Select one of the 12 books to see the text, and between our choice of figures and themes to see highlighted instances.
1. From my grandfather Verus:
the lessons of noble character and even
temper.
2. From my father’s reputation and my memory of him: modesty and
manliness.
3. From my mother: piety and bountifulness, to keep myself not only from
doing evil but even from dwelling on evil thoughts, simplicity too in diet
and to be far removed from the ways of the rich.
4. From my mother’s grandfather: not to have attended public schools but
enjoyed good teachers at home, and to have learned the lesson that on
things like these it is a duty to spend liberally.
5. From my tutor: not to become a partisan of the Green jacket or the Blue
in the races, nor of Thracian or Samnite gladiators;
to bear pain and be
content with little; to work with my own hands, to mind my own business,
and to be slow to listen to slander.
6. From Diognetus: to avoid idle enthusiasms; to disbelieve the professions
of sorcerers and impostors about incantations and exorcism of spirits and
the like; not to cock-fight or to be excited about such sports; to put up
with plain-speaking and to become familiar with philosophy; to hear the
lectures first of Baccheius
, then of Tandasis and Marcian, in boyhood to
write essays and to aspire to the camp-bed and skin coverlet and the other
things which are part of the Greek training.
7. From Rusticus: to get an impression of need for reform and treatment
of character; not to run off into zeal for rhetoric, writing on speculative
themes, discoursing on edifying texts, exhibiting in fanciful colours the
ascetic or the philanthropist. To avoid oratory, poetry, and preciosity; not to
parade at home in ceremonial costume or to do things of that kind; to write
letters in the simple style, like his own from Sinuessa to my mother. To be
easily recalled to myself and easily reconciled with those who provoke
and offend, as soon as they are willing to meet me. To read books
accurately and not be satisfied with superficial thinking about things or
agree hurriedly with those who talk round a subject. To have made the
acquaintance of the Discourses of Epictetus, of which he allowed me to
share a copy of his own.
8. From Apollonius: moral freedom, not to expose oneself to the
insecurity of fortune; to look to nothing else, even for a little while, except
to reason. To be always the same, in sharp attacks of pain, in the loss of a
child, in long illnesses. To see clearly in a living example that a man can be
at once very much in earnest and yet able to relax.
Not to be censorious in exposition; and to see a man who plainly considered
technical knowledge and ease in communicating general truths as the least
of his good gifts. The lesson how one ought to receive from friends what
are esteemed favours, neither lowering oneself on their account, nor
returning them tactlessly.
9. From Sextus: graciousness, and the pattern of a household governed by
its head, and the notion of life according to Nature. Dignity without
pretence, solicitous consideration for friends, tolerance of amateurs and of
those whose opinions have no ground in science.
A happy accommodation to every man, so that not only was his
conversation more agreeable than any flattery, but he excited the greatest
reverence at that very time in the very persons about him. Certainty of
grasp, and method in the discovery and arrangement of the principles
necessary to human life.
Never to give the impression of anger or of any other passion, but to be at
once entirely passionless and yet full of natural affection. To praise without
noise, to be widely learned without display.
10. From Alexander the grammarian: to avoid fault-finding and not to
censure in a carping spirit any who employ an exotic phrase, a solecism, or
harsh expression, but oneself to use, neatly and precisely, the correct phrase,
by way of answer or confirmation or handling of the actual question—the
thing, not its verbal expression—or by some other equally happy reminder.
11. From Fronto: to observe how vile a thing is the malice and caprice
and hypocrisy of absolutism; and generally speaking that those whom we
entitle ‘Patricians’ are somehow rather wanting in the natural affections.
12. From Alexander the Platonist: seldom and only when absolutely
necessary to say to anyone or write in a letter: ‘I am too busy’; nor by such
a turn of phrase to evade continually the duties incident to our relations to
those who live with us, on the plea of ‘present circumstances’.
13. From Catulus: not to neglect a friend’s remonstrance, even if he may
be unreasonable in his remonstrance, but to endeavour to restore him to his
usual temper. Hearty praise, too, of teachers, like what is recorded of
Athenodotus and Domitius, and genuine love towards children.
14. From Severus: love of family, love of truth, and love of justice. To
have got by his help to understand Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dio, Brutus,
and to conceive the idea of a commonwealth based on equity and freedom
of speech, and of a monarchy cherishing above all the liberty of the
subject. From him, too, consistency and uniformity in regard for
philosophy; to do good, to communicate liberally, to be hopeful; to believe
in the affection of friends and to use no concealment towards those who
incurred his censure, and that his friends had no necessity to conjecture his
wishes or the reverse, but he was open with them.
15. From Maximus: mastery of self and vacillation in nothing;
cheerfulness in all circumstances and especially in illness. A happy blend of
character, mildness with dignity, readiness to do without complaining what
is given to be done. To see how in his case everyone believed ‘he really
thinks what he says, and what he does, he does without evil intent’; not to
be surprised or alarmed; nowhere to be in a hurry or to procrastinate, not to
lack resource or to be depressed or cringing or on the other hand angered or
suspicious. To be generous, forgiving, void of deceit. To give the
impression of inflexible rectitude rather than of one who is corrected. The
fact, too, that no one would ever have dreamt that he was looked down on
by him or would have endured to conceive himself to be his superior. To be
agreeable also (in social life).
16. From my father (by adoption): gentleness and unshaken resolution in
judgements taken after full examination; no vainglory about external
honours; love of work and perseverance; readiness to hear those who had
anything to contribute to the public advantage; the desire to award to every
man according to desert without partiality; the experience that knew where
to tighten the rein, where to relax. Prohibition of unnatural practices,
social tact and permission to his suite not invariably to be present at his
banquets nor to attend his progress from Rome, as a matter of obligation,
and always to be found the same by those who had failed to attend him
through engagements. Exact scrutiny in council and patience; not that he
was avoiding investigation, satisfied with first impressions. An inclination
to keep his friends, and nowhere fastidious or the victim of manias but his
own master in everything, and his outward mien cheerful. His long
foresight and ordering of the merest trifle without making scenes. The
check in his reign put upon organized applause and every form of lipservice; his unceasing watch over the needs of the empire and his
stewardship of its resources; his patience under criticism by individuals of
such conduct. No superstitious fear of divine powers or with man any
courting of the public or obsequiousness or cultivation of popular favour,
but temperance in all things and firmness; nowhere want of taste or search
for novelty.
In the things which contribute to life’s comfort, where fortune was lavish to
him, use without display and at the same time without apology, so as to take
them when they were there quite simply and not to require them when they
were absent. The fact that no one would have said that he was a sophist, an
impostor, or a pedant, but a ripe man, an entire man, above flattery, able to
preside over his own and his subjects’ business.
Besides all this the inclination to respect genuine followers of philosophy,
but towards the other sort no tendency to reproach nor on the other hand to
be hoodwinked by them; affability, too, and humour, but not to excess. Care
of his health in moderation, not as one in love with living nor with an eye to
personal appearance nor on the other hand neglecting it, but so far as by
attention to self to need doctoring or medicine and external applications for
very few ailments.
A very strong point, to give way without jealousy to those who had some
particular gift like literary expression or knowledge of the Civil Law or
customs or other matters, even sharing their enthusiasm that each might get
the reputation due to his individual excellence. Acting always according to
the tradition of our forefathers, yet not endeavouring that this regard for
tradition should be noticed. No tendency, moreover, to chop and change, but
a settled course in the same places and the same practices. After acute
attacks of headache, fresh and vigorous at once for his accustomed duties;
and not to have many secrets, only very few and by way of exception, and
those solely because of matters of State. Discretion and moderation alike in
the provision of shows, in carrying out public works, in donations to the
populace, and so on; the behaviour in fact of one who has an eye precisely
to what it is his duty to do, not to the reputation which attends the doing.
He was not one who bathed at odd hours, not fond of building, no
connoisseur of the table, of the stuff and colour of his dress, of the beauty of
his slaves. His costume was brought to Rome from his country house at
Lorium; his manner of life at Lanuvium; the way he treated the taxcollector who apologized at Tusculum, and all his behaviour of that sort.
Nowhere harsh, merciless, or blustering, nor so that you might ever say ‘to
fever heat’, but everything nicely calculated and divided into its times, as
by a leisured man; no bustle, complete order, strength, consistency. What is
recorded of Socrates would exactly fit him: he could equally be abstinent
from or enjoy what many are too weak to abstain from and too selfindulgent in enjoying. To be strong, to endure, and in either case to be sober
belong to the man of perfect and invincible spirit, like the spirit of Maximus
in his illness.
17. From the gods: to have had good grandparents, good parents, a good
sister, good masters, good intimates, kinsfolk, friends, almost everything;
and that in regard to not one of them did I stumble into offence, although I
had the kind of disposition which might in some circumstances have led me
to behave thus; but it was the goodness of the gods that no conjunction of
events came about which was likely to expose my weakness. That I was not
brought up longer than I was with my grandfather’s second wife, that I
preserved the flower of my youth and did not play the man before my time,
but even delayed a little longer. That my station in life was under a
governor and a father who was to strip off all my pride and to lead me to
see that it is possible to live in a palace and yet not to need a bodyguard or
embroidered uniforms or candelabra and statues bearing lamps and the like
accompaniments of pomp, but that one is able to contract very nearly to a
private station and not on that account to lose dignity or to be more remiss
in the duties that a prince must perform on behalf of the public. That I met
with so good a brother,
able by his character not only to rouse me to care
of myself but at the same time to hearten me by respect and natural
affection; that my children were not deficient in mind nor deformed in
body; that I made no further progress in eloquence and poetry and those
other pursuits wherein, had I seen myself progressing along an easy road, I
should perhaps have become absorbed. That I made haste to advance my
masters to the honours which they appeared to covet and did not put them
off with hopes that, as they were still young, I should do it later on. To have
got to know Apollonius, Rusticus, Maximus. To have pictured to myself
clearly and repeatedly what life in obedience to Nature really is, so that,
so far as concerns the gods and communications from the other world, and
aids and inspirations, nothing hinders my living at once in obedience to
Nature, though I still come somewhat short of this by my own fault and by
not observing the reminders and almost the instructions of the gods. That
my body has held out so well in a life like mine; that I did not touch
Benedicta or Theodotus,but that even in later years when I experienced
the passion of love I was cured; that though I was often angry with Rusticus
I never went to extremes for which I should have been sorry; that though
my mother was fated to die young, she still spent her last years with me.
That whenever I wanted to help anyone in poverty or some other necessity I
was never told that I could not afford it, and that I did not myself fall into
the same necessity so as to take help from another; that my wife is what
she is, so obedient, so affectionate, and so simple; that I was well provided
with suitable tutors for my children. That I was granted assistance in
dreams, especially how to avoid spitting blood and fits of giddiness, and
the answer of the oracle at Caieta: ‘Even as thou shalt employ thyself; and
that, although in love with philosophy, I did not meet with any sophist or
retire to disentangle literary works or syllogisms or busy myself with
problems ‘in the clouds’.For all these things require ‘the gods to help and
Fortune’s hand’.
1. Say to yourself in the early morning:
I shall meet today inquisitive,
ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things
have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I,
because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong,
and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own
(not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a
portion of divinity),
I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man
will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him;
for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like
eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another
therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away
from him is to tend to antagonism.
2. This whatever it is that I am, is flesh and vital spirit and the governing
self. Disdain the flesh: blood and bones and network, a twisted skein of
nerves, veins, arteries. Consider also what the vital spirit is: a current of air,
not even continuously the same, but every hour being expelled and sucked
in again. There is then a third part, the governing self. Put away your books,
be distracted no longer, they are not your portion. Rather, as if on the point
of death, reflect like this: ‘you are an old man, suffer this governing part of
you no longer to be in bondage, no longer to be a puppet pulled by selfish
impulse, no longer to be indignant with what is allotted in the present or to
suspect what is allotted in the future.’
3. The work of the gods is full of Providence: the work of fortune is not
divorced from Nature or the spinning and winding of the threads ordained
by Providence. All flows from that other world; and there is, besides,
necessity and the well-being of the whole universe, whereof you are a part.
Now to every part of Nature that is good which the nature of the Whole
brings, and which preserves that nature; and the whole world is preserved as
much by the changes of the compound bodies as by the changes of the
elements which compose those bodies. Let this be sufficient for you, these
be continually your doctrines. But put away your thirst for books,
that so
you may not die murmuring, but truly reconciled and grateful from your
heart to the gods.
4. Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how
many times the gods have given you days of grace, and yet you do not use
them. Now is it high time to perceive the kind of Universe whereof you are
a part and the nature of the governor of the Universe from whom you
subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and
that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will
be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again.
5. Each hour be minded, valiantly as becomes a Roman and a man, to do
what is to your hand, with precise . . . and unaffected dignity, natural love,
freedom and justice; and to give yourself repose from every other
imagination. And so you will, if only you do each act as though it were your
last, freed from every random aim, from wilful turning away from the
directing Reason, from pretence, self-love and displeasure with what is
allotted to you. You see how few things a man need master in order to live a
smooth and god-fearing life; for the gods themselves will require nothing
more of him who keeps these precepts.
6. You are doing yourself violence, violence, my soul; and you will have
no second occasion to do yourself honour. Brief is the life of each of us, and
this of yours is nearly ended, and yet you do not reverence yourself, but
commit your well-being to the charge of other men’s souls.
7. Do things from outside break in to distract you? Give yourself a time of
quiet to learn some new good thing and cease to wander out of your course.
But, when you have done that, be on your guard against a second kind of
wandering. For those who are sick to death in life, with no mark on which
they direct every impulse or in general every imagination, are triflers, not in
words only but also in their deeds.
8. men are not easily seen to be brought into evil case by failure to consider
what passes in another’s soul; but they who do not read aright the motions
of their own soul are bound to be in evil case.
9. Always remember the following: what the nature of the Whole is; what
my own nature; the relation of this nature to that; what kind of part it is of
what kind of Whole; and that no man can hinder your saying and doing at
all times what is in accordance with that Nature whereof you are a part.
10. Like a true philosopher Theophrastus says, when comparing, as men
commonly do compare, various faults, that errors of appetite are graver than
errors of temper. For clearly one who loses his temper is turning away from
Reason with a kind of pain and inward spasm; whereas he who offends
through appetite is the victim of pleasure and is clearly more vicious in a
way and more effeminate in his wrong-doing. Rightly then and in a truly
philosophic spirit Theophrastus said that an offence attended with pleasure
involves greater censure than one attended with pain. And, generally, the
latter resembles more a man who was originally wronged and so is forced
by pain to lose his temper; the other has begun it himself and has been
impelled to do wrong, carried away by appetite to do what he does.
11. In the conviction that it is possible you may depart from life at once, act
and speak and think in every case accordingly. But to leave the company of
men is nothing to fear, if gods exist;
for they would not involve you in ill.
If, however, they do not exist or if they take no care for man’s affairs, why
should I go on living in a world void of gods, or void of providence? But
they do exist, and they do care for men’s lives, and they have put it entirely
in a man’s power not to fall into real ills; for the rest, if anything were an ill,
they would have provided also for this, that it may be in every man’s power
not to fall into it; (and how could what does not make a man worse make
his life worse?) But the nature of the Whole would not have winked at these
things either out of ignorance or because (though it knew of them) it had
not the power to guard against them or to put them right; neither would it
have made so vast an error, from want of power or skill, as to permit good
and ill to befall indifferently, both good and bad men equally. Now death
and life, good report and evil report, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty,
these all befall men, good and bad alike, equally, and are themselves neither
right nor wrong: they are therefore neither good nor ill.
12. How all things are vanishing swiftly, bodies themselves in the Universe
and the memorials of them in Time; what is the character of all things of
sense, and most of all those which attract by the bait of pleasure or terrify
by the threat of pain or are shouted abroad by vanity, how cheap,
comtemptible, soiled, corruptible, and mortal: these are for the faculty of
mind to consider. To consider too what kind of men those are whose
judgements and voices confer honour and dishonour; what it is to die, and
that if a man looks at it by itself and by the separating activity of thought
strips off all the images associated with death, he will come to judge it to be
nothing else but Nature’s handiwork. But if a man fears Nature’s handiwork
he is a mere child; and yet death is not merely Nature’s handiwork, but also
her well-being. To consider also how mortal man touches God and through
what organ of himself, and when that part of him is in what sort of
condition.
13. Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round
everything, and, as Pindar says,
‘searches the bowels of the earth’, and
seeks by conjecture to sound the minds of his neighbours, but fails to
perceive that it is enough to abide with the Divinity that is within himself
and to do Him genuine service. Now that service is to keep Him unsullied
by passion, trifling, and discontent with what comes from God or men.
What comes from the Gods is to be revered because of excellence; what
comes from men is dear because they are of one kindred with himself;
pitiful too sometimes, humanly speaking, by reason of their ignorance of
good and ill. This disablement is more grievous than that which robs the
eyes of the power to distinguish light from darkness.
14. Even were you about to live three thousand years or thrice ten
thousand, nevertheless remember this, that no one loses any other life than
this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus
the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal
for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is
proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future;
how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these
two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and
are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or
for two hundred or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same
spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an
equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since
(as we saw) this is all he has and a man does not lose what he has not got.
15. ‘Everything is what you judge it to be.’ While the retort made to the
Cynic philosopher Monimus is plain enough, plain too is the use of the
saying, if one only take the gist of it, so far as it is true.
16. The soul of a man does violence to itself, first and foremost when it
becomes so far as in it lies, a separate growth, a blain as it were upon the
Universe. For to turn against anything that comes to pass is a separation
from Nature, by which the natures of each of the rest are severally
comprehended. Secondly, when it turns away from any human being or is
swept counter to him, meaning to injure him, as is the case with the natures
of those who are enraged. It violates itself, thirdly, when it is the victim of
pleasure or pain; fourthly, when it acts a part, and says or does anything
both feignedly and falsely. Fifthly, when, failing to direct any act or impulse
of its own upon a mark, it behaves in any matter without a plan or
conscious purpose, whereas even the smallest act ought to have a reference
to the end. Now the end of reasonable creatures is this: to obey the rule and
ordinance of the most venerable of all cities and governments.
17. Of a man’s life, his time is a point, his existence a flux, his sensation
clouded, his body’s entire composition corruptible, his vital spirit an eddy
of breath, his fortune hard to predict, his fame uncertain. Briefly, all the
things of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium;
his life a warfare and a sojourn in a strange land, his after-fame oblivion.
What then can be his escort through life? One thing and one thing only.
Philosophy. And this is to keep the spirit within him unwronged and
unscathed, master of pains and pleasures, doing nothing at random, nothing
falsely and with pretence; needing no other to do aught or to leave aught
undone; and moreover accepting what befalls it, that is, what is assigned to
it, as coming from the other world from which it came itself. And in all
things awaiting death, with a mind that is satisfied, counting it nothing else
than a release of the elements from which each living creature is composed.
Now if there is no hurt to the elements themselves in their ceaseless
changing each into other, why should a man apprehend anxiously the
change and dissolution of them all? For this is according to Nature; and no
evil is according to Nature.
1. We ought to take into account not only the fact that day by day life is
being spent and a smaller balance remaining, but this further point also that,
should we live longer, it is at least doubtful whether the intellect will
hereafter be the same, still sufficient to comprehend events and the
speculation which contributes to the understanding alike of things divine
and human. For, if the mind begin to decay, there will be no failure of
functions like transpiration, nutrition, sense-impression, and desire; but the
right employment of ourselves, precision in regard to the related elements
of duty, analysis of the indications of sense, to know just whether the time
is come to take leave of life, and all questions of the kind which specially
require a trained judgement— these are extinguished before the rest.
