Before presenting the first fragment of the Aurelius journals, it is necessary to set out, briefly and without embellishment, the state of the material as it came into my hands. Readers will notice that the opening entry (now numbered 2) begins abruptly, without conventional preface, invocation, or identifying rubric. This is not an editorial decision but a consequence of the condition in which the folios were recovered.
The surviving leaves were discovered among wartime papers from Monte Cassino, misfiled within a box of unclassified intelligence documents returned to London in 1945. Several of these wartime files were handled repeatedly over the following decades, sometimes for legitimate cataloguing purposes, sometimes, I suspect, simply because they attracted curiosity. The parchment bundle has been both overlooked and, regrettably, disturbed. What remains is fragmentary, incomplete, and in places worn thin by moisture and handling. The opening leaves are the most damaged of all. I have done my best to transcribe the journals as the author intended them to be.
The medieval hand is competent but inconsistent, suggesting that Aurelius wrote intermittently, under conditions not always conducive to concentration or neatness. One section appears to have been composed outdoors, fine grit embedded in the ink confirms this, while at least one other was written, from the evidence of pressure and line angle, during illness or exhaustion. Marginalia from a second hand complicate the reading of two folios, though whether these later notes were made by a contemporary or a later copyist cannot yet be established.
The decision to present these fragments in the order in which they were written is deliberate but relies somewhat on guesswork. There is no definitive way to reconstruct the original sequence other than through the content of the entries. The folios were disordered when removed from the wartime box, either by earlier handlers or during the chaos of the monastery’s destruction. Any attempt at chronological reconstruction is therefore hypothetical at best.
Readers should approach the journals with this in mind: we enter Aurelius’ world at Entry 2, not at the beginning of his life, but at the beginning of a coherent narrative following a momentous occasion in his life.
The fragments will speak for themselves, as far as they are able. We are blessed that time and chance have permitted the ink to survive.
All material published here is fictional, presented in the style of edited historical documents.