Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume.

Take a nice, deep breath.

And off we go.

This evening we're tipping back into the classics and continuing one of the most popular

readings on this podcast to date.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,

the Emperor of Rome.

Let's pick up where we left off. 14. From the gods I received that I had good

grandfathers and parents, a good sister, good masters, good

domestics, loving kinsmen, almost all that I have, and that I never through haste and rashness transgressed against any of them.

Notwithstanding that my disposition was such as that such a thing if occasion had been, might very well have been committed by me,

but that it was the mercy of the gods to prevent such a concurring of matters and occasions

as might make me to incur this blame, that I was not long brought up by the concubine of my father

That I preserved the flower of my youth that I took not upon me to be a man before my time

But rather put it off longer than I needed.

That I lived under the government of my lord and father who would take away from me all

pride and

vanglory and reduce me to that conceit and opinion that it was not impossible for a

prince to live in the court without a troop of guards and followers, extraordinary apparel, such and such torches

and statues and other like particulars of state and magnificence, but that a man may reduce and contract

himself almost to the state of a private man, and yet for all that not to become the more base and remiss in those public matters and affairs

...