Accordingly we must press forward, not only because every day we are
drawing nearer to death, but also because the apprehension of events and
the ability to adapt ourselves to them begin to wane before the end.
2. We must also observe closely points of this kind, that even the
secondary effects of Nature’s processes possess a sort of grace and
attraction. To take one instance, bread when it is being baked breaks open at
some places; now even these cracks, which in one way contradict the
promise of the baker’s art, somehow catch the eye and stimulate in a special
way our appetite for the food. And again figs, when fully mature, gape, and
in ripe olives their very approach to decay adds a certain beauty of its own
to the fruit. Ears of corn too when they bend downwards, the lion’s
wrinkled brow, the foam flowing from the boar’s mouth, and many other
characteristics that are far from beautiful if we look at them in isolation, do
nevertheless because they follow from Nature’s processes lend those a
further ornament and a fascination. And so, if a man has a feeling for, and a
deeper insight into the processes of the Universe, there is hardly one but
will somehow appear to present itself pleasantly to him, even among mere
attendant circumstances. Such a man also will feel no less pleasure in
looking at the actual jaws of wild beasts than at the imitations which
painters and sculptors exhibit, and he will be enabled to see in an old
woman or an old man a kind of freshness and bloom, and to look upon the
charms of his own boy slaves with sober eyes. And many such experiences
there will be, not convincing to everyone but occurring to him and to him
alone who has become genuinely familiar with Nature and her works.
3. Hippocrates, after curing many sicknesses, himself fell sick and died.
The Chaldean astrologers foretold the death of many persons, then the
hour of fate overtook them also. Alexander, Pompeius, and Julius Caesar,
after so often utterly destroying whole towns and slaying in the field many
myriads of horse and foot, themselves also one day departed from life.
Heraclitus, after many speculations about the fire which should consume
the Universe, was waterlogged by dropsy, poulticed himself with cow-dung,
and died. Vermin killed Democritus; another kind of vermin Socrates.
What is the moral? You went on board, you set sail, you have made the
port. Step ashore: if to a second life, nothing is void of gods, not even in
that other world; but if to unconsciousness, you will cease to suffer pains
and pleasures and to be the servant of an earthly vessel as far inferior as that
which does it service is superior; for the one is mind and deity, the other
clay and gore.
4. Do not waste the balance of life left to you in thoughts about other
persons, when you are not referring to some advantage of your fellows—for
why do you rob yourself of something else which you might do—I mean if
you imagine to yourself what so and so is doing, and why; what he is saying
or thinking or planning, and every thought of the kind which leads you
astray from close watch over your governing self?
Rather you must, in the train of your thoughts, avoid what is merely casual
and without purpose, and above all curiosity and malice; you must habituate
yourself only to thoughts about which if someone were suddenly to ask:
‘What is in your mind now?’, you would at once reply, quite frankly, this or
that; and so from the answer it would immediately be plain that all was
simplicity and kindness, the thoughts of a social being, who disregards
pleasurable, or to speak more generally luxurious imaginings or rivalry of
any kind, or envy and suspicion or anything else about which you would
blush to put into words that you had it in your head.
A man so minded, putting off no longer to be one of the elect, is surely a
priest and minister of gods, employing aright that which is seated within
him, which makes the mere mortal to be unstained by pleasures, unscathed
by any pain, untouched by any wrong, unconscious of any wickedness; a
wrestler in the greatest contest of all, not to be overthrown by any passion;
dyed with justice to the core, welcoming with his whole heart all that comes
to pass and is assigned to him; seldom and only under some great necessity
and for the common good imagining what another person is saying or doing
or thinking. For he has only his own work to realize and he keeps in mind
continually what is assigned to him from the Whole; his work he makes
perfect, his lot he is convinced is good; for the birth-spirit assigned to every
man goes with him and carries him along with it.
Moreover, he remembers that all reasonable beings are akin to himself, and
that although to care for all men is in accord with man’s nature, he is to
cling not to the opinion of all men, but only of men who live in accord with
Nature. Indeed, he remembers continually what those who do not so live are
like, in their homes and abroad, by night and by day; what manner of men
they are, and those with whom they defile themselves. Therefore he takes
no account even of the praise of such men-men who are not even acceptable
to themselves.
5. Do not act unwillingly nor selfishly nor without self-examination, nor
with divergent motives. Let no affectation veneer your thinking. Be neither
a busy talker, nor a busybody. Moreover let the God within be the guardian
of a real man, a man of ripe years, a statesman, a Roman, a magistrate,
who has taken his post like one waiting for the Retreat to sound, ready to
depart, needing no oath nor any man as witness. And see that you have
gladness of face, no need of service from without nor the peace that other
men bestow. You should stand upright,
not be held upright.
6. If you discover in the life of man something higher than justice, truth,
temperance, fortitude, and generally speaking than your understanding
contented with itself, where it presents you behaving by the rule of right,
and satisfied with destiny, in what is assigned to you and is not yours to
choose; if, I say, you see something higher than this, turn to it with all your
heart and enjoy the supreme good now that it is found. But if nothing higher
is revealed than the very divinity seated within you, subordinating your
private impulses to itself, examining your thoughts, having withdrawn
itself, as Socrates used to say,
from the sense-affections, and subordinated
itself to the gods and making men its first care; if you find all else to be
smaller and cheaper than this, give no room to anything else, to which when
once you incline and turn, you will no longer have the power without a
struggle to prefer in honour that which is your own, your peculiar good. For
it is not right to set up a rival of another kind to the good of Reason and of
the Commonwealth; the praise of the multitude, for example, or place or
wealth or pleasurable indulgence. All these, though they appear for a little
while to be in accord, suddenly gain the mastery and carry a man away. Do
you then, I say, simply and of your own free will, choose the higher and
hold fast to that. ‘But the higher is what is to our advantage’;
if to the
advantage of a reasonable being, keep hold of that, but if to the advantage
of a mere animate creature, say so and preserve your decision without
parade; only see to it that you make a choice that will not betray you.
7. Never value as an advantage to yourself what will force you one day to
break your word, to abandon self-respect, to hate, suspect, execrate another,
to act a part, to covet anything that calls for walls or coverings to conceal it.
A man who puts first his own mind and divinity, and the holy rites of its
excellence, makes no scene, utters no groans, will need neither the refuge of
solitude nor the crowded streets. What is most worthwhile, he will pass his
days neither in pursuit nor in avoidance, and it is no concern at all of his
whether the time be longer or shorter for which he shall have the use of the
soul in its bodily envelope; for even if he must be released at once, he will
depart as easily as he would perform any other act that can be done with
reverence and sobriety, being careful all his life of this one thing alone that
his understanding be not found in any state which is foreign to a reasonable
social being.
8. In the understanding of a man of chastened and purified spirit you will
find no trace of festering wound, no ulceration, no abscess beneath the skin.
The hour of fate does not surprise his life before its fulfilment, so that one
would say that the actor is leaving the stage before he has fulfilled his role,
before the play is over. You will find nothing servile or artificial, no
dependence on others nor severance from them; nothing to account for,
nothing that needs a hole to hide in.
9. Reverence your faculty of judgement. On this it entirely rests that your
governing self no longer has a judgement disobedient to Nature and to the
estate of a reasonable being. This judgement promises deliberateness,
familiar friendship with men, and to follow in the train of the gods.
10. Therefore throw all else aside, and hold fast only these few things;
further calling to mind at the same time that each of us lives only in the
present, this brief moment; the rest is either a life that is past, or is in an
uncertain future. Little the life each lives, little the corner of the earth he
lives in, little even the longest fame hereafter, and even that dependent on
a succession of poor mortals, who will very soon be dead, and have not
learnt to know themselves, much less the man who was dead long years
ago.
11. To the above supports let one more be added. Always make a figure or
outline of the imagined object as it occurs, in order to see distinctly what it
is in its essence, naked, as a whole and parts; and say to yourself its
individual name and the names of the things of which it was compounded
and into which it will be broken up. For nothing is so able to create
greatness of mind as the power methodically and truthfully to test each
thing that meets one in life, and always to look upon it so as to attend at the
same time to the use which this particular thing contributes to a Universe of
a certain definite kind, what value it has in reference to the Whole, and
what to man, who is a citizen of the highest City, whereof all other cities are
like households. What is this which now creates an image in me, what is its
composition? how long will it naturally continue, what virtue is of use to
meet it; for example, gentleness, fortitude, truth, good faith, simplicity, selfreliance, and the rest? Therefore, in each case, we must say: this has come
from God; this by the actual co-ordination of events, the complicated web
and similar coincidence or chance; this again from my fellow man, my
kinsman, my comrade, yet one who does not know what is natural for
himself But I do know; wherefore I use him kindly and justly, according to
the natural law of fellowship, aiming, however, at the same time at his
desert, where the question is morally indifferent.
12. If you complete the present work, following the rule of right, earnestly,
with all your might, with kindness, and admit no side issue, but preserve
your own divinity pure and erect, as if you have this moment to restore it; if
you make this secure, expecting nothing and avoiding nothing, but content
with present action in accord with Nature and with heroic truth in what you
mean and say, you will live the blessed life. Now there is no one who is
able to prevent this.
13. As doctors have their instruments and scalpels always at hand to meet
sudden demands for treatment, so do you have your doctrines ready in order
to recognize the divine and human, and so to do everything, even the very
smallest, as mindful of the bond which unites the divine and human; for you
will not do any act well which concerns man without referring it to the
divine; and the same is true of your conduct to God.
14. Do not wander from your path any longer, for you are not likely to read
your notebooks or your deeds of ancient Rome and Greece or your extracts
from their writings, which you laid up against old age. Hasten then to the
goal, lay idle hopes aside, and come to your own help, if you care at all for
yourself, while still you may.
15. They have not learnt to know the manifold significance of theft, of
sowing, of buying, resting, seeing what ought to be done. This depends not
on the bodily eye but on another kind of vision.
16. Body, vital spirit, mind: of the body, sense perceptions; of the vital
spirit, impulses; of the mind, doctrines. To be impressed by images belongs
also to the beasts of the field, to be swayed by the strings of impulse to wild
beasts, to men who sin against nature, to a Phalaris or a Nero. To have
the mind as guide to what appear to be duties belongs also to men who do
not believe in gods, who betray their own country, who do anything and
everything once they have locked their doors. If then all else is common
to you with those whom I have mentioned, it remains the peculiar mark of
the good man to love and welcome what befalls him and is the thread fate
spins for him; not to soil the divinity seated within his breast nor to disquiet
it with a mob of imaginations, but to preserve and to propitiate it, following
God in orderly wise, uttering no word contrary to truth, doing no act
contrary to justice. And if all men disbelieve that he lives simply, modestly,
and cheerfully, he is not angry with any one of them nor diverted from the
road that leads to the goal of his life, at which he must arrive, pure,
peaceful, ready to depart, in effortless accord with his own birth-spirit.
1. The sovereign power within, in its natural state, so confronts what
comes to pass as always to adapt itself readily to what is feasible and is
presented to it. This is because it puts its affection upon no material of its
own choice; rather it sets itself upon its objects with a reservation, and then
makes the opposition which encounters it into material for itself It is like a
fire, when it masters what falls into it, whereby a little taper would have
been put out, but a bright fire very quickly appropriates and devours what is
heaped upon it, and leaps up higher out of those very obstacles.
2. Nothing that is undertaken is to be undertaken without a purpose, nor
otherwise than according to a principle which makes the art of living
perfect.
3. men look for retreats for themselves, the country, the seashore, the hills;
and you yourself, too, are peculiarly accustomed to feel the same want. Yet
all this is very unlike a philosopher, when you may at any hour you please
retreat into yourself. For nowhere does a man retreat into more quiet or
more privacy than into his own mind, especially one who has within such
things that he has only to look into, and become at once in perfect ease; and
by ease I mean nothing else but good behaviour. Continually, therefore,
grant yourself this retreat and repair yourself. But let them be brief and
fundamental truths, which will suffice at once by their presence to wash
away all sorrow, and to send you back without repugnance to the life to
which you return.
For what is it that shall move your repugnance? The wickedness of men?
Recall the judgement that reasonable creatures have come into the world for
the sake of one another; that patience is a part of justice; that men do wrong
involuntarily; and how many at last, after enmity, suspicion, hatred,
warfare, have been laid out on their death-beds and come to dust. This
should make you pause. But shall what is assigned from Universal Nature
be repugnant to you? Revive the alternative: ‘either Providence or blind
atoms’,
and the many proofs that the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.
Shall then the things of the flesh still have hold upon you? Reflect that the
understanding, when once it takes control of itself and recognizes its own
power, does not mingle with the vital spirit, be its current smooth or broken,
and finally reflect upon all that you have heard and consented to about pain
and pleasure.
Well, then, shall mere glory distract you? Look at the swiftness of the
oblivion of all men; the gulf of endless time, behind and before; the
hollowness of applause, the fickleness and folly of those who seem to speak
well of you, and the narrow room in which it is confined. This should make
you pause. For the entire earth is a point in space, and how small a corner
thereof is this your dwelling place, and how few and how paltry those who
will sing your praises here!
Finally, therefore, remember your retreat into this little domain which is
yourself, and above all be not disturbed nor on the rack, but be free and
look at things as a man, a human being, a citizen, a creature that must die.
And among what is most ready to hand into which you will look have these
two: the one, that things do not take hold upon the mind, but stand without
unmoved, and that disturbances come only from the judgement within; the
second, that all that your eyes behold will change in a moment and be no
more; and of how many things you have already witnessed the changes,
think continually of that.
The Universe is change, life is opinion.
4. If mind is common to us all, then also the reason, whereby we are
reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which
enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also
is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in
one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth. For
in what other common government can we say that the whole race of men
partakes? And thence, from this common City, is derived our mind itself,
our reason and our sense of law, or from what else? For as the earthy is in
me a portion from some earth, and the watery from a second element, and
the vital spirit from some source, and the hot and fiery from yet another
source of its own (for nothing comes from nothing, just as nothing returns
to nothing), so therefore the mind also has come from some source.
5. Death is like birth, a mystery of Nature; a coming together out of
identical elements and a dissolution into the same. Looked at generally this
is not a thing of which man should be ashamed, for it is contrary neither to
what is conformable to a reasonable creature nor to the principle of his
constitution.
6. These are natural and necessary results from creatures of this kind, and
one who wants this to be otherwise wants the fig tree not to yield its acrid
juice. And in general remember this, that within a very little while both he
and you will be dead, and a little after not even your name nor his will be
left.
7. Get rid of the judgement; you are rid of the ‘I am hurt’; get rid of the ‘I
am hurt’, you are rid of the hurt itself.
8. What does not make a man worse than he was, neither makes his life
worse than it was, nor hurts him without or within.
9. It was a law of necessity that what is naturally beneficial should bring
this about.
10. ‘All that comes to pass comes to pass with justice.’ You will find this to
be so if you watch carefully. I do not mean only in accordance with the
ordered series of events, but in accordance with justice and as it were by
someone who assigns what has respect to worth. Watch, therefore, as you
have begun and whatever you do, do it with this, with goodness in the
specific sense in which the notion of the good man is conceived. Preserve
this goodness in everything you do.
11. Don’t regard things in the light in which he who does the wrong judges
them, nor as he wishes you to judge them: but see them as in truth they are.
12. In these two ways you must always be prepared: the one, only to act as
the principle of the royal and law-giving art prescribes for the benefit of
mankind; the second, to change your purpose, if someone is there to correct
and to guide you away from some fancy of yours
. The guidance must,
however, always be from a conviction of justice or common benefit
ensuing, and what you prefer must be similar, not because it looked pleasant
or popular.
13. ‘You have reason?’ ‘Yes, I have?’ ‘Why not use it then? If this is doing
its part, what else do you want?’
14. You came into the world as a part. You will vanish in that which gave
you birth, or rather you will be taken up into its generative reason by the
process of change.
15. many grains of incense upon the same altar; one falls first, another later,
but difference there is none.
16. Within ten days you will appear a god even to those11
to whom today
you seem a beast or a baboon, if you return to your principles and your
reverence of the Word.
17. Don’t live as though you were going to live a myriad years. Fate is
hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good.
18. How great a rest from labour he gains who does not look to what his
neighbour says or does or thinks,
but only to what he himself is doing, in
order that exactly this may be just and holy, or in accord with a good man’s
conduct. ‘Do not look round at a black character’, but run towards the
goal, balanced, not throwing your body about.
19. The man in a flutter for after-fame fails to picture to himself that each of
those who remember him will himself also very shortly die, then again the
man who succeeded him, until the whole remembrance is extinguished as it
runs along a line of men who are kindled and then put out. And put the case
that those who will remember never die, and the remembrance never dies,
what is that to you! And I do not say that it is nothing to the dead; what is
praise to the living, except perhaps for some practical purpose? For now
you are putting off unseasonably the gift of Nature, which does not depend
on the testimony of some one else . . .
20. Everything in any way lovely is of itself and terminates in itself, holding
praise to be no part of itself. At all events, in no case does what is praised
become better or worse. This I say also of what is commonly called lovely,
for instance materials and work of art; and indeed what is there lacking at
all to that which is really lovely? No more than to law, no more than to
truth, no more than to kindness or reverence of self. Which of these is
lovely because it is praised or corrupted because it is blamed? Does an
emerald become worse than it was, if it be not praised? And what of gold,
ivory, purple, a lute, a sword-blade, a flower-bud, and little plant?
21. You ask how, if souls continue to exist, the atmosphere has room for
them from time external. But how does the ground have room for the bodies
of those who for so long an age are buried in it? The answer is that, as on
earth change and dissolution after a continuance for so long make room for
other dead bodies, so in the atmosphere souls pass on and continue for so
long, and then change and are poured out and are kindled being assumed
into the generative principle of Universal Nature, and so provide room for
those which succeed to their place. This would be the answer presuming
that souls do continue. But we must consider not only the multitude of
bodies that are thus buried, but also the number of animals eaten every day
by ourselves and the rest of the animal creation. How large a number are
devoured and in a manner of speaking buried in the bodies of those who
feed upon them; and yet there is room to contain them because they are
turned into blood, because they are changed into forms of air and heat. How
shall we investigate the truth of this? By a distinction into the material and
the causal.
22. Do not wander without a purpose, but in all your impulses render what
is just, and in all your imaginations preserve what you apprehend.
23. Everything is fitting for me, my Universe, which fits thy purpose.
Nothing in thy good time is too early or too late for me; everything is fruit
for me which thy seasons. Nature, bear; from thee, in thee, to thee are all
things. The poet sings: ‘Dear city of Cecrops’, and will you not say: ‘Dear
city of God’?
24. Democritus has said: ‘Do few things, if you would enjoy tranquillity’.
May it not be better to do the necessary things and what the reason of a
creature intended by Nature to be social prescribes, and as that reason
prescribes? For this brings not only the tranquillity from doing right but
also from doing few things. For if one removes most of what we say and do
as unnecessary, he will have more leisure and less interruption. Wherefore
on each occasion he should remind himself: ‘Is this not one of the necessary
things?’
25. Make trial for yourself how the life of the good man, too, fares well, of
the man pleased with what is assigned from Universal Nature and contented
by his own just action and kind disposition.
26. You have seen those things, look now at these: do not trouble yourself,
make yourself simple. Does a man do wrong? He does wrong to himself.
Has some chance befallen you? It is well; from Universal Nature, from the
beginning, all that befalls was determined for you and the thread was
spun. The sum of the matter is this: life is short; the present must be
turned to profit with reasonableness and right. Be sober without effort.
27. Either an ordered Universe or a medley heaped together mechanically
but still an order; or can order subsist in you and disorder in the Whole!
