than it sounds, and the difficulty is the point. Most of what we think we admire in people turns out, when you try to write it down, to be a mood rather than an action.