And that, too, when all things are so distinguished and yet intermingled and
sympathetic.
28. A black heart is an unmanly heart, a stubborn heart; resembling a
beast of prey, a mere brute, or a child; foolish, crafty, ribald, mercenary,
despotic.
29. If he is a foreigner in the Universe who does not recognize the essence
of the Universe, no less is he a foreigner, who does not recognize what
comes to pass in it. A fugitive is he who runs away from the reasonable law
of his City; a blind man, he who shuts the eye of the mind; a beggar, he who
has need of another and has not all that is necessary for life in himself; a
blain on the Universe, he who rebels and separates himself from the reason
of our common nature because he is displeased with what comes to pass
(for Nature who bore you, brings these things also into being); a fragment
cut off from the City, he who cuts off his own soul from the soul of
reasonable creatures, which is one.
30. Here is a philosopher without a tunic, another without a book, another
here half-naked. ‘I have no bread,’ he says, ‘still I stand firm by the Word.’
And I have nourishment from my lessons and yet do not stand firm.
31. Love the art which you were taught, set up your rest in this. Pass
through what is left of life as one who has committed all that is yours, with
your whole heart, to the gods, and of men making yourself neither despot
nor servant to any.
32. Call to mind by way of example the time of Vespasian: you will see
everything the same: men marrying, bringing up children, falling ill, dying,
fighting, feasting, trading, farming, flattering, asserting themselves,
suspecting, plotting, praying for another’s death, murmuring at the present,
lusting, heaping up riches, setting their heart on offices and thrones. And
now that life of theirs is no more and nowhere.
Again pass on to the time of Trajan; again everything the same. That life,
too, is dead. In like manner contemplate and behold the rest of the records
of times and whole nations; and see how many after their struggles fell in a
little while and were resolved into the elements. But most of all you must
run over in mind those whom you yourself have known to be distracted in
vain, neglecting to perform what was agreeable to their own constitution, to
hold fast to this and to be content with this. And here you are bound to
remember that the attention paid to each action has its own worth and
proportion; only so you will not be dejected if in smaller matters you are
occupied no farther than was appropriate.
33. Words familiar in olden times are now archaisms; so also the names of
those whose praises were hymned in bygone days are now in a sense
archaisms; Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus; a little after, Scipio too
and Cato; then also Augustus, then also Hadrian and Antoninus. For all
things quickly fade and turn to fable, and quickly, too, utter oblivion covers
them like sand. And this I say of those who shone like stars to wonder at;
the rest, as soon as the breath was out of their bodies, were ‘unnoticed and
unwept’
34. With your whole will surrender yourself to Clotho to spin your fate into
whatever web of things she will.
35. All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered.
36. Contemplate continually all things coming to pass by change, and
accustom yourself to think that Universal Nature loves nothing so much as
to change what is and to create new things in their likeness. For everything
that is, is in a way the seed of what will come out of it, whereas you
imagine seeds to be only those which are cast into the earth or into the
womb. But that is very unscientific.
37. You will presently be dead and are not yet simple, untroubled, void of
suspicion that anything from outside can hurt you, not yet propitious to all
men, nor counting wisdom to consist only in just action.
38. Look into their governing principles, even the wise among them, what
petty things they avoid and what pursue!
39. Your evil does not consist in another’s governing principle, nor indeed
in any change and alteration of your environment. Where then? Where the
part of you which judges about evil is. Let it not frame the judgement, and
all is well. Even if what is nearest to it, your body, is cut, cauterized,
suppurates, mortifies, still let the part which judges about these things be at
rest; that is, let it decide that nothing is good or evil which can happen
indifferently to the evil man and the good. For what happens indifferently to
one whose life is contrary to Nature and to one whose life is according to
Nature, this is neither according to nor contrary to Nature.
40. Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one
being and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this
living creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how
all things work together to cause all that comes to pass, and their wonderful
web and texture.
41. You are a spirit bearing the weight of a dead body, as Epictetus used to
say.
42. For what comes to pass in the course of change nothing is evil, as
nothing is good for what exists in consequence of change.
43. There is a kind of river of things passing into being, and Time is a
violent torrent. For no sooner is each seen, then it has been carried away,
and another is being carried by, and that, too, will be carried away.
44. All that comes to pass is as familiar and well known as the rose in
spring and the grape in summer. Of like fashion are sickness, death,
calumny, intrigue, and all that gladdens or saddens the foolish.
45. What follows is always organically related to what went before; for it is
not like a simple enumeration of units separately determined by necessity,
but a rational combination; and as Being is arranged in a mutual coordination, so the phenomena of Becoming display no bare succession but a
wonderful organic interrelation.
46. Always remember what Heraclitus said: ‘the death of earth is the birth
of water, the death of water is the birth of atmosphere, the death of
atmosphere is fire, and conversely’
47. Just as, if one of the gods told you: ‘tomorrow you will be dead or in
any case the day after tomorrow’, you would no longer be making that day
after important any more than tomorrow, unless you are an arrant coward
(for the difference is a mere trifle), in the same way count it no great matter
to live to a year that is an infinite distance off rather than till tomorrow.
48. Think continually how many physicians have died, after often knitting
their foreheads over their patients; how many astrologers after prophesying
other men’s deaths, as though to die were a great matter; how many
philosophers after endless debate on death or survival after death; how
many paladins after slaying their thousands; how many tyrants after using
their power over men’s lives with monstrous arrogance, as if themselves
immortal; how many entire cities have, if I may use the term, died,
Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others innumerable. Run over, too, the
many also you know of, one after another. One followed this man’s funeral
and then was himself laid on the bier; another followed him, and all in a
little while. This is the whole matter: see always how ephemeral and cheap
are the things of man—yesterday, a spot of albumen, tomorrow, ashes or a
mummy. Therefore make your passage through this span of time in
obedience to Nature and gladly lay down your life, as an olive, when ripe,
might fall, blessing her who bare it and grateful to the tree which gave it
life.
49. Be like the headland on which the waves continually break, but it stands
firm and about it the boiling waters sink to sleep. ‘Unlucky am I, because
this has befallen me.’ Nay rather: ‘Lucky am I, because, though this befell
me, I continue free from sorrow, neither crushed by the present, nor fearing
what is to come.’ For such an event might have befallen any man, but not
every man would have continued in it free from sorrow. On what grounds
then is this ill fortune more than that good fortune? Do you, speaking
generally, call what is not a deviation from man’s nature a man’s ill fortune,
and do you suppose that what is not opposed to his natural will is a
deviation from his nature? Very well, you have been taught what that will
is. Can what has befallen you prevent your being just, high-minded,
temperate, prudent, free from rash judgements, trustful, self-reverent, free,
and whatever else by its presence with him enables a man’s nature to secure
what is really his? Finally, in every event which leads you to sorrow,
remember to use this principle: that this is not a misfortune, but that to bear
it like a brave man is good fortune.
50. An unscientific but none the less a helpful support to disdain of death is
to review those who have clung tenaciously to life. What more did they
gain than those who died prematurely? In every case they are laid in some
grave at last: Caedicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, and any others like
them, who after carrying many to the grave were themselves carried out. To
speak generally the difference is a small one, and this difference longdrawn-out through what great toils and with what sorts of men and in how
weak a body. Do not count it then as a thing . . .; for see the gulf of time
behind and another infinite time in front: in this what difference is there
between a three-days-old infant and a Nestor of three generations?
51. Run always the short road, and Nature’s road is short. Therefore say and
do everything in the soundest way, because a purpose like this delivers a
man from troubles and warfare, from every care and superfluity.
1. At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready:
‘I am called to man’s labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going
out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for?
Is it for this that I am fashioned, to lie in bedclothes and keep myself
warm?’ ‘But this is more pleasant.’ ‘Were you born then to please yourself;
in fact for feeling, not for action? Can’t you see the plants, the birds, the
ants,
the spiders, the bees each doing his own work, helping for their part
to adjust a world? And then you refuse to do a man’s office and don’t make
haste to do what is according to your own nature.’ ‘But a man needs rest as
well.’ I agree, he does, yet Nature assigns limits to rest, as well as to eating
and drinking, and you nevertheless go beyond her limits, beyond what is
sufficient; in your actions only this is no longer so, there you keep inside
what is in your power. The explanation is that you do not love your own
self, else surely you would love both your nature and her purpose. But other
men who love their own crafts wear themselves out in labours upon them,
unwashed and unfed; while you hold your own nature in less honour than
the smith his metal work, the dancer his art, the miser his coin, the lover of
vainglory his fame. Yet they, when the passion is on them, refuse either to
eat or to sleep sooner than refuse to advance the objects they care about,
whereas you imagine acts of fellowship to bring a smaller return and to be
deserving of less pains.
2. How simple to reject and to wipe away every disturbing or alien
imagination, and straightway to be in perfect calm.
3. Make up your mind that you deserve every word and work that is
according to Nature, and do not allow the ensuing blame or speech of any
men to talk you over; but, if it is right to be done or said, do not count
yourself undeserving of it. Those others have their own selves to govern
them, and use their several inclinations. Don’t look round at that, but walk
the straight way, following your own and the common Nature, for the path
of them both is one.
4. I walk in Nature’s way until I shall lie down and rest, breathing my last in
this from which I draw my daily breath, and lying down on this from which
my father drew his vital seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk;
from which for so many years I am fed and watered day by day; which
bears my footstep and my misusing it for so many purposes.
5. ‘Your mental powers they cannot admire.’ Granted! but there is much
else of which you cannot say: ‘that is no gift of mine’. Bring forth then
what is wholly in your power, freedom from guile, dignity, endurance of
labour, distaste for pleasure, contentment with your portion, need of little,
kindness, freedom, plain-living, reserve in speech, magnanimity. See you
not how much you are able to bring forth, where there is no excuse of want
of gift or want of facility, and yet you are content to keep a lower place?
Are you obliged to grumble, to be grasping, to flatter, to blame your poor
body, to be obsequious, to vaunt yourself, to be tossed about in mind,
because you have been fashioned without talent? No, by heaven, you had
the power to be rid of all this long ago, and only, if at all, to be convicted of
some slowness and tardiness of understanding; and even there you should
exercise yourself, not disregarding your faults nor finding satisfaction in
your dullness.
6. One kind of man, when he does a good turn to someone, is forward also
to set down the favour to his account. Another is not forward to do this, but
still within himself he thinks as though he were a creditor and is conscious
of what he has done. A third is in a sense not even conscious of what he has
done, but he is like a vine which has borne grapes, and asks nothing more
when once it has borne its appropriate fruit. A horse runs, a hound tracks,
bees make honey, and a man does good, but doesn’t know that he has done
it and passes on to a second act, like a vine to bear once more its grapes in
due season. You ought then to be one of these who in a way are not aware
of what they do. ‘Yes, but one ought to be aware precisely of this; for’, he
argues, ‘it is a mark of the social being to perceive it too.’ What you are
saying is true, but you take what is now meant in the wrong way; because
of this you will be one of those whom I mentioned above, for they, too, are
led astray by a kind of plausible reasoning. But if you make up your mind
to understand what is meant, do not be afraid of omitting thereby any social
act.’
7. A prayer of the people of Athens:
‘Rain, beloved Zeus, rain on the
cornfields and the plains of Attica.’ One ought to pray thus simply and
freely, or not to pray at all.
8. We commonly say: ‘Aesculapius ordered a man horse-exercise, cold
baths, or no shoes’; similarly we might say: ‘Universal Nature ordered him
sickness, disablement, loss or some other affliction.’ In the former phrase
‘ordered’ virtually means ‘laid this down for him as appropriate to health’;
in the latter what befits every man has been laid down for him as
appropriate to the natural order. So, too, we say things ‘befit us’ as
workmen talk of squared blocks ‘fitting’ in walls or pyramids bonding with
one another in a definite structure. For in the whole of things there is one
connecting harmony, and as out of all material bodies the world is made
perfect into a connected body, so out of all causes the order of Nature is
made perfect into one connected cause. Even quite simple folk have in their
minds what I am saying, for they use the phrase; ‘it was sent to him’; and so
this was ‘sent’ to him, that is, ‘this was ordered for him’. Accordingly let us
accept these orders as we accept what Aesculapius orders. many of them,
too, are assuredly severe, yet we welcome them in hopes of health. Let the
performance and completion of the pleasure of the Universal Nature seem
to you to be your pleasure, precisely as the conduct of your health is seen to
be, and so welcome all that comes to pass, even though it appear rather
cruel, because it leads to that end, to the health of the universe, that is to the
welfare and well-being of Zeus. For he would not ‘send’ this to one, if it
were not to the well-being of the whole, no more than any living principle
you may choose ‘sends’ anything which is not appropriate to what is
governed by it. Thus there are two reasons why you must be content with
what happens to you: first because it was for you it came to pass, for you it
was ordered and to you it was related, a thread of destiny stretching back to
the most ancient causes; secondly because that which has come to each
individually is a cause of the welfare and the completion and in very truth
of the actual continuance of that which governs the Whole. For the perfect
Whole is mutilated if you sever the least pan of the contact and continuity
alike of its causes as of its members; and you do this so far as in you lies,
whenever you are disaffected, and in a measure you are destroying it.
9. Don’t be disgusted, don’t give up, don’t be impatient if you do not carry
out entirely conduct based in every detail upon right principles; but after a
fall return again, and rejoice if most of your actions are worthier of human
character. Love that to which you go back, and don’t return to Philosophy
as to a schoolmaster, but as a man with sore eyes to the sponge and salve, as
another to a poultice, another to a fomentation. For so you will show that to
obey Reason is no great matter but rather you will find rest in it. Remember,
too, that philosophy wills nothing else than the will of your own nature,
whereas you were willing some other thing not in accord with Nature. For
what is sweeter than this accord? Does not pleasure overcome us just by
sweetness? Well, see whether magnanimity, freedom, simplicity,
consideration for others, holiness are not sweeter; for what is sweeter than
wisdom itself when you bear in mind the unbroken current in all things of
the faculty of understanding and knowledge?
10. Realities are so veiled, one might say, from our eyes that not a few and
those not insignificant thinkers
thought them to be incomprehensible,
while even the Stoics think them difficult of comprehension; and all our
assent to perceptions is liable to alter. For where is the infallible man to be
met? Pass on, then, to objects of experience—how short their duration, how
cheap, and able to be in the possession of the bestial,
the harlot, or the
brigand. Next pass to the characters of those who live with you, even the
best of whom it is hard to suffer, not to say that it is hard for a man even to
endure himself. In such a fog and filth,
in so great a torrent of being and
time and movement and moving things, what can be respected or be
altogether the object of earnest pursuit I do not see. On the contrary, one
must console oneself by awaiting Nature’s release, and not chafing at the
circumstances of delay, but finding repose only in two things: one, that
nothing will befall me which is not in accordance with the nature of the
Whole; the other, that it is in my power to do nothing contrary to my God
and inward Spirit; for there is no one who shall force me to sin against this.
11. ‘To what purpose, then, am I now using my soul?’ In every case ask
yourself this question and examine yourself: ‘What have I now in this part
which men call the governing part, and whose soul have I at present? A
child’s, a boy’s, a woman’s, a despot’s, a dumb animal’s, a dangerous
beast’s?’
12. You could apprehend the character of what the majority of men fancy to
be ‘goods’ like this. If a man were to conceive the existence of real goods,
like wisdom, temperance, justice, fortitude, he could not with those in his
mind still listen to the popular proverb about ‘goods in every corner’, for it
will not fit. But with what appear to the majority of men to be goods in his
mind he will listen to and readily accept what the comic poet said as an
appropriate witticism. In this way even the majority perceive the difference,
otherwise this proverb would not in the one case offend and be disclaimed,
whereas in the case of wealth and the blessings which lead to luxury or
show we accept it as a witticism to fit the case. Go on, then, and ask
whether one should respect and conceive to be good, things to which when
one has thought of them one could properly apply the proverb that their
owner is so well off that he ‘has not a corner where to ease himself.
13. I was composed of a formal and a material substance; and of these
neither will pass away into nothingness, just as neither came to exist out of
nothingness. Thus, every part of me will be assigned its place by change
into some part of the Universe, and that again into another part of the
Universe, and so on to infinity. By a similar change both my parents and I
came to exist, and so on to another infinity of regression. For there is no
reason to prevent one speaking so, even if the Universe is governed
according to finite periods (of coming to be and passing away).
14. Reason and the method of reasoning are abilities, sufficient to
themselves and their own operations. Thus, they start from their appropriate
principle and proceed to their proposed end; wherefore reasonable acts are
called right acts, to indicate the rightness of their path.
15. A man ought to treasure none of these things, which does not fall to a
man’s portion qua man. They are not requirements of a man, nor does
man’s nature profess them, nor are they accomplishments of man’s nature.
Accordingly man’s end does not lie in them, and certainly not the good
which is complementary to his end. Moreover, if any of these were given as
his portion to man, it would not have been his portion to disdain them and
to resist them, nor would the man who made himself independent of them
have been laudable nor the man who took less of them than he might, have
been good, if they were really ‘goods’. But as things are, the more a man
robs himself of these and other such, the more he forbears when he is
robbed of them, so much the more is he good.
16. As are your repeated imaginations so will your mind be, for the soul is
dyed by its imaginations.
Dye it, then, in a succession of imaginations like
these: for instance, where it is possible to live, there also it is possible to
live well: but it is possible to live in a palace, therefore it is also possible to
live well in a palace. Or once more: a creature is made for that in whose
interest it was created: and that for which it was made, to this it tends: and
to what it tends, in this is its end: and where its end is, there is the
advantage and the good alike of each creature: therefore fellowship is the
good of a reasonable creature. For it has been proved long ago that we are
born for fellowship; or was it not plain that the inferior creatures are in the
interests of the superior, the superior of one another? But the animate are
superior to the inanimate and the reasoning to the merely animate.
17. To pursue the impossible is madness: but it is impossible for evil men
not to do things of this sort.
18. Nothing befalls anything which that thing is not naturally made to bear.
The same experience befalls another, and he is unruffled and remains
unharmed; either because he is unaware that it has happened or because he
exhibits greatness of soul. Is it not strange that ignorance and
complaisance are stronger than wisdom . . .?
19. Things as such do not touch the soul in the least: they have no avenue to
the soul nor can they turn or move it. It alone turns and moves itself, and it
makes what is submitted to it resemble the judgements of which it deems
itself deserving.
20. In one relation man is the nearest creature to ourselves, so far as we
must do them good and suffer them. But so far as they are obstacles to my
peculiar duties, man becomes something indifferent to me as much as sun
or wind or injurious beast. By these some action might be hindered, but
they are not hindrances to my impulse and disposition, because of my
power of reservation and adaptation; for the understanding adapts and alters
every obstacle to action to suit its object, and a hindrance to a given duty
becomes a help, an obstacle in a given path a furtherance.
21. Reverence the sovereign power over things in the Universe; this is what
uses all and marshals all. In like manner, too, reverence the sovereign power
in yourself; and this is of one kind with that. For in you also this is what
uses the rest, and your manner of living is governed by this.
22. What is not injurious to the city does not injure the citizens either. On
the occasion of every imagination that you have been injured apply this
canon: ‘If the city is not injured by this neither am I injured.’ But if the city
is injured you must not be angry, only point out to him who injured the city
what he has failed to see.
23. Repeatedly dwell on the swiftness of the passage and departure of
things that are and of things that come to be. For substance is like a river in
perpetual flux, its activities are in continuous changes, and its causes in
myriad varieties, and there is scarce anything which stands still, even what
is near at hand; dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and the future, in
which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who in all this is
puffed up or distracted or takes it hardly, as if he were in some lasting
scene, which has troubled him for long?
24. Call to mind the whole of Substance of which you have a very small
portion, and the whole of time whereof a small hair’s breadth has been
determined for you, and of the chain of causation whereof you are how
small a link.
25. Another does wrong. What is that to me? Let him look to it; he has his
own disposition, his own activity. I have now what Universal Nature wills
me to have, and I do what my own nature wills me to do.
26. See that the governing and sovereign part of your soul is undiverted by
the smooth or broken movement in the flesh, and let it not blend therewith,
but circumscribe itself, and limit those affections within the (bodily) parts.
But when they are diffused into the understanding by dint of that other
sympathy,
as needs must be in a united system, then you must not try to
resist the sensation, which is natural, yet the governing part must not of
itself add to the affection the judgement that it is either good or bad.
27. ‘Live with the gods.’ But he is living with the gods who continuously
exhibits his soul to them, as satisfied with its dispensation and doing what
the deity, the portion of himself
which Zeus has given to each man to
guard and guide him, wills. And this deity is each man’s mind and reason.
28. Are you angry with the man whose person or whose breath is rank?
What will anger profit you? He has a foul mouth, he has foul armpits; there
is a necessary connexion between the effluvia and its causes. ‘Well, but the
creature has reason, and can, if he stops to think, understand why he is
offensive.’ Bless you! and so too have you reason; let reasonable
disposition move reasonable disposition; point it out, remind him; for if
he hearkens, you will cure him and anger will be superfluous. You are
neither play-actor nor harlot.
29. As you intend to live when you depart, so you are able to live in this
world; but if they do not allow you to do so, then depart this life, yet so as if
you suffered no evil fate. The chimney smokes and I leave the room. Why
do you think it a great matter? But while no such reason drives me out, I
remain a free tenant and none shall prevent me acting as I will, and I will
what agrees with the nature of a reasonable and social creature.
30. The mind of the Whole is social. Certainly it has made the inferior in
the interests of the superior and has connected the superior one with
another. You see how it has subordinated, coordinated, and allotted to each
its due and brought the ruling creatures into agreement one with another.
31. How have you hitherto borne yourself to gods, parents, brother, wife,
children, masters, tutors, friends, connexions, servants? Has your relation to
all men hitherto been: ‘not to have wrought nor to have said a lawless thing
to any’?
32. Why do the ignorant and unlearned confound men of knowledge and
learning? What soul has knowledge and learning? That which knows the
beginning and end and the reason which informs the whole substance and
through all eternity governs the Whole according to appointed cycles.
33. In how short a time, ashes or a bare anatomy, and either a name or not
even a name; and if a name, then a sound and an echo. And all that is
prized in life empty, rotten, and petty; puppies biting one another, little
children quarrelling, laughing, and then soon crying. And Faith, Selfrespect, Right, and Truth ‘fled to Olympus from the spacious earth’.
What, then, still keeps one here, if the sensible is ever-changing, never in
one stay, the senses blurred and subject to false impressions; the soul itself
an exhalation from blood, and a good reputation in such conditions vanity?
What shall we say? Wait in peace, whether for extinction or a change of
state; and until its due time arrives, what is sufficient? What else than to
worship and bless the gods, to do good to men, to bear them and to
forbear;
34. You are able always to have a favourable tide, if you are able to take a
right path, if, that is, you are able both to conceive and to act with rectitude.
These two things are common to God’s soul and to man’s, that is, to the
soul of every reasonable creature: not to be subject to another’s hindrance,
to find his good in righteous act and disposition, and to terminate his desire
in what is right.
35. If this is neither evil of mine nor action which results from evil of mine,
and if the Universe is not injured, why am I troubled because of it? And
what injury is there to the Universe?
36. Don’t be carried away by imagination which sees only the surface, but
help men as best you may and as they deserve, even though their loss be of
something indifferent. Do not, however, imagine the loss to be an injury, for
that habit is bad. Like the old man who, when he went away, used to ask
for his foster-child’s top, but did not forget that it was a top; so you should
act also in this instance. And so you are lamenting in the pulpit! Have you
forgotten, my friend, what these things were worth? I know, but to the
sufferers they were of vast importance.’ Is that a reason why you should
make a fool of yourself too?
37. ‘There was a time when I was fortune’s favourite, wherever and
whenever she visited me.’ Yes, but to be fortune’s favourite meant assigning
good fortune to yourself; and good fortune means good dispositions of the
soul, good impulses, good actions.
1. The matter of the Whole is docile and adaptable, and the Reason that
controls it has in its own nature no ground to create evil, for it contains no
evil; nor does it create anything amiss nor is any injury done by it; and all
things come into being and are accomplished according to it.
2. Provided you are doing your proper work it should be indifferent to you
whether you are cold or comfortably warm, whether drowsy or with
sufficient sleep, whether your report is evil or good, whether you are in the
act of death or doing something else. For even that wherein we die is one of
the acts of life, and so even at that moment to ‘make the best use of the
present’ is enough.
3. Look to what is within: do not allow the intrinsic quality or the worth of
any one fact to escape you.
4. All things that exist will very swiftly change; either they will pass into
vapour, if we presume that matter is a whole, or else they will be dispersed
into their atoms.
5. The controlling Reason knows its own disposition, what it creates, and
the material upon which it works.
6. The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.
7. Rejoice and set up your rest in one thing: to pass from act to act of
fellowship, keeping God in remembrance.
8. The governing principle it is which wakes itself up and adapts itself,
making itself of whatever kind it wills and making all that happens to it
appear to be of whatever kind it wills.
9. All things are being accomplished in each case according to the nature of
the Whole; for certainly they cannot be in accordance with any other nature,
whether embracing them without, or enclosed within, or attached to them
outside.
10. Either a medley, a mutual interlacing of atoms and their scattering: or
unification, order, providence. If then the former, why do I so much as
desire to wear out my days in a world compounded by accident and in a
confusion governed by chance? Why am I concerned about anything else
than how I am in one way or another to ‘return to earth’? And why am I
troubled? Whatever I do, the scattering into atoms will come upon me. But,
if the alternative be true, I bow my head, I am calm, I take courage in that
which orders all.
11. Whenever you are obliged by circumstances to be in a way troubled,
quickly return to yourself, and do not, more than you are obliged, fall out of
step; for you will be more master of the measure by continually returning to
it.
12. Had you a step-mother and a mother at the same time, you would wait
upon the former but still be continually returning to your mother. This is
now what the palace5 and your philosophy are to you. Return to her again
and again, and set up your rest in her, on whose account that other life
appears tolerable to you and you tolerable in it.
13. Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and
choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of
a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian
wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb’s fleece dipped in a shellfish’s blood; and in matters of sex intercourse,
that it is attrition of an
entrail and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus. Surely these are
excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating
them so as to see the kind of things they really are. You should adopt this
practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which
is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off
the profession on which they vaunt themselves. For pride is an arch-seducer
of reason, and just when you fancy you are most certainly busy in good
works, then you are most certainly the victim of imposture. Consider for
instance what Crates says even about Xenocrates.
14. Most of the objects which the vulgar admire may be referred to the
general heads of what is held together by ‘stress’,
like minerals and timber,
or by ‘growth’, like figs, vines, olives; those admired by slightly superior
folk to things held together by ‘animal spirit’, for instance flocks and herds
or bare ownership of a multitude of slaves; those by persons still more
refined to things held together by ‘reasonable spirit’, not, however,
reasonable as such but so far as to be technical or skilled in something else.
But one who reveres spirit in its full sense of reasonable and political
regards those other objects no longer, but above all continually keeps his
own spirit in reasonable and social being and activity, co-operating with a
fellow being to this end.
15. Some things are hastening to be, others to have come and gone, and a
part of what is coming into being is already extinct. Flux and change renew
the world incessantly, as the unbroken passage of time makes boundless
eternity ever young. In this river,
therefore, on which he cannot stand,
which of these things that race past him should a man greatly prize? As
though he should begin to set his heart on one of the little sparrows that fly
past, when already it has gone away out of his sight. Truly the life of every
man is itself as fleeting as the exhalation of spirit from his blood or the
breath he draws from the atmosphere. For just as it is to draw in a single
breath and to return it, which we do every moment, so is it to render back
the whole power of respiration, which you acquired but yesterday or the day
before, at birth, to that other world from which you first drew it in.
16. To transpire like plants or to breathe like cattle or wild beasts is not a
thing to value, nor to be stamped by sense impression or drawn by the
strings of impulse, nor to live in herds or to take in nourishment—this last is
on a level with relieving the body of the dregs of that nourishment. What,
then, should be valued? The clapping of hands? Surely not; and so not
even the clapping of tongues, for the applause of multitudes is a clapping of
tongues. Therefore you have put mere glory away. What is left to be
valued? To my thinking to move and to be held back according to man’s
proper constitution, the end to which both rustic industries and the arts give
the lead. (For every art aims at this, that what it fashions should be suited to
the purpose for which it has been fashioned. This is the aim of the gardener
and of the vinedresser, of the breaker of colts and the trainer of dogs.) And
to what end do children’s training and teaching labour? Here, then, is what
is of true value, and if this be well, you will not endeavour to obtain for
yourself any one of the rest. Will you not cease to value many other things
besides? Then you will not be free or self-contained or passionless; for you
will be obliged to entertain envy and rivalry, to regard with suspicion those
who are able to take away those things, to plot against those who have what
is valued by you. To sum up, he who feels the want of any one of those
things must be sullied thereby and besides must often blame the gods. But
to reverence and value your own understanding will make you acceptable to
yourself, harmonious with your fellows, and in concord with the gods; that
is, praising whatsoever they assign and have ordained.
17. The motions of the Elements are up, down, in circles: the movement of
man’s excellence is in none of these, but proceeding in a more divine way
and on a path past finding out it fares well.
18. Only think what it is they do. They refuse to speak good of men living
at the same time and in their company, yet themselves set great store on
being spoken well of by those who will be born after them, whom they have
never seen and never will see. Yet this is next door to being sad because
men born before you were not speaking good words about you.
19. Do not because a thing is hard for you yourself to accomplish, imagine
that it is humanly impossible: but if a thing is humanly possible and
appropriate, consider it also to be within your own reach.
20. In the field a player may have scratched us with his nails or given us a
blow with his head, in a rage, yet we do not label him for that or hit back or
suspect him afterwards of designs against us. Still, we do, in fact, keep
away from him, not, however, as a foe and not with suspicion but with
good-natured avoidance. Let us take this for an example in other
departments of life; let us overlook much in the case of those who are, so to
speak, our opponents in the game; for, as I said, it is possible to avoid them,
yet neither to suspect nor hate them.
21. Suppose a man can convince me of error and bring home to me that I
am mistaken in thought or act; I shall be glad to alter, for the truth is what I
pursue, and no one was ever injured by the truth, whereas he is injured who
continues in his own self-deception and ignorance.
22. Let me do my own duty; nothing else distracts me, for it is either lifeless
or without reason or has gone astray and is ignorant of the true path.
23. Use dumb animals and lifeless things and objects generally with a
generous and free spirit, because you have reason and they have not; use
men because they have reason, in a neighbourly spirit; and in all things call
upon for gods for help. Let it make no difference to you for how long a
time you will do these things, for even three hours in this spirit is enough.
24. Alexander the Great and his stable boy were levelled in death, for they
were either taken up into the same life-giving principles of the Universe or
were scattered without distinction into atoms.
25. Reflect upon the multitude of bodily and mental events taking place in
the same brief time, simultaneously in every one of us; and so you will not
be surprised that many more events, or rather all things that come to pass,
exist simultaneously in the one and entire unity, which we call the Universe.
26. Suppose a man puts you the problem how to write the name
Antoninus. Will you raise your voice to pronounce each of its component
parts? Then suppose they are angry, will you be angry in return? Will you
not quietly enumerate and go over in succession each of the letters? In the
same way then, in our life here, remember that every duty has its
complement of definite numbers. These you must preserve and not be
troubled, and if men make difficulties, not meet them with difficulties, but
bring what you propose to do methodically to completion.
27. How inhuman it is to forbid men to set out after what appears suitable
and advantageous to themselves. Yet, in a way, you are not allowing them
to do this, whenever you are indignant because they do wrong; for certainly
they are moved to what looks to be suitable and advantageous to
themselves. ‘But it is, in fact, not so.’ Very well, instruct them and make it
plain; don’t be indignant.
28. Death is repose from sense-response, from the stimulus of impulse,
from intellectual analysis and the service of the flesh.
29. It is absurdly wrong that, in this life where your body does not give in,
your spirit should be the first to surrender.
30. Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar,
not to be dipped in the
purple dye; for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore, simple, good, pure,
grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong
for your proper work. Wrestle to continue to be the man Philosophy wished
to make you. Reverence the gods, save men. Life is brief; there is one
harvest of earthly existence, a holy disposition and neighbourly acts. In all
things like a pupil of Antoninus; his energy on behalf of what was done in
accord with reason, his equability everywhere, his serene expression, his
sweetness, his disdain of glory, his ambition to grasp affairs.
Also how he let nothing at all pass without first looking well into it and
understanding it clearly; how he would suffer those who blamed him
unjustly, not blaming them in return; how he was in no hurry about
anything; how he refused to entertain slander; how exactly he scrutinized
men’s characters and actions, was not given to reproach, not alarmed by
rumour, not suspicious, not affecting to be wise; how he was content with
little, in lodging, in his bed, in dress, in food, in service; how he loved work
and was long-suffering.
What a man, too, he was to remain in his place until evening; because of his
spare diet not needing even to relieve nature except at his usual hour.
Moreover, his constancy and uniformity to his friends, his tolerance of
plain-spoken opposition to his opinions and delight when anyone indicated
a better course; and how he revered the gods without superstition. So may
your last hour find you, like him, with a conscience void of reproach.
31. Be sober once more, recall yourself and shake off sleep again. Perceive
that they were dreams which troubled you, and once again fully awake,
look at these things as you looked at those.
32. I am composed of body and spirit. Now to the body all things are
indifferent, for it cannot distinguish them itself. And to the understanding
all that are not its own activities are indifferent, and all that are its own
activities are in its control. Even of these, however, it is concerned only
about the present, for its future and past activities are themselves also at the
present moment indifferent.
33. Neither pain of hand nor pain of foot is contrary to Nature, provided the
foot is doing the service of a foot or the hand of a hand. It follows that not
even for a man, as man, is pain contrary to Nature, while he is doing the
service of a man, and if pain for him is not contrary to Nature, neither is it
an evil for him.
34. What monstrous pleasures brigands, pathics, parricides, and despots
enjoy.
35. Do you not see how mechanic craftsmen suit themselves up to a point to
amateurs, yet none the less stick to the rule of their craft and never submit
to desert that? Is it not grievous, then, that architect and physician will
reverence, each the principle of his art, more than man his own principle,
which he has in common with the gods?
36. Asia and Europe are corners in the Universe; every sea, a drop in the
Universe; Mount Athos, a clod of earth in the Universe; every instant of
time, a pin-prick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing
away. All things come from that other world, starting from that common
governing principle, or else are secondary consequences of it. Thus, even
the lion’s jaws, deadly poison, and every injurious thing, like a thistle or a
bog, are by-products from those august and lovely principles. Do not,
then, imagine them to be contrary to what you reverence, but reflect upon
the fountain of all things.
37. He who sees what is now has seen all things, whatsoever came to pass
from everlasting and whatsoever shall be unto unlimited time. For all things
are of one kin and of one kind.
38. Meditate often upon the bond of all in the Universe and their mutual
relationship. For all things are in a way woven together and all are because
of this dear to one another; for these follow in order one upon another
because of the stress-movement and common spirit and the unification of
matter.
39. Fit yourself into accord with the things in which your portion has been
cast, and love the men among whom your lot has fallen, but love them truly.
40. Every instrument, tool, and vessel is well off, if it carry out the work for
which it was fashioned. Yet here the maker is outside the tool. Where things
are held together by a natural principle, the power which made them is
within and abides with them. You must accordingly reverence it the more,
and believe that if you are and continue according to the will of that power,
you have all things to your mind. And in like manner its things are to the
mind of the All.
41. Should you propose to yourself as good or evil something beyond your
will, the necessary result is that, if you fall into that evil or fail of that good,
you blame the gods and you hate men who are or who you suspect will be
the causes of your loss of the good or your falling into the evil; and indeed
we commit many wrongs from concern in regard to these things. If,
however, we decide that only what our will controls is good or evil, then no
ground is left either to arraign God or to adopt the position of an enemy to
man.
42. We are all working together to a single end, some consciously and with
understanding, some without knowledge, as Heraclitus, I think, says that
even ‘Sleepers are workers and fellow-workers in what comes to pass in the
world’
43. Does the Sun god claim to do the work of the god of rain, or
Aesculapius the work of the Fruit-bearing goddess? And how is it with
each of the stars? Is not their province different, but they are working
together to the same end?
44. If so be that the gods took counsel about me and what must happen to
me, they took counsel for good; for it is not easy to conceive a god without
purpose, and on what possible ground would be likely to desire to do me
harm? What advantage would there be from this either for themselves or for
the common good, which is their principal care? But if they took no counsel
about me as an individual, surely they did for the common good, and as the
present follows upon that by way of consequence, I am bound to welcome
and to love it. But suppose they take counsel, if you will, about nothing (a
thing it is impious to believe, or else let us cease to sacrifice and pray to
them, to swear by them and to do all else that we do, believing them to be
present and living in our midst); yet still, suppose they take council about
none of our concerns, I am able to take counsel about myself, and my
consideration is about what is advantageous. Now the advantage of each is
what is proper to his own constitution and nature, and my nature is
reasonable and social. As Antoninus, my city and my fatherland is Rome;
as a man, the Universe. All then that benefits these cities is alone my
good.
45. All that befalls the individual is to the advantage of the Whole. This
should be enough. However, if you watch carefully, you will generally see
this besides: what advantages a man also advantages the rest of men; but
here advantage must be taken in its more usual acceptance of what lies in
between good and evil.
46. Just as the performances in the amphitheatre and such places pall
upon you, being for ever the same scenes, and the similarity makes the
spectacle nauseating, so you feel in the same way about life as a whole; for
all things, up and down, are the same and follow from the same. How long
will it last?
47. Think constantly of the death of men of all sorts, of all sorts of
pursuits and of every kind of nation, so that your thought comes down to
Philistio, Phoebus, and Origanio. Now pass on to the remaining classes of
men. We are bound to change to that other world, where are so many subtle
orators, so many grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates;
so many heroes of old, captains and kings of later days. Besides these,
Eudoxus, Hipparchus, and Archimedes, other acute natures, great minds,
hard workers, rogues, self-willed men, those who made mock of man’s
mortal and transient life itself, like menippus and all of his kind. Of them
all reflect that long ago they were laid in the ground. Why was it dreadful
for them, why dreadful for those whose names are not even remembered?
One thing here is of great price, to live out life with truth and righteousness,
gracious to liars and to the unrighteous.
48. Whenever you desire to cheer yourself, think upon the merits of those
who are alive with you; the energy of one, for instance, the modesty of
another, the generosity of a third, of another some other gift. For nothing is
so cheering as the images of the virtues shining in the character of
contemporaries, and meeting so far as possible in a group. Therefore you
should keep them ready to your hand.
49. You are not discontented, surely, because you weigh only so many
pounds and not three hundred? So, too, because you may only live so many
years and no longer? As you are contented with the quantity of matter
determined for you, so also be contented with your days.
50. Endeavour to persuade them, but act even if they themselves are
unwilling, when the rule of justice so directs. If, however, a man employs
force to resist, change your object to resignation and freedom from a sense
of present injury, and use the opposition to elicit in yourself a different
virtue. Remember, too, that you set out with a reservation and were not
aiming at the impossible. What then was your aim? ‘An aim qualified by a
reservation.’ But you do achieve this; what we proposed to ourselves does
come to pass.
51. He who loves glory thinks the activity of another to be his own good; he
who loves pleasure thinks his own feeling to be his good; he who has
intelligence, thinks his own action to be his good.
52. It is possible to entertain no thought about this, and not be troubled in
spirit; for things of themselves are not so constituted as to create our
judgements upon them.
53. Habituate yourself not to be inattentive to what another has to say and,
so far as possible, be in the mind of the speaker.
54. What does not benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee.
55. If the crew spoke evil of the master of the ship or his patients of the
doctor, would they listen to any one else? Or how should the master achieve
safety for the passengers or health for those he is treating?
56. How many in whose company I came into the world are gone away
already!
57. Honey appears bitter to the jaundiced, water is dreaded by those bitten
by a mad dog, and to little boys a ball seems a fine thing. Why then am I
angry? Or do you think that misrepresentation has smaller power over men
than bile over the jaundiced or poison over the victim of a bite?
58. No one will prevent your living by the rule of your own nature: nothing
will happen to you contrary to the rule of Universal Nature.
59. What creatures they are whom they wish to please, and by what kind of
results and what kind of actions! How swiftly eternity will cover all things,
and how many it has covered already!
1. This is Evil; it is that which you have often seen. Have this ready to hand
at every emergency, that this is what you have often seen. You will in
general find the same things repeated up and down the world. The ancient
chronicles are full of them, those of the middle age, the recent. Cities and
households today are full of them. There is nothing new, all alike familiar
and short-lived.
2. Your principles are living principles. How else can they become lifeless,
except the images which tally with them be extinguished? And with you it
lies to rekindle them constantly. ‘I am able to think as I ought about this; if,
then, I am able, why am I troubled? Things outside my understanding are
nothing at all in regard to my understanding.’ Master this, and you stand
upright. To come back to life is in your power; look once more at things as
once you did, for herein to come back to life consists.
3. A procession’s vain pomp, plays on a stage, flocks, herds, sham fights, a
bone thrown to puppies, a crumb into fishponds, toiling and moiling of ants
carrying their loads, scurrying of startled mice, marionettes dancing to
strings. Well, then, you must stand up in all this, kindly and not carrying
your head proudly; yet understand that every man is worth just so much as
the worth of what he has set his heart upon.
4. In conversation one ought to follow closely what is being said; in the
field of impulse to follow what is happening; in the latter case to see
immediately what is the object of reference, in the former to mark closely
the meaning expressed.
5. Is my understanding sufficient for this or not? If it is sufficient, I employ
it for the task as an instrument bestowed on me by Universal Nature. But if
it is insufficient, either I withdraw
from the task in favour of one who can
accomplish it better (provided in other ways this is my duty), or else I do it
as best I can, taking to help me one who by using my intelligence to assist
him can do what is now opportune and beneficial for the general public. For
whatever I do, by myself or with another, should contribute solely to this,
the general benefit and harmony.
6. How many whose praises have been loudly sung are now committed to
oblivion: how many who sang their praises are long ago departed.
7. Do not be ashamed to be helped; the task before you is to accomplish
what falls to your lot, like a soldier in a storming-party.
Suppose you are
lame and cannot scale the wall by yourself, yet it can be done with
another’s help.
8. Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must,
bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the
present.
9. All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and
scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged
together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For
there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one
law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one truth, if indeed
the perfection of creatures of the same family and partaking of the same
Reason is one.
10. Everything material vanishes very swiftly in the Universal Substance,
every cause is very swiftly taken up into the Universal Reason, and the
memorial of everything is very swiftly buried in eternity.
11. For a reasonable creature the same act is according to Nature and
according to Reason.
12.
Upright, or held upright.
13. Reasonable beings, constituted for one fellowship of cooperation, are
in their separated bodies analogous to the several members of the body in
individual organisms. The idea of this will come home to you more if you
say to yourself: ‘I am a member of the system made up of reasonable
beings.’ If, however, by the change of one letter, you call yourself a part,
you do not yet love men from your heart; well-doing is not yet a joy to you
for its own sake; you are still doing it as a bare duty, not yet as though
doing good to yourself.
14. Let what will from outside happen to what can be affected by this
happening, for the parts which are affected shall, if they please, find fault;
whereas I myself, unless I conceive the accident to be evil, am not yet
harmed; and it is my power not to conceive it to be evil.
15. Whatever any one may do or say, I am bound to be good; exactly as if
gold or emerald or purple were continually to say this: ‘whatever any one
may do or say, I am bound to be an emerald and to keep the colour that is
mine.’
16. The governing self does not create disorder for itself; I mean, for
instance, it does not alarm itself or lead itself to appetite. If, however,
anyone else can alarm it or give it pain, let him do so, for it will not itself,
with the consent of its judgement, turn to such moods. Let the body, if it
can, be careful itself to suffer nothing; and the vital spirit which entertains
fear and grief, if it suffers anywhere, let it say that it does; but that which
delivers judgement generally on these affections will not suffer, for it will
not itself be hasty to deliver such a judgement. The governing power
regarded by itself has no wants, unless it create want for itself, and in the
same way it is untroubled and unhindered, unless it trouble and hinder
itself.
17. Happiness is a good genius or a good familiar spirit. ‘What then are you
doing here, phantom of imagination? Depart, in God’s name, the way you
came; I have no need of you. But you have come according to your ancient
habit. I am not angry with you, only depart.’
18. Is it change that a man fears? Why, what can have come to be without
change, and what is dearer or more familiar to Universal Nature? Can you
yourself take your bath, unless the firewood changes? Can you be
nourished, unless what you eat changes? Can any other service be
accomplished without change? Do you not see that it is precisely your
changing which is similar, and similarly necessary to Universal Nature?
19. Through the matter of the Whole, as through a winter torrent, all bodies
are passing, connatural with the Whole and cooperating with it, as our
members work with one another. How many a Chrysippus, a Socrates, an
Epictetus has Eternity already sucked down! Let the same thought strike
you in the case of any single individual or object.
20. One thing only troubles me, that I may not myself do something which
the constitution of man does not intend, or in the way it does not intend, or
which at this moment it does not intend.
21. Near at hand is your forgetting all; near, too, all forgetting you.
22. It is a property of man to love even those who stumble. This feeling
ensues if it occur to you at the time that men are your kindred and go wrong
because of ignorance and against their will; that in a little while both of
you will be dead; but, above all, that he did you no harm, for he did not
make your governing self worse than it was before.
23. Universal Nature out of its whole material, as from wax, models now
the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree,
next for a man, next for something else. And these, every one, subsist for a
very brief while. Yet it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, as it was
none for it to be nailed together.
24. A scowl on the face is eminently against Nature and, whenever it is
often repeated, the expression dies or is at last extinguished, so that it loses
the power to light up again. . . . Try to understand this very point that it is
against Reason. For if even the consciousness of doing wrong has gone,
what ground for living is left?
25. Everything that your eyes look upon will be changed almost in a
moment by Nature which orders the Whole, and out of the material it will
create other things, and again out of their material others, in order that the
world may be ever fresh and young.
26. When a man offends against you, think at once what conception of good
or ill it was which made him offend. And, seeing this, you will pity him,
and feel neither surprise nor anger. For you yourself still conceive either the
same object as he does to be good, or something else of the same type; you
are bound, therefore, to excuse him. If, on the other hand, you no longer
conceive things of that kind to be goods or ills, you will the more easily be
kind to one whose eye is darkened.
27. Do not think of what are absent as though they were not existing, but
ponder on the most fortunate of what you have got, and on account of them
remind yourself how they would have been missed, if they had not been
here. Take heed at the same time not to accustom yourself to overvalue the
things you are thus contented to have, so as to be troubled if at any time
they are not here.
28. Withdraw into yourself: the reasonable governing self is by its nature
content with its own just actions and the tranquillity it thus secures.
29. Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse which is
drawing you. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is
happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its
causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour. Leave
the wrong done by another where the wrong arose.
30. Direct your thought to what is being said. Let your mind gain an
entrance into what is occurring and who is producing it.
31. Make yourself glad in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what
lies between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. Democritus
says: ‘All (sensibles) are ruled by law, but in reality the elements alone
exist.’
32. On Death: either dispersal, if we are composed of atoms; or if we are a
living unity, either extinction or a change of abode.
33. On Pain: What we cannot bear removes us from life; what lasts can be
borne. The understanding, too, preserves its own tranquillity by
abstraction, and the governing self does not grow worse; but it is for the
parts which are injured by the pain, if they can, to declare it.
34. On Fame: see what their minds are like, what they avoid, what pursue.
And, besides, that as the sands are constantly carried over one another,
hiding what went before, so in our life what was before is very swiftly
hidden by what is carried after.
35. ‘Do you really imagine that an intelligence endowed with greatness of
heart and a vision of all time and all reality thinks this mortal life to be a
great thing?’ ‘Impossible’, was his answer. ‘Then such a man as that will
consider even death not a thing to be dreaded, will he not?’ ‘Most
assuredly.’
36. ‘A King’s part: to do good and to be reviled.’
37. It is absurd that a man’s expression should obey and take a certain
shape and fashion of beauty at the bidding of the mind, whereas the mind
itself is not shaped and fashioned to beauty by itself.
38. ‘man must not vent his passion on dead things. Since they care
nothing. . .’
39. ‘May it be joy that you give to the immortal gods and to men.’
40.
‘Life, like ripe corn, must to the sickle yield. And one must be,
another cease to be.’
41. ‘Were the gods careless of my sons and me. Yet there is reason here.’
42. ‘For with me stand both Righteousness and Good.’
43. ‘Mourn not with them that sorrow; feel no thrill.’
44.
‘But I should have a right answer to give him, as follows: “You speak
unadvisedly, my friend, if you fancy that a man who is worth anything
ought to take the risk of life or death into account, and not to consider only
one thing, when he is acting, whether he does what is right or wrong, the
actions of a good man or a bad.” ‘
45. ‘For really and truly, men of Athens, the matter stands like this:
wherever a man takes post, believing it to be the best, or is posted by his
captain, there he ought, as I think, to remain and abide the risk, taking into
account nothing, whether death or anything else, in comparison with
dishonour.’
46. ‘But consider, my friend, whether possibly high spirit and virtue are
not something other than saving one’s life and being saved. Perhaps a man
who is really a man must leave on one side the question of living as long as
he can, and must not love his life, but commit these things to God, and,
believing the women’s proverb that no one ever escaped his destiny, must
consider, with that in his mind, how he may live the best possible life in the
time that is given him to live.’
47. Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you ran with them, and
continually dwell in mind upon the changes of the elements into one
another; for these imaginations wash away the foulness of life on the
ground.
48. Moreover, when discoursing about mankind, look upon earthly things
below as if from some place above them—herds, armies, farms, weddings,
divorces, births, deaths, noise of law courts, lonely places, divers foreign
nations, festivals, mournings, market places, a mixture of everything and an
order composed of contraries.
49. Behold the past, the many changes of dynasties; the future, too, you are
able to foresee, for it will be of like fashion, and it is impossible for the
future to escape from the rhythm of the present. Therefore to study the life
of man for forty years is no different from studying it for a hundred
centuries. For what more will you see?
50.
The earth-born parts return to earth again
But what did blossom of ethereal seed
Returns again to the celestial pole.’
Or else this: an undoing of the interlacement of the atoms and a similar
shattering of the senseless molecules.
51.
‘With gifts of meat and drink and magic charms
Turning aside the current not to die.’
‘man must endure whatever wind doth blow
From God, and labour still without lament.’
52. ‘A better man at wrestling’: but not more sociable or more modest or
better trained to meet occasion or kinder to the fault of neighbours.
53. Where work can be accomplished according to the reason which is
common to gods and men, there is nothing to fear; for where it is possible
to obtain benefit by action which moves on an easy path and according to
your constitution, there is no injury to suspect.
54. Everywhere and continually it is in your power to be reverently content
with your present circumstance, to behave to men who are present with you
according to right and to handle skilfully the present impression, that
nothing you have not mastered may cross the threshold of the mind.
55. Do not look round to the governing selves of men different from
yourself, but keep looking straight forward to the goal to which Nature is
leading you. Universal Nature through what befalls you, and your own
nature by what has to be done by yourself. Now each must do what follows
from its constitution, and while the other creatures are constituted for the
sake of the reasonable (just as in all else the inferior are for the sake of the
superior), the reasonable are for one another’s sake. Thus the principal
end in man’s constitution is the social; and the second, to resist the passions
of the body; for it is a property of reasonable and intelligent movement to
limit itself and never to be worsted by movements of sense or impulse; for
each of those belong to the animal in us, but the movement of intelligence
resolves to be sovereign and not to be mastered by those movements
outside itself. And rightly so, for that is constituted by nature to make use of
them. The third end in a reasonable constitution is to avoid rash judgement
and not to be deceived. Let the governing self, therefore, hold fast to these,
and progress on a straight path, and it possesses what is its own.
56. As though you were now dead and have not lived your life up to the
present moment, use the balance remaining to live henceforward according
to Nature.
57. Love only what falls to your lot and is destined for you; what is more
suited to you than that?
58. On each occurrence keep before your eyes those to whom the same
happened, and then they were sorry, were surprised, complained. And now
where are they? Nowhere. Very well, do you, too, desire what they desired?
Will you not leave the moods of others to those who shift their moods and
are shifted, and yourself be entirely concerned with the way to treat them?
For you will treat them well and they will be material for yourself; only
attend and resolve to be fair to yourself in all that you do, and call both
things to your mind that what you do is important and that it is unimportant
in what sphere your action lies.
59. Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to
bubble up, if you always delve.
60. The body, too, should be composed, not sprawling about, whether in
motion or in repose. For we should require of the body as a whole just what
the mind exhibits in the face, when it preserves it intelligent and comely.
But all these precautions must be adopted without affectation.
61. The art of living resembles wrestling more than dancing, in as much as
it stands prepared and unshaken to meet what comes and what it did not
foresee.
62. Constantly stop and consider the manner of men these are whose
testimony you desire to gain, and their ruling principles; for, if you look
into the sources of their judgement and impulse, you will not blame those
who stumble involuntarily nor will you invite their testimony to yourself.
63. ‘No soul is willing to be robbed of truth,’ he says. The same holds of
justice, too, of temperance, of kindness, and the like. It is most necessary to
remember this continually, for thus you will be more gentle to all men.
64. In the case of every pain be ready with the reflection that it is not an
evil, and does not injure the intelligence at the helm; for it does not destroy
it, in so far as the soul is reasonable and social. In the case of most pains,
however, the saying of Epicurus should help you: ‘Pain is neither
intolerable nor continuing, provided you remember its limits and do not let
your imagination add to it.’ Remember, too, that many disagreeable
feelings are identical with pain, and yet we do not perceive that they are;
drowsiness, for example, and extreme heat, and loss of appetite. Whenever,
then, you are disgusted in one or other of these ways, say to yourself: ‘you
are giving in to pain.’
65. See that you do not feel to the inhuman what they feel to mankind.
66. How do we know that Telauges was not in character superior to
Socrates? It is not enough that Socrates won more glory by his death,
argued more fluently with the Sophists, spent the whole frosty night in the
open with more endurance, thought it braver to refuse, when ordered to
arrest Leo of Salamis, and ‘carried his head high in the streets’ (a trait
in regard to which one might question whether it was true). No, we have to
consider this: what kind of soul Socrates had, whether he could be content
with being just in his dealings with men and righteous in his dealing with
the gods, whether he was neither hastily indignant with wickedness nor a
servant to any man’s ignorance, whether he neither accepted as unfamiliar
anything assigned by Universal Nature or endured it as intolerable, nor
submitted his mind to be affected by the affections of the flesh.
67. Nature did not so blend you with the compound Whole that she did not
permit you to circumscribe yourself and to bring what is its own into
submission to itself. Always bear this in mind, and further that to live the
blessed life rests upon very few conditions; and do not, just because you
have abandoned hope of being a thinker and a student of science, on this
account despair of being free, modest, sociable, and obedient to God; for it
is possible to become an entirely godlike man and yet not to be recognized
by anyone.
68. Live out your life without restraint in entire gladness even if all men
shout what they please against you, even if wild beasts tear in pieces the
poor members of this lump of matter that has hardened about you. For, in
the midst of all this, what hinders the mind from preserving its own self in
tranquillity, in true judgement about what surrounds it and ready use of
what is submitted to it, so that judgement says to what befalls it: ‘this is
what you are in reality, even if you seem other in appearance’, and use says
to what is given to it: ‘I was looking for you, for the present is to me always
material of reasonable and political virtue, that is (generally speaking) of
the art of man or God’; since whatever comes to pass is suited to God or
man, and is neither novel nor hard to deal with, but familiar and easy to
handle.
69. Perfection of character possesses this: to live each day as if the last, to
be neither feverish nor apathetic, and not to act a part.
70. The gods, who have no part in death, are not grieved because in so long
an eternity they will be obliged always and entirely to suffer so many and
such worthless men; and besides they take care of them in all kinds of
ways. Yet do you, who are all but at the point of vanishing, give up the
struggle, and that though you are one of the worthless?
71. It is ridiculous not to flee from one’s own wickedness, which is
possible, but to flee from other men’s wickedness, which is impossible.
72. Whatever the reasonable and political faculty discovers to be neither
intelligent nor social, with good reason it decides to be beneath itself.
73. When you have done good and another has been its object, why do
you require a third thing besides, like the foolish—to be thought to have
done good or to get a return?
74. No one wearies of receiving benefits, and to benefit another is to act
according to Nature. Do not weary then of the benefits you receive by the
doing of them.
75. The Universal Nature felt an impulse to create a world; and now either
everything that comes into being arises by way of necessary consequence,
or even the sovereign ends to which the ruling principle of the world directs
its own impulse are devoid of reason. To remind yourself of this will make
you calmer in the face of many accidents.
1. This also conduces to contempt of vainglory, that it is no longer in your
power to have lived your whole life, or at any rate your life from manhood,
in the pursuit of philosophy. To yourself as well as to many others it is plain
that you fall far short of philosophy. And so you are tainted, and it is no
longer easy for you to acquire the reputation of a philosopher. Your calling,
too,
in life has a rival claim. Therefore, if you have truly seen where the
matter at issue lies, put away the question of what men will think of you
and be satisfied if you live the rest of your life, be it more or less, as your
nature wills. Consider accordingly what it does will, and let nothing besides
distract you; for experience has taught you in how many paths you have
strayed and nowhere found the good life: not in logical arguments, not in
riches, not in glory, not in self-indulgence, nowhere. Where then is it to be
found?
In doing what man’s nature requires. How then will he do this? If
he hold fast doctrines upon which impulses and actions depend. What
doctrines are these? They concern good and evil, how nothing is good for
man which does not make him just, sober, brave, and free; nothing evil
which does not produce effects the opposite of these.
2. On the occasion of each act, ask yourself: ‘How is this related to me?
Shall I repent of it? But a little while and I am dead and all things are taken
away. What more do I require, if my present work is the work of an
intelligent and social creature, subject to the same law as God?’
3. Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Pompeius, what are they by comparison
with Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? For these men saw reality and its
causal and material aspects, and their ruling selves were self-determined;
but as for the former, how much there was to provide for, and of how many
things they were the servants.
4. Even if you break your heart, none the less they
will do just the same.
5. In the first place, be not troubled; for all things are according to
Universal Nature, and in a little while you will be no one and nowhere,
even as Hadrian and Augustus are no more. Next, looking earnestly at the
question, perceive its essence, and reminding yourself that your duty is to
be a good man, and what it is that man’s nature demands, do that without
swerving, and speak the thing that appears to you to be most just, provided
only that it is with kindness and modesty, and without hypocrisy.
6. The work of Universal Nature is this: to transfer what is here to there, to
make changes, to take up from here and to carry there. All things are
alterations, but the assignments, too, are impartial: all things are familiar,
but not so that we need dread some new experience.
7. Every natural thing is satisfied when it fares well, and a reasonable nature
fares well when it gives its assent to nothing false or obscure in its
imaginations, directs its impulses only to social ends, desires and avoids
only what is in our power, and welcomes all that is assigned by Universal
Nature. For it is a part of Universal Nature, just as the leaf’s nature is part
of the plant’s, only in that case the leaf’s nature is part of a Nature naturally
without sense or reason and able to be hindered, whereas man’s nature is
part of a Nature which is unhindered and reasonable and just, inasmuch as it
assigns to each, impartially and according to its worth, its share of times,
substance, cause, activity, experience. Consider, however, not whether you
will find one thing equal to another in everything, but whether the whole of
this taken together is not equal to the whole of that other.
8. You are not able to read; but you are able to restrain your arrogance, you
are able to rise above pleasures and pains, you are able to be superior to
fame, you are able not only not to be angry with the unfeeling and
graceless, but to care for them besides.
9. Let no one any longer hear you finding fault with your life in a palace;
nay, do not even hear yourself.
10. Regret is blame of oneself for having let something useful go by; but the
good must be something useful and worth the attention of a really good
man. Now no really good man would regret having let a pleasure go by: no
pleasure, therefore, is either useful or good.
11. What is this by itself in its own constitution, what is its substance or
substrate, what its causal element, what its function in the world and how
long a time does it persist?
12. When you are called from sleep with difficulty,
revive the thought that
to render social acts is according to your constitution and to human nature,
but to sleep is what you share also with dumb animals. Now what to every
creature is according to Nature is also more closely related to it, more part
of its flesh and bone, yes, and also more agreeable.
13. Continually and, if possible, on the occasion of every imagination, test
it by natural science, by psychology, by logic.
14. Whatever man you meet, say to yourself at once: ‘what are the
principles this man entertains about human goods and ills?’ For if he has
certain principles about pleasure and pain and the sources of these, about
honour and dishonour, about death and life, it will not seem surprising or
strange to me if he acts in certain ways, and I shall remember that he is
obliged to act like this.
15. Remember that it is as absurd to be surprised that the world brings forth
the fruits with which it teems as that the fig-tree should bear figs.
9 And it is
absurd for the physician or the master of a ship to be surprised, if a patient
is feverish or if a head wind gets up.
16. Remember that to change your course and to follow someone who
puts you right is not to be less free. For the change is your own action,
proceeding according to your own impulse and decision, and indeed
according to your mind.
17. If it is in your power to decide, why do you do it? But if in another’s,
whom do you find fault with? The atoms or the gods? Either is madness.
You must find fault with no one. If you are able, put him right; if you can’t
do this, at least put the thing itself right; but if you can’t even do this, to
what purpose still does fault-finding tend? For nothing should be done
without a purpose.
18. What dies does not fall outside the Universe. If it remains here and
changes here, it is also resolved here into the eternal constituents, which are
elements of the Universe and of yourself. And the elements themselves
change and make no grievance of it.
19. Each has come into being for a purpose—a horse, say, or a vine. Why
are you surprised? So the Sun God will say: ‘I came into being for a
purpose’, and the rest of the gods too. What then is the purpose of your
coming to be? ‘To please yourself?’ See whether the idea allows itself to
be framed.
20. Nature has designed the ending of each thing, no less than its beginning
and its continuance, like one who throws a ball up. What good is it to the
ball to go up or harm to come down and even fall to the ground? What good
to the bubble to be blown or harm to it to burst? The same is true of a
candle.
21. Turn it inside out and see the sort of thing it is, what it is like when it
grows old or falls sick or . . . [gap in text] Shortlived alike are praiser and
the praised, he who remembers and he who is remembered. Moreover, they
live in a mere corner of this region of the globe and even here all are not in
accord, nor is even a man in accord with himself. The whole earth, too, is a
mere point.
22. Attend to the subject, the activity, the doctrine, or the meaning. You
deserve to suffer this; so you would rather become good tomorrow than be
good today.
23. Am I doing something? I relate the act to beneficence to men. Does an
accident befall me? I accept it, relating it to the gods and to the source of all
things, from which all that comes to pass depends by a common thread.
24. As your bath appears to your senses—soap, sweat, dirt, greasy water,
all disgusting—so is every piece of life and every object.
25. Lucilla laid Verus in the grave, Lucilla followed; Secunda buried
Maximus, Secunda next; Epitynchanus buried Diotimus, Epitynchanus
next; Antoninus Faustina, Antoninus next. The same story over again. Celer
Hadrian, Celer came next. Where now are those acute minds, those who
unveiled the future, those who were swollen with pride? Acute minds like
Charax and Demetrius and Eudaemon and others of their kind. All creatures
of a day, dead long since; some remembered not even for a little while,
some turned to fable, and some even now fading out of fable. Keep these
facts in mind, that your own frame is bound either to be scattered into atoms
or your spirit to be extinguished or to change its place and be stationed
somewhere else.
26. A man’s joy is to do what is proper to man, and man’s proper work is
kindness to his fellow man, disdain of the movements of the senses, to
discern plausible imaginations, to meditate on Universal Nature and the
work of her hands.
27. There are three relations: one to your environment, one to the divine
cause from which all things come to pass for all, one to those who live at
the same time with you.
28. Pain is an evil, either to the body, in which case let the body say that it
is so, or to the soul. But it is in the soul’s power to preserve its own quiet
and calm, and not to judge pain to be an evil; for every judgement,
impulse, desire, or aversion is within, and nothing evil makes its way up to
this.
29. Wipe out impressions by continually saying to yourself: it is in my
power now not to allow any wickedness to be in this soul of mine, any
appetite or disturbance at all, but seeing what is the character of them all I
employ each according to its worth. Remember this power as Nature
requires.
30. Speak both in the senate and to every man of whatever rank with
propriety, without affectation. Use words that ring true.
31. The court of Augustus, his wife, daughter, grandsons, stepsons, sister,
Agrippa, his kinsmen, familiar friends, Areios, Maecenas, doctors,
sacrificial ministers—a whole court dead. Next pass on to other courts—
death not of a single individual, but of a family, like the children of
Pompeius. Then the familiar inscription upon tombs: THE LAST OF HIS
LINE. Calculate all the anxiety of those who preceded them in order to
leave behind an heir, and then it was ordained that one should be the last;
here again a whole family dead.
32. You must plan your life, one action at a time, and be content if each
acquires its own end as best it can; and that it should acquire its end, no one
at all can prevent you. ‘But some external obstacle will be in the way.’
None to prevent action with justice, temperance, and due reflection. ‘But
possibly some other activity will be hindered.’ Still, by meeting the actual
obstacle with resignation and good-temperedly altering your course to what
is granted you, a new action is at once substituted, which will fit into the
plan of which we are speaking.
33. Accept without pride, relinquish without a struggle.
34. If you have ever seen a dismembered hand or foot or a head cut off,
lying somewhere apart from the rest of the trunk, you have an image of
what a man makes of himself, so far as in him lies, when he refuses to
associate his will with what happens and cuts himself off or when he does
some unneighbourly act. You have somehow made yourself an outcast from
the unity which is according to Nature; for you came into the world as a
part and now you have cut yourself off. Yet here there is this admirable
provision that it is in your power to make yourself once more part of the
unity—God has permitted this to no other part, to come together again,
once it has been severed and cut off. But consider the kindness with which
he has honoured man. He has put it in his power, to begin with, not to be
broken off from the Whole, and then, if he has been broken off, to come
back again once more and to grow together and to recover his portion as a
part.
35. As each reasonable creature receives the rest of his abilities from the
Nature of the Whole, so have we received this ability, too, from her. Just as
she converts every obstacle and resistance, puts it into its place in the order
of necessity and makes it a part of herself, so, too, the reasonable creature
can make every obstacle material for himself and employ it for whatever
kind of purpose he has set out upon.
36. Do not allow the imagination of the whole of your life to confuse you,
do not dwell upon all the manifold troubles which have come to pass and
will come to pass, but ask yourself in regard to every present piece of work:
what is there here that can’t be borne and can’t be endured? You will be
ashamed to make the confession. Then remind yourself that it is not the
future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and
that this gradually grows less, if only you isolate it and reprove your
understanding, if that is not strong enough to hold out against it, thus taken
by itself.
37. Is Panthea or Pergamos still sitting by the funeral bier of Verus;
Chabrias or Diotimus by Hadrian’s bier? Absurd! And if they were still
sitting there, would the dead perceive it? And if they did perceive it, would
it give them pleasure? And, if it gave them pleasure, would the mourners
live for ever? Were not they too fated first to become old men and women,
and then to die? And when they were dead, what would those they mourned
do afterwards? This is all a smell of corruption and blood, and dust in a
winding sheet.
38. If you have a sharp sight; ‘see’, says he, ‘and judge, by the wisest
judgements you have.’
39. In the constitution of a reasonable creature I see no virtue able to oppose
justice: but I see one able to oppose pleasure, self-control.
40. If you cancel your judgement about what seems to pain you, you
yourself stand firm on surest ground. ‘What is self?’ ‘Reason.’ ‘But I am
not reason.’ ‘Granted; then do not let reason itself trouble itself, but if some
other part of you is harmed, let it form its own judgement about itself.’
41. An obstacle to sense perception is injurious to animal nature; an
obstacle to impulse is equally injurious to animal nature. (And something
else may similarly be an obstacle and injurious to the constitution of a
plant.) Thus then an obstacle to reason is injurious to a reasoning nature.
Transfer, therefore, all these considerations to yourself. Perhaps pain and
pleasure are affecting you. Sense affection must look to it. Did an obstacle
oppose your impulse? If you started out to satisfy it without mental
reservation, the obstacle is at once injurious to you as a reasonable being;
but if you experience the general lot, you are not yet hurt or hindered. The
properties of the mind, you know, no one else is wont to hinder, for neither
fire nor steel nor despot nor abuse affect it one whit, when it has become ‘a
sphere rounded and at rest’.
42. I do not deserve to give myself pain, for I never deliberately gave
another pain.
43. One thing gives joy to one man, another to another; it is my joy if I keep
my governing self intact, not turning my back on any human being nor on
anything that befalls men, but seeing everything with kind eyes, welcoming
and employing each occasion according to its merits.
44. See that you bestow this present time upon yourself. Those who rather
run after fame in the future leave out of account that men hereafter will be
just such others as these whom they find hard to bear, and those men, too,
will be liable to death. What, after all, is it to you if men hereafter resound
your name with such and such voices or have such and such a judgement
about you?
45. ‘Take me up and cast me where you please.’ For there I shall keep the
divinity within me propitious; satisfied, that is, if it should behave and act
consistently with its own constitution.
Is this a sufficient reason why my soul should be in evil case, should lower
itself, be humbled, craving, fettered, fluttering? What will you discover to
be a sufficient reason for that?
46. Nothing can happen to any human being which is not an incident
appropriate to man, nor to an ox which is not appropriate to oxen, nor to a
vine which is not appropriate to vines, nor to a stone which is not peculiar
to a stone. If then that happens to each which is both customary and natural,
why should you be discontented with your lot? For the Universal Nature did
not bring to you what you could not bear.
47. If you suffer pain because of some external cause, what troubles you is
not the thing but your decision about it, and this it is in your power to wipe
out at once. But if what pains you is something in your own disposition,
who prevents you from correcting your judgement? And similarly, if you
are pained because you fail in some particular action which you imagine to
be sound, why not continue to act rather than to feel pain? ‘But something
too strong for you opposes itself.’ Then do not be pained, for the reason
why the act is not done does not rest with you. ‘Well, but if this be left
undone, life is not worth living.’ Depart then from life in a spirit of good
will, even as he dies who achieves his end, contented, too, with what
opposes you.
48. Remember that the governing self becomes invincible when it
withdraws into itself and is satisfied with itself, doing nothing which it does
not will to do, even if its opposition is unreasonable. How much more then
when it decides both with reason and circumspection about a given case?
On this account the understanding free from passions is a citadel of
refuge; for man has nothing stronger into which to retreat and be
thereafter inexpugnable. He then who has not seen this is uninstructed; he
who has seen it and does not retreat is unfortunate.
49. Do not say more to yourself than the first impressions report. You have
been told that some one speaks evil of you. This is what you have been told;
you have not been told that you are injured. I see that the little child is ill;
this is what I see, but that he is in danger I do not see. In this way then abide
always by the first impressions and add nothing of your own from within,
and that’s an end of it; or rather one thought you may add, as one who is
acquainted with every change and chance of the world.
50. The cucumber is bitter? Put it down. There are brambles in the path?
Step to one side. That is enough, without also asking: ‘Why did these things
come into the world at all?’ Because the student of Nature will ridicule the
question, exactly as a carpenter or cobbler would laugh at you if you found
fault because you see shavings and clippings from their work in their
shops. Still, they do have a place to throw rubbish into, whereas Universal
Nature has nothing outside himself, and yet the astonishing thing in her way
of working is that, having fixed her own limits, she is ever changing into
herself everything within those limits that looks as though it were going bad
and getting old and useless, and out of these very things creating again
others that are young, in order that she may need no substance from outside
nor require any place to throw away what begins to decay. Thus she is
satisfied with her own room, her own material and her own way of working.
51. Be not a sluggard in action nor confused in conversation nor wandering
in imagination. Briefly, neither contract into yourself nor boil over in spirit
nor in your mode of life leave no room for leisure.
‘They kill you, cut you in pieces, pursue you with curses.’ What has this
to do with your understanding abiding pure, sane, temperate, and just? As if
a man should stand by a sweet and crystal spring of water and curse it, but
it never ceases bubbling up in water fresh to drink, and if he throw in mud
or dung, it will quickly break it up and wash it away and will in no way be
discoloured. How then shall you possess an overflowing fountain, not a
mere cistern? If you guard yourself every hour unto freedom, contentedly,
too, simply and reverently.
52. He who does not know that the Universe exists, does not know where
he is. He who does not know the purpose of the Universe, does not know
who he is nor what the Universe is. He who fails in any one of these
respects could not even declare the purpose of his own birth. What then do
you imagine him to be, who shuns or pursues the praises of men who
applaud, and yet do not know either where they are or who they are?
53. Do you wish to be praised by a man who curses himself three times
every hour? Do you wish to please a man who doesn’t please himself? Does
a man please himself who repents of nearly everything that he does?
54. No longer merely breathe with the atmosphere that surrounds you, but
now think also with the mind that surrounds all things. For the power of
mind is as much poured out everywhere and distributed for him who is
willing to absorb it, as the power of atmosphere for him who is able to
respire it.
55. In general evil does no injury to the Universe, and particular evil does
no injury to a neighbour, but only injures him to whom it is permitted to be
delivered from it as soon as ever he himself determines.
56. To my will the will of a neighbour is as indifferent as his vital spirit and
his flesh. For even though we were brought into the world more than
anything else for the sake of one another, still each of our governing selves
has its own sovereign right; for otherwise the evil of my neighbour would
surely be evil of mine, and that was not God’s good pleasure, in order that
my unhappiness might not depend on someone other than myself
57. The sun appears to be poured down and indeed is poured in every
direction but not poured out. For this pouring is extension, and so its beams
are called rays from their being extended. Now you may see what kind of
thing a ray is by observing the sun’s light streaming through a chink into a
darkened room. For it is stretched in a straight line, and rests so to speak
upon any solid body that meets it and cuts off the flow of air beyond. It
rests there and does not glide off or fall. The pouring and diffusion of the
understanding then should be similar, in no way a pouring out, but an
extension, and it should not rest forcibly or violently on obstacles that meet
it nor yet fall down, but stand still and illuminate the object that receives it;
for that which does not reflect it will rob itself of the light.
58. He who fears death fears either total loss of consciousness or a change
of consciousness. Now if you should no longer possess consciousness, you
will no longer be aware of any evil; alternatively, if you possess an altered
consciousness, you will be an altered creature and will not cease from
living.
59. men have come into the world for the sake of one another. Either
instruct them then or bear with them.
60. An arrow’s path and the mind’s path are different. Nevertheless, both
when it is on its guard and when it revolves round a subject of inquiry, the
path of mind is none the less direct and upon its object.
61. Enter into the governing self of every man and permit every other man
to enter into your own.
1. Whosoever does injustice commits sin; for Universal Nature having
made reasonable creatures for the sake of one another, to benefit each other
according to desert but in no wise to do injury, manifestly he who
transgresses her will sins against the most venerable of the gods, because
Universal Nature is a nature of what is, and what is is related to all that
exists.
And further, he who lies sins in regard to the same divine being, and she is
named Truth and is the first cause of all truths. Now he who lies voluntarily
commits sin in so far as by deceit he does injustice, and he who lies
involuntarily sins, in so far as he is discordant with Universal Nature and
creates disorder by fighting against the natural order of the Universe; for he
who is carried of himself counter to truth does so fight, since he had before
received from Nature aptitudes by neglecting which he is now not able to
distinguish falsehood from truth.
Moreover, he who runs after pleasures as goods and away from pains as
evils commits sin; for being such a man he must necessarily often blame
Universal Nature for distributing to bad and good contrary to their desert,
because the bad are often employed in pleasures and acquire what may
produce these, while the good are involved in pain and in what may
produce this.
And further, he who fears pains will sometimes fear what is to come to pass
in the Universe, and this is at once sinful, while he who pursues pleasures
will not abstain from doing injustice, and this is plainly sinful. But those
who wish to follow Nature, being like-minded with her, must be indifferent
towards the things to which she is indifferent, for she would not create both
were she not indifferent towards both. Whosoever, therefore, is not himself
indifferent to pain and pleasure, death and life, honour and dishonour,
which Universal Nature employs indifferently, plainly commits sin.
And by ‘Universal Nature employing these indifferently’, I mean that in the
natural order they happen indifferently to what comes to pass and follows
upon an original impulse of Providence, whereby from an original cause it
had an impulse to this world order, having conceived certain principles of
what should come to be, and appointed powers generative of substances and
changes and successions of the like kind.
2. A wiser man’s part had been to go away from men without tasting
falsehood, hypocrisy, luxury, and pride; a second-best course is to breathe
your last filled at least with distaste for these things. Or is it your choice to
sit down with wickedness and does not your experience even yet persuade
you to flee from the plague? For corruption of understanding is much more
a plague than such a distemper and change of this environing atmosphere;
for this is a plague to animals, as animate beings, that is a plague to men,
as human beings.
3. Disdain not death, but be well satisfied with it, because this, too, is one of
the things which Nature wills. For as are adolescence and old age, growth
and maturity, development of teeth and beard and grey hair, begetting,
conception, and childbearing and the rest of the natural functions which
life’s seasons bring, such also is actual dissolution. This, therefore, is like a
man of trained reason, not to be rash or violent or disdainful in the face of
death, but to wait for it as one of the natural functions; and, as you now wait
for the unborn child to come forth from your wife’s womb, so expect the
hour in which your soul will drop from this shell.
And if you would have an everyday rule to touch your heart, it will make
you most contented with death to dwell upon the objects from which you
are about to be parted and the kind of characters with whom your soul will
be no longer contaminated. For you should in no wise be offended by them,
but rather both care for them and bear them gently, yet still remember that
your deliverance will not be from men like-minded with yourself. This
alone, if anything could, might draw you back and detain you in life, were it
granted you to live with those who had adopted the same doctrines; but, as
it is, you see how great is the burden in the discord of life lived with them,
so that you say: ‘Come swiftly, death, for fear I, too, forget myself.’
4. Whosoever does wrong, wrongs himself; whosoever does injustice, does
it to himself, making himself evil.
5. Often he who omits an act does injustice, not only he who commits an
act.
6. Sufficient are the present judgement that grasps its object, the present
social act, the present disposition well satisfied with all that comes to pass
from a cause outside the self.
7. Wipe out imagination: check impulse: quench desire: keep the governing
self in its own control.
8. One vital spirit is distributed in irrational creatures: one mind spirit is
divided in rational creatures; just as one element earth is in all earthy things
and we see by one light and breathe one atmosphere, all that have sight and
vital spirit.
9. All that partake in something common to them hasten towards what is of
the same kind. The earthy all tends to earth, the watery all flows together,
and the nature of air is similar so that they even need things to hold them
apart by compulsion. Fire rises because of the elemental fire, but is so ready
to combine in combustion with all fire here below that every material that is
a little too dry is easily ignited, because what hinders ignition is mixed in it
in too small proportions. Therefore also, all that partakes of a common
mind similarly, or even more swiftly, hastens to what is akin; for in
proportion as it is superior to the rest, so is it more ready to mix and be
blended with its own kind.
At any rate there were found from the first among irrational creatures,
hives, and flocks, care for nestlings, and what resembles love; for already
there were vital spirits there, and in the higher part the tendency to union
was found raised in degree, as it was not in plants or minerals or trees.
Among reasonable creatures, constitutions, friendships, households, and
gatherings were found, conventions too and armistices in war. Among the
yet higher, even among beings in a sense separated, there subsisted a unity
such as obtains among the stars. Thus progress towards the higher was able
to produce a sympathy even in what are separated.
Notice then what occurs now; only intelligent creatures have now forgotten
that zeal and inclination to each other, and here only you do not see
concurrence. Yet even so, they are overtaken in their flight, for nature is too
strong for them. Watch and you will observe what I mean; certainly one
would more quickly discover something earthy not attaching itself to the
earthy than man entirely cut off from man.
10. man, God, and the Universe alike bear fruit, each in the appropriate
season, but if custom has come to apply the word strictly of the vine and
similar fruits, no matter. Reason, too, has its fruit, for the Whole and for
itself, and from reason other results similar to itself come to pass.
11. If you can, change him by teaching, but if you cannot, remember that
kindness was given you for this. The gods, too, are kind
to such men and
even co-operate with them to some objects, to health, to wealth, to
reputation, so good are they to men; and you may be so too; or say, who is
there to prevent you?
12. Labour, not like one who is unfortunate, nor wishing to be pitied or
admired: rather have only one wish: to bestir yourself or to keep quiet as the
reason of the City requires.
13. Today I escaped all circumstance, or rather I cast out all circumstance,
for it was not outside me, but within, in my judgements.
14. All things are the same: familiar in experience, transient in time, sordid
in their material; all now such as in the days of those whom we have buried.
15. Things stand outside our doors, themselves by themselves, neither
knowing nor reporting anything about themselves. What then does report
about them? The governing self.
16. Not in feeling but in action is the good and ill of the reasonable social
creature; even as his excellence and his failings are not in feeling but in
action.
17. To the stone that is thrown up it is no ill to be carried down nor good to
be carried upwards.
18. Penetrate within, into their governing selves, and you will see what
critics you fear, and what poor critics they are of themselves.
19. All things are in change, and you yourself in continuous alteration and
in a sense destruction. So, too, is the Universe as a whole.
20. Another’s wrong act you must leave where it is.
21. The ceasing of action, impulse, judgement is a pause and a kind of
death, not any evil. Now pass to the ages of your life, boyhood for instance,
youth, manhood, old age; for each change of these was a death; was it
anything to be afraid of? Pass now to your manner of life under your
grandfather, then under your mother, then under your (adoptive) father, and
when you discover many another destruction, change, and ending, ask
yourself: ‘Was it anything to be afraid of?’ So then even the ceasing, pause,
and change of your whole life is not.
22. Make haste to your own governing self, to that of the Whole, and that of
this man. To your own, to make it a righteous mind; to that of the whole, to
remind yourself what it is of which you are a part; to this man’s, that you
may observe whether it is ignorance or design, and may reflect at the
same time that his self is of one kind with your own.
23. As you are yourself a complement of a social system, so let every act of
yours be complementary of a social living principle. Every act of yours,
therefore, which is not referred directly or remotely to the social end
sunders your life, does not allow it to be a unity, and is a partisan act, like a
man in a republic who for his own pan sunders himself from the harmony
of his fellows.
24. Children’s fits of temper and dolls and ‘spirits carrying dead bodies’
25. Penetrate to the individuality of the cause and separating it from the
matter, look into it; next isolate the time which at longest this individuality
can by its nature subsist.
26. You endure a myriad troubles because you are not content with your
governing self doing the kind of things it was formed to do. But enough.
27. When another blames or hates you or men express such sentiments, go
to their inward selves, pass in and see what kind of men they are. You will
see that you ought not to torment yourself in order that they may hold some
opinion about you. You must, however, be well disposed to them; for in the
natural order they are friends, and moreover the gods help them in a variety
of ways, by dreams, by prophecy; to get, however, the objects about
which they are concerned.
28. The rotations of the Universe are the same, up and down, from age to
age.
Now either the mind of the Whole has an impulse to each individual; and if
that is so, welcome what it initiates; or else it had an impulse once for all
and what follows is consequential upon that; and why are you anxious? And
whether the Whole be God, all is well—or whether it be Chance, somehow
molecules or atoms, be not yourself then ruled by Chance.
29. In a moment earth will cover us all, then earth, too, will change and
what ensues will change to eternity and that again to eternity. A man who
thinks of the continuous waves of change and alteration, and the swift
passage of all mortal things, will hold them in disdain.
29. The matter of the Whole is a torrent; it carries all in its stream. What
then, man, is your part? Act as Nature this moment requires; set about it, if
it is granted you, and don’t look round to see whether anyone will know.
Don’t hope for Plato’s Utopia, but be content to make a very small step
forward and reflect that the result even of this is no trifle. How cheap are
these mere men with their policies and their philosophic practice, as they
suppose; they are full of drivel. For who will change men’s convictions?
And without a change of conviction what else is there save a bondage of
men who groan and pretend to obey? Go to now and talk to me of
Alexander, Philip, and Demetrius of Phalerum. If they saw what
Universal Nature willed and went to school to her, I will follow: but if they
were actors on the world’s stage, no one has condemned me to imitate
them. The work of Philosophy is simplicity and self-respect; lead me not
away to vainglory.
30. ‘Look from above’ at the spectacle of myriad herds, myriad rites, and
manifold journeying in storm and calm; diversities of creatures who are
being born, coming together, passing away. Ponder, too, the life led by
others long ago, the life that will be led after you, the life being led in
uncivilized races; how many do not even know your name, how many will
very soon forget it and how many who praise you perhaps now will very
soon blame you; and that neither memorial nor fame nor anything else at all
is worth a thought.
31. Calm, in respect of what comes to pass from a cause outside you;
justice, in acts done in accord with a cause from yourself: that is to say,
impulse and act terminating simply in neighbourly conduct, because for you
this is according to Nature.
32. You have the power to strip off many superfluities which trouble you
and are wholly in your own judgement; and you will make a large room at
once for yourself by embracing in your thought the whole Universe,
grasping ever-continuing Time and pondering the rapid change in the parts
of each object, how brief the interval from birth to dissolution, and the time
before birth a yawning gulf even as the period after dissolution equally
boundless.
33. All that your eyes behold will very quickly pass away, and those who
saw it passing will themselves also pass away very quickly; and he who
dies in extreme age will be made equal in years with the infant who meets
an untimely end.
34. What governing selves are theirs, what mean ends have they pursued,
for what mean reasons do they give love and esteem! Accustom yourself to
look at their souls in nakedness. When they fancy that their blame hurts or
their praise profits, how great their vanity.
35. Loss is nothing else but change. In this Universal Nature rejoices and by
her all things come to pass well. From eternity they came to pass in like
fashion and will be to everlasting in other similar shapes. Why then do you
say ‘all things ever came to pass badly and that all will ever be bad’? So no
power it seems was ever found in so many gods to remedy this, but the
world is condemned to be straitened in uninterrupted evils?
36. The rottenness of the matter which underlies everything. Water, dust,
bones, stench. Again: marble, an incrustation of earth; gold and silver,
sediments; your dress, the hair of animals; the purple dye, blood, and so all
the rest. What is of the nature of breath too is similar and changing from
this to that.
37. Enough of this wretched way of life, of complaining and mimicry. Why
are you troubled, what novelty is there in this, what takes you out of
yourself? The formal side of things? Look it in the face. The material side
then? Face that. Besides these there is nothing, except even now at this late
hour to become simpler and better in your relation to the gods. To acquaint
yourself with these things for a hundred years or for three is the same.
38. If he did wrong, the harm is with him; but perhaps he did not.
39. Either all comes to pass from one fountain of mind, as in a single
organic body, and the part must not find fault with what is for the good of
the whole; or else there are atoms, nothing but a mechanical mixture and
dispersal. Why then be troubled? Say to your governing self: ‘are you dead,
gone to corruption, turned into a beast, are you acting a part, running with
the herd, feeding with it?’
40. The gods are either powerless or powerful. If then they are powerless,
why do you pray? But if they are powerful, why not rather pray them for
the gift to fear none of these things, to desire none of them, to sorrow for
none of them, rather than that any one of them should be present or absent?
For surely if they can co-operate with man, they can co-operate to these
ends. But perhaps you will say: ‘The gods put these things in my power.’
Were it not better then to use what is in your power with a free spirit rather
than to be concerned for what is not in your power with a servile and abject
spirit? Besides, who told you that the gods do not co-operate even in respect
to what is in our power? Begin at least to pray about these things and you
will see. That man prays: ‘How may I know that woman’; do you pray:
‘How may I not desire to know her.’ Another prays: ‘How may I get rid of
him’; do you pray: ‘How may I not want to be rid of him.’ Another: ‘How
may I not lose my little child’; do you pray: ‘How may I not be afraid to
lose him.’ Turn your prayers round in this way generally and see what is the
result.
41. Epicurus says: ‘In illness my conversation was not about the
sufferings of my body, nor used I’, he says, ‘to talk to my visitors about
such matters, but I continued to debate leading principles of science and to
keep only to this, how the understanding while conscious of such changes
in the mere flesh is yet undisturbed and preserves its own proper good. I did
not even’, he goes on, ‘permit the medical men to give themselves airs as
though they were doing some great thing, but my life passed on happily and
brightly.’ Do the same then as he did, in sickness if you are sick and in any
other circumstance, for it is common to every school not to desert
Philosophy in any at all of the accidents of life and not to gossip with the
ignorant and unlearned. Be intent only on what is now being done and on
the instrument you use to do it.
42. Whenever you are offended by a man’s shamelessness, ask yourself
immediately: ‘Is it possible then for the shameless not to be in the world?’
It is not; do not then ask for the impossible; for he, too, is one of the
shameless who must exist in the world. And have the same ready also for
the rogue, the traitor, and every kind of wrongdoer; for directly you remind
yourself that the class of such persons cannot but be, you will be gentler to
them as individuals. Another useful thing is to call to mind immediately
what virtue Nature gave man to meet this wrong, for she gave as an antidote
against the unfeeling, mildness, against another, some other faculty, and
generally speaking it is in your power to convert the man who has gone
astray, for every man who does wrong is going wrong from the goal set
before him and has gone astray. And what harm have you suffered? For you
will find that none of those with whom you are angry has done the kind of
thing by which your understanding was likely to become worse and it is
there that your ills and harms have their entire existence.
How is it an evil or strange event that the uninstructed does what
uninstructed men do? See whether you should not rather find fault with
yourself for not expecting that he would do this wrong; for you had
aptitudes from reason to enable you to argue that in all probability this man
will do this wrong, and yet you forgot and are surprised that he did wrong.
But, most important of all, turn inward to your own self, whenever you
blame the traitor or the ungrateful, for the fault is plainly yours, whether
you trusted a man with such a disposition to keep faith or whether, when
you bestowed a favour,
you did not give it unreservedly or so that you
received the whole fruit from your act itself then and there. For when you
have done good, what more, oh man, do you wish? Is it not enough that
what you did was in agreement with your nature and do you seek a
recompense for this? As if the eye asked a return for seeing or the feet for
walking; for just as these were made for this which they effect according
to their proper constitution, and so get what is theirs, even thus man is made
by Nature to be benevolent, and whenever he contributes to the common
stock by benevolence or otherwise, he has done what he was constituted for,
and gets what is his own.
1. Wilt thou one day, my soul, be good, simple, single, naked, plainer to see
than the body surrounding thee? Wilt thou one day taste a loving and
devoted disposition? Wilt thou one day be filled and without want, craving
nothing and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, for indulgence in
pleasures; not time wherein longer to indulge thyself, nor happy situation of
place or room or breezes nor harmony of men? Wilt thou rather be satisfied
with present circumstance and pleased with all the present, and convince
thyself that all is present for thee from the gods and all is well for thee and
will be well whatsoever is dear to them to give and whatsoever they
purpose to bestow for the sustenance of the perfect living creature, the good
and just and beautiful, which begets, sustains, includes, and embraces all
things that are being resolved into the generation of others like themselves?
Wilt thou one day be such as to dwell in the society of gods and men so as
neither to find fault at all with them nor to be condemned by them?
2. Observe what your nature requires in so far as you are governed by mere
physical nature; then do that and accept that, if only your nature as part of
the animal world will not be rendered worse. Next you are to observe what
your nature as part of the animal world requires and to take it all, if only
your nature as a reasonable being will not be rendered worse. But what is
reasonable is consequently also social. Make use then of these rules and do
not be troubled about anything besides.
3. Every event happens in such a way that your nature can either support it
or cannot. If then it happens so that your nature can support it, do not
complain but support it as it is your nature to do; but if so that your nature
cannot support it, do not complain, for it will destroy you quickly.
Remember, however, that your nature can support everything which it is in
the power of your own judgement to make tolerable and endurable by
representing to yourself that to do this is to your advantage or is your duty.
4. If he goes wrong, instruct him kindly and point out what is being
overlooked; if you fail, blame yourself or, better, not even yourself.
5. Whatever befalls you was prepared for you beforehand from eternity and
the thread of causes was spinning from everlasting both your existence and
this which befalls you.
6. Whether there are Atoms or Nature, the first postulate must be: ‘I am
part of the Whole which is governed by Nature’; the second: ‘I am allied in
some way to the parts that are of the same kind with me.’ For if I remember
these postulates, I shall, in so far as I am a part, not be disaffected to
anything assigned by the Whole; for nothing which benefits the Whole is
injurious to the part, since the Whole contains nothing which does not
benefit itself, and while all natural existences have this common attribute,
the nature of the Universe has this further attribute that no external cause
can compel it to generate anything injurious to itself.
By remembering, therefore, that I am a part of a Whole so characterized, I
shall be well-affected to all that results from it, and inasmuch as I am allied
in some way to the parts of the same kind as myself, I will do no unsocial
act, rather I will study the good of my kind and direct every impulse to the
common benefit and divert it from what opposes that benefit. Now when
things are being accomplished in this way, life must needs flow smoothly,
just as you would see that a citizen’s life is smooth as he progresses by acts
which benefit his fellow citizens and welcomes whatever his city assigns.
7. The parts of the Whole, all which the Universe naturally includes, must
necessarily perish, a word which is to be interpreted to denote change. Now
if this were naturally evil as well as necessary for the parts, the Whole
would not continue to be in a right condition while its parts were tending to
change and had been put together specifically with a view to perishing. (For
whether did Nature herself undertake to injure the parts of herself and to
create them with a tendency to evil, and bound by necessity to fall into evil,
or did such things come to pass without her knowledge? Neither view is
credible.)
But now suppose one dispensed with Nature and expounded facts by way of
‘natural law’; how absurd it is in one breath to assert that the parts of the
Whole change by natural law, and in the same moment to be surprised or
indignant as though at an occurrence in violation of natural law, particularly
when the dissolution of each is taking place into the elements out of which
each is composed. For this dissolution is either a dissipation of the atoms
out of which they were compounded or else a turning of the solid into its
earthy and of the vital spirit into its airy part, so that these too are caught up
into the Reason of the Whole, whether the Whole returns periodically
to
fire or is renewed by eternal exchanges.
And do not imagine this solid body and this vital spirit to be that of its
original entry into existence, for all this it took in only yesterday or the day
before, an influx from foodstuffs and the atmosphere which is respired;
what is changing then is what it took in, not what its mother brought into
the world. And even suppose that what thus is changing binds you
intimately to the individual self, that is in fact nothing, I think, to affect my
present argument.
8. After giving yourself these titles: good, self-respecting, true, sane,
conforming, high-minded, take care not to get others in their place; and, if
you do lose these titles, be quick to return to them. Remember, further, that
‘sanity’ was intended to denote apprehensive attention to individual objects
and the reverse of negligence; ‘conformity’ glad acceptance of the
assignments of Universal Nature; and ‘high-mindedness’ elevation of the
thinking part above the smooth or interrupted movement of the flesh, above
petty reputation and death and all indifferent things.
Therefore, if you continue to preserve yourself in these titles, not aspiring to
be called them by others, you will be a changed man and will enter upon a
changed life. For still to be such as you have been up to the present, to be
torn and polluted in such a way of life, is to be utterly brutalized, to cling to
mere life like half-devoured combatants in the arena, a mass of wounds
and dusty blood, yet imploring to be kept alive until the morrow, only to be
exposed in that state to the same teeth and claws.
Adventure yourself then upon these few titles, and if you are able to abide
in them, abide like a man translated to Islands of the Blest; but if you
perceive that you are falling away and losing control, go bravely away into
some corner, there to recover control, or even depart altogether from life,
not angrily, but simply and freely and with self-respect, having done at
least this one thing in life, to have made your exit thus.
To remember the titles, however, it will be a great help to you to remember
the gods, and that they at least do not wish to be the objects of servility, but
for all rational beings to be made into their likeness, and that the fig-tree
should be what does the work of a fig-tree, the dog of a dog, the bee of a
bee, and man the work of a man.
9. Play-acting, warfare, excitement, lethargy—in fact slavery! Every day
those sacred doctrines of yours, whichever of them you imagine and admit
without scientific investigation, will be obliterated, whereas you should
look at every object and do every act so that, at one and the same time,
circumstance is accomplished and theory exercised, and the confidence
which comes from a scientific knowledge of each experience is preserved,
unnoticed, not concealed. For when will you take your indulgence in
simplicity, when in dignity, when in the knowledge of what each object is in
essence, what station it holds in the world, how long it naturally persists, of
what it is compounded, to whom it can belong, who can give it and who
take it away?
10. A spider is proud when he traps a fly, a man when he snares a leveret,
another when he nets a sprat, another boars, another bears, another
Sarmatian prisoners. If you test their sentiments, are they not bandits?
11. Acquire a methodical insight into the way all things change, one into
another; attend continually to this part of Nature and exercise yourself in it,
for nothing is so likely to promote an elevation of mind. He has put off the
body and, reflecting that he will be bound almost at once to leave all these
things behind and to depart from men, he has devoted his whole self to
justice in what is being accomplished by himself, and to Universal Nature
in what comes to pass otherwise. And he spends no thought about what
someone may say or think about him or do against him, but is contented
with these two things, if he is himself acting justly in what is done in the
present, and if he embraces what is assigned to him in the present; and he
has put away every preoccupation and enthusiasm, and has no other will
than to pursue a straight path according to the law and, pursuing it, to
follow in God’s train.
12. What need have you of a hint or suggestion, when it is possible to see
what ought to be done and, if you are conscious of that, kindly to proceed
on this path without turning back; but if you are not conscious of it, to
suspend judgement and use the best men to advise you; or if some farther
points bar this advice, to go forward according to your present opportunities
cautiously, holding fast to what seems to be just? For it is best to achieve
justice, since, as you see, failure is to fail in this. The man who in
everything follows the rule of Reason is at once master of his time and
quick to act, at once cheerful in expression and composed.
13. Ask yourself directly you awake from sleep: will it be of any moment to
you, if just and right acts are blamed by another? No, it will not. Have you
forgotten what these who plume themselves upon praise or censure of
others are like at bed and board, the sort of things they do and avoid or
pursue, how they steal and plunder, not with hands and feet, but with the
most precious part of themselves, in which, whenever it determines, faith,
self-respect, truth, law, a good divinity come into being?
14. To Nature, who bestows all things and takes them away, the man who
has learnt his lesson and respects himself says: ‘Give what is thy good
pleasure, take back what is thy good pleasure’; and this he says not boasting
himself but only listening to her voice and being of one mind with her.
15. Small is this balance of life left to you. Live as on a height; for here or
there matters nothing, if everywhere one lives in the Universe, as in a city.
Let men see, let them study a true man, a man who lives in accord with
Nature. If they cannot bear him, let them kill him, for it were better so than
for him to live on those terms.
16. Don’t any more discuss at large what the good man is like, but be good.
17. Let your imagination dwell continually upon the whole of Time and the
whole of Substance, and realize that their several parts are, by comparison
with Substance, a fig-seed; by comparison with Time, the turn of a gimlet.
18. Dwell upon everything that exists and reflect that it is already in process
of dissolution and coming into being by change and a kind of decay or
dispersion, or in what way it is born to die, in a manner of speaking.
19. What creatures they are; they eat, sleep, copulate, relieve nature, and so
on; then what are they like as rulers, imperious or angry and fault-finding to
excess; yet but yesterday how many masters were they slaving for and to
what purpose, and tomorrow they will be in a like condition.
20. Each man’s benefit is what Universal Nature brings to each, and it is his
benefit precisely at the time she brings it.
21. ‘Earth loves the rain’
22. Either you go on living in the world and are familiar with it by now, or
you go out, and that by your own will, or else you die and your service is
accomplished. There is nothing beside these three: therefore be of good
courage.
23. Always realize vividly the saying that one place of retreat is like any
other, and how everything in the place you are in is the same as it would be
on the top of a hill or by the sea or wherever you choose. You will find
exactly what Plato says: ‘building round himself a fold on a hill and
milking his bleating flocks’.
24. What is my governing self to me, and what son of thing am I making it
now, and for what purpose am I employing it now? Is it void of reason? Is it
severed and torn asunder from society? Is it so melted into and blended with
the flesh that it conforms to its movements?
25. He who runs away from his master is a fugitive slave. But law is a
master and therefore the transgressor of law is a fugitive slave. In the same
way, also, he who gives way to sorrow or anger or fear, wishes that
something had not been or were not now, or should not be hereafter, of what
is appointed by that which ordains all things; and that is law, laying down
for every man what falls to his lot. He, therefore, who yields to fear or pain
or anger is a fugitive slave.
26. A man drops seed into a womb and goes his way and thereupon
another causal principle takes it, labours upon it and completes a new-born
babe. What a marvellous result of that small beginning. Next the babe
passes food through the gullet and thereupon another causal principle takes
it and creates sensation and impulse; in a word, life and strength and other
results, how many and how marvellous. Contemplate, therefore, in thought
what comes to pass in such a hidden way, and see the power, as we see the
force which makes things gravitate or tend upwards, not with the eyes, but
none the less clearly.
27. Reflect continually how all things came to pass in days gone by as they
do today, and reflect that so they will hereafter; and put before your eyes
whole dramas and scenes of the same kind, which you have known in
your own experience or from earlier history, the whole court of Hadrian, for
instance, or of Antoninus; of Philip, Alexander, and Croesus; for those
were all like these; the actors only were different.
28. Picture to yourself every man who gives way to pain or discontent at
any thing at all as like a pig being sacrificed, kicking and squealing. Such
also is the man who groans on his bed, alone and in silence. Think of the
chain we are bound by, and that to the rational creature only is it given to
obey circumstances of his own will, while mere obedience is necessary for
all.
29. At the time of each separate act, stop and ask yourself whether death is
to be feared because you are deprived of this.
30. When you run against someone’s wrong behaviour, go on at once to
reflect what similar wrong act of your own there is; for instance, to esteem
money or pleasure or glory as goods, and so on with each kind. For if you
attend to this, you will quickly forget your anger, when it occurs to you at
the same time that he is compelled, for what else can he do? Alternatively,
if you can, remove what in him is subject to compulsion.
31. When you see Satyrion, Eutyches, or Hymen, picture a follower of
Socrates; or an Euphrates, when you see Eutychion or Silvanus; an
Alciphron, when you see Tropaeophorus; and a Crito or Xenophon, when
you see Severus.So when you look at yourself, picture one of the
Caesars, and in every case picture a parallel. Then let the thought strike you
in the same moment: ‘Where are they all? Nowhere, or we know not
where.’ For in this way you will continually see that man’s life is smoke
and nothingness, especially if you remind yourself that what has once
changed will be no more in infinite Time. Why then are you bothered? Why
not satisfied to pass through this brief moment ordering your ways? What
kind of material condition and station are you running away from? What is
it all except a school of exercise for a reason which has exactly and
scientifically looked into what life contains? Wait, therefore, until you
assimilate even these things to yourself, as a strong stomach assimilates any
food and a bright fire turns whatever you throw into it to flame and light.
32. Don’t let it be possible for anyone to say of you truthfully that you are
not simple and good, but let him be a liar who thinks any of these things
about you. And this entirely rests with you; for who prevents your being
good and simple? Only make up your mind not to go on living, if you are
not like that, for Reason, too, disowns one who is not like that.
33. What is the soundest thing that can be done or said in a given material
condition? For whatever this may be, you are able to do or say it, and you
are not to make the excuse that you are prevented. You will never cease
groaning until you feel that to act appropriately to man’s constitution in any
material condition which occurs to you or befalls you is for you what luxury
is to the sensualist. For you should regard as an indulgence whatever you
can achieve in accord with your own nature, and this you can achieve
everywhere. Now the roller is not allowed everywhere to be moved
according to its own natural movement, nor are water, fire, and the rest,
which are governed by natural law or life without reason—for there are
many things which separate them and resist them. Mind and reason are able
to move through any thing that opposes, as their nature and their will
prescribe. Put before your eyes this ease with which reason will prove to be
carried through all things (as fire moves upwards, a stone down, a roller on
a slope) and ask for nothing more, for the remaining obstacles are either
of the lifeless body or else do not overwhelm it or do any harm at all
without the judgement and the consent of reason itself.
For mark you, were it not so, the man affected would have become evil at
once; at all events in all other constituted things whatever is affected itself
becomes worse because of any evil which happens to it, whereas in this
case, if one may so put it, a man becomes better and more laudable by right
use of circumstances. And generally, remember that nothing harms the
natural citizen which does not harm the city and nothing harms the city
which does not harm the law. Now none of what are called strokes of bad
luck harms the law: wherefore, not harming the law, it harms neither city
nor citizen.
34. For one bitten by true doctrines even the briefest and most familiar
saying is reminder enough to dispel sorrow and fear, for instance:
‘leaves,
the wind scatters some on the face of the ground;
like unto them are the children of men.’
35. The healthy eye should be able to look at every object of sight, and not
to say: ‘I wish it were green’, for this is what a man does who has
ophthalmia. The healthy ear and nose must be ready for every object of
hearing or smell, and the healthy stomach must be disposed to every kind of
nourishment as the mill is ready for everything which it is made to grind.
Accordingly the healthy understanding too must be ready for all
circumstances; but that which says: ‘may my children be kept safe’ or ‘may
all men praise whatever I do’, is the eye looking for green or the teeth for
what is tender.
36. No one is so fortunate but that when he is dying some will be at his
bedside welcoming the evil that is coming to him. Was he earnest and wise;
perhaps there will be someone at the end to say of him: ‘we shall breathe
more freely now this schoolmaster has gone; he was not hard on any of us,
but I could feel he was tacitly condemning us.’ So much for the earnest
man; but in our own case what a number of other things there are for
which many want to be rid of us. You will think then of this as you die and
will depart more easily, thinking to yourself: ‘I am going away from the
kind of life in which even my fellow men, for whom I laboured, prayed, and
thought so much, even they wish me to go away, hoping perhaps for some
relief by my death.’ Why then should one hold on to a longer stay in this
world? Do not, however, on this account leave them with less kindness, but
preserve your own character, friendly and well disposed and propitious; and
again do not go as if you were being torn away, but as for a man who has a
quiet end the soul slips easily from its casing, so should your departure be
from them. For it was Nature who bound you and united you to them, and
now she sets you free. I am set free from men who are certainly my
kinsfolk, yet I do not resist and I go under no compulsion. For this, too, is
one of the things which are according to Nature.
37. Accustom yourself in the case of whatever is done by anyone, so far as
possible to inquire within yourself: ‘to what end does this man do this?’
And begin with yourself and first examine yourself
38. Remember that what is hidden within you controls the strings; that is
activity, that is life, that, if one may say so, is the man. Never occupy your
imagination besides with the body which encloses you like a vessel and
these organs which are moulded round you. They are like an axe, only
differing as being attached to the body. For, indeed, these parts are of no
more use without the cause which moves or checks them than the shuttle to
the weaver, the pen to the writer or the whip to the man who holds the reins.
1. The properties of the rational soul: it is conscious of itself, it moulds
itself, makes of itself whatever it will, the fruit which it bears it gathers
itself (whereas others gather the fruits of the field and what in animals
corresponds to fruit), it achieves its proper end, wherever the close of life
comes upon it; if any interruption occur, its whole action is not rendered
incomplete as is the case in the dance or a play and similar arts, but in every
scene of life and wherever it may be overtaken, it makes what it proposed
to itself complete and entire, so that it can say: ‘I have what is my own.’
Moreover, it goes over the whole Universe and the surrounding void and
surveys its shape,
reaches out into the boundless extent of time, embraces
and ponders the periodic rebirth of the Whole and understands that those
who come after us will behold nothing new nor did those who came before
us behold anything greater, but in a way the man of forty years, if he have
any understanding at all, has seen all that has been and that will be by
reason of its uniformity. A property, too, of the rational soul is love of one’s
neighbour, truth, self-reverence and to honour nothing more than itself; and
this last is a property of law also; accordingly right principle and the
principle of justice differ not at all.
2. You will despise joyous song and the dance and the combat-at-arms if
you disintegrate the tuneful phrase into every one of its notes, and ask
yourself about each whether you are its servant; for you will be ashamed.
And so you will be if you do what corresponds in the case of the dance in
respect of each movement or pose, and the same also in the case of the
combat-at-arms. Generally then, excepting virtue and its effects, remember
to have recourse to the several parts and by analysis to go on to despise
them, and to apply the same process to life as a whole.
3. How admirable is the soul which is ready and resolved, if it must this
moment be released from the body, to be either extinguished or scattered or
to persist. This resolve, too, must arise from a specific decision. not out of
sheer opposition like the Christians, but after reflection and with dignity,
and so as to convince others, without histrionic display.
4. Have I done a neighbourly act? I am thereby benefited. Let this always
be ready to your mind, and nowhere desist.
5. What is your art? To be good. But how is this done except by principles
of thought, concerned both with Universal Nature and with man’s
individual constitution?
6. First of all tragedies were put on the stage to remind you of what comes
to pass and that it is Nature’s law for things to happen like that, and that you
are not to make what charmed you on the stage a heavy burden on the
world’s greater stage. For you see that those events are bound to have that
ending and that even those endure them who have cried aloud: ‘Alas! Alas!
Cithaeron’. There are also valuable sayings in the dramatists; an especially
famous one, for instance:
Were the gods careless of my sons and me.
Yet there is reason here,
and again:
man must not vent his passion on mere things,
or:
Life, like ripe corn, must to the sickle yield,
and the many others of the same sort.
After Tragedy was introduced the Old Comedy,
which through its
instructive frankness and its reminder by actual plainness of language to
avoid vanity was not without profit, and this directness Diogenes also
adopted with a somewhat similar object. After the Old, observe what the
Middle Comedy was like and afterwards with what end the New Comedy
was adopted, passing little by little into a love of technique based on
imitation. It is recognized that there are profitable sayings of these authors
also, but after all what was the object to which the whole aim of such poetry
and drama looked?
7. How vividly it strikes you that no other calling in life is so fitted for the
practice of philosophy as this in which you now find yourself.
8. A branch cut off from the bough it belonged to cannot but be cut off
also from the whole tree. Similarly a man, if severed from a single man, has
fallen away from society as a whole. Now in the case of a branch, it is cut
off by another agency, whereas man by his own act divides himself from his
neighbour, when he hates him and turns from him, yet he does not realize
that at the same time he has severed himself from the whole
Commonwealth. Only there is this singular gift of Zeus who brought
society together, that we are enabled to join again with the man we belong
to, and again to become complements of the Whole. Yet, if it is often
repeated, the effect of such separation is to make what separates difficult to
unite and to restore. Generally speaking, too, the branch which originally
grew with the tree and shared its transpiration, by remaining with it, is
different from the branch which is engrafted again after being cut off,
whatever gardeners may say.
‘Grow together with them but do not share their doctrines.’
9. Just as those who oppose you as you progress in agreement with right
principle will not be able to divert you from sound conduct, so do not let
them force you to abandon your kindness towards them; but be equally on
your guard in both respects, in steady judgement and behaviour as well as
in gentleness towards those who try to hinder you or are difficult in other
ways. For to be hard upon them is a weakness just as much as to abandon
your course and to give in, from fright; for both are equally deserters from
their post, the man who is in a panic as well as the man who is alienated
from his natural kinsman and friend.
10. ‘No Nature is inferior to Art’, for the crafts imitate natural things. If
then this be true, the Nature which is the most perfect of all natures and all
inclusive would not fall short of technical inventiveness. Moreover, all
crafts create the lower in the interests of the higher, wherefore the Universal
Nature does the same. And so from her is the birth of Justice, and from
Justice the rest of the virtues have their existence; for Justice will not be
preserved if we are concerned for indifferent objects or are easily deceived
by them or are liable to stumble or to change.
11. The objects whose pursuit or avoidance disturbs your peace do not
come to you, but in a measure you go to them. Let your judgement at all
events about them be untroubled and they will remain unmoved, and you
will be seen neither to pursue nor to avoid them.
12. The sphere of the soul is true to its own form, when it is neither
extended in any way nor contracted inwards; when it is neither scattered nor
dies down, but is lighted by the light whereby it sees the truth of all things
and the truth within itself.
13. Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I
may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.
Will he hate me? Let him see to it. But I will be kind and well-disposed to
every man and ready to show him what is overlooked, not reproachfully nor
as though I were displaying forbearance, but genuinely and generously like
the famous Phocion, if he was not in fact pretending. For the inward parts
ought to be like that, and a man ought to be seen by the gods to be neither
disposed to indignation nor complaining. For what harm is there to you if
you are yourself at the moment doing the thing which is appropriate to your
nature and accepting what is at this moment in season for Universal Nature,
as a human being intent upon the common benefit being somehow realized?
14. They despise one another, yet they flatter one another; they want to get
above one another and yet bow down to one another.
15. How rotten and crafty is the man who says: ‘I have made up my mind
to deal plainly with you.’ What are you about, my friend? This preface is
not necessary. The intention will reveal itself, it ought to be graven on the
forehead; the tone of voice should give that sound at once; the intention
should shine out in the eyes at once, as the beloved at once reads the whole
in the glances of lovers. The simple and good man ought to be entirely
such, like the unsavoury man, that those who stand by detect him at once,
whether he will or not, as soon as he comes near. But the affectation of
simplicity is like a razor; nothing is uglier than the wolfs profession of
friendship, avoid that above all. The good and simple and kind has these
qualities in his eyes and they are not hidden.
16. Live constantly the highest life. This power is in a man’s soul, if he is
indifferent to what is indifferent; and he will be so, if he regard every one of
these indifferent objects as a whole and in its parts, remembering that none
of them creates in us a conception about itself nor even comes to us, but
they are motionless, and it is we who create judgements about them and so
to speak inscribe them on ourselves; and yet we need not inscribe them and,
if we do so unconsciously, we can wipe them off again at once. Remember,
too, that attention to this kind of thing will last but a little while and, after
that, life will have reached its close. And yet what difficulty do these things
present? If they are what Nature wills, rejoice in them and you will find
them easy: if they are not, look for what your own nature wills and hasten
to this, even should it bring you no glory; for every man is pardoned if he
seeks his own good.
17. What the origin of each experience is and the material condition of
each; what it is changing into and what it will be like when it has changed,
and that it will suffer no injury by the change.
18. First, what is my position in regard to others and how we came into
the world for one another; and, to put it in a different way, that I was born to
protect them, as the ram protects his flocks or the bull his herd. Then, going
further back, proceed from the truth that, unless the Universe is mere atoms,
it is Nature which administers the Whole and, granted this, the lower are in
the interests of the higher, the higher for one another.
Secondly, what creatures they are at board and in bed and so on, and above
all what kind of compulsion they are under because of their opinions, and
with what arrogance they do what they do.
Thirdly, that, if they do what is right, you ought not to complain, but if what
is wrong, clearly they act involuntarily and in ignorance—for as every soul
is unwilling to be deprived of the truth, so is it unwilling not to be related to
every man according to his worth; at any rate they resent it, if they are
spoken of as unjust, inconsiderate, overreaching, in a word as wrong-doers
in regard to their neighbours.
Fourthly, that you yourself also often do wrong and are another such as they
are, and that, even if you do abstain from some kinds of wrong action, at all
events you have at least a proclivity to them, though cowardice or
tenderness for your good name or some similar bad motive keeps you from
offences like theirs.
Fifthly, that you are not even sure that they actually do wrong; for many
actions are done to serve a given purpose and, generally, one must ascertain
much before making a certainly correct decision upon a neighbour’s
conduct.
Sixthly, when you are highly indignant or actually suffering, that man’s life
is but a moment, and in a little we are one and all laid low in death.
Seventhly, that it is not what they do that troubles us, for that lies in their
own governing selves, but it is our judgements about them. Very well then,
remove your judgement about the supposed hurt and make up your mind to
dismiss it, and your anger is gone. How then will you remove it? By
reflecting that what hurts you is not morally bad; for unless what is morally
bad is alone hurtful, it follows of necessity that you also do much wrong
and become a brigand and a shifty character.
Eighthly, how much more grievous are what fits of anger and the
consequent sorrows bring than the actual things are which produce in us
those angry fits and sorrows.
Ninthly, that gentleness is invincible, if it be genuine and not sneering or
hypocritical. For what can the most insolent do to you, if you continue
gentle to him, and, if opportunity allows, mildly admonish him and quietly
show him a better way at the very moment when he attempts to do you
injury: ‘No, my child; we came into the world for other ends. It is not I that
am harmed, but you are harmed, my child.’ And point out with tact and on
general grounds that this is so, that not even bees act like that nor the many
creatures that are by nature gregarious. But you must not do it ironically or
as if finding fault, but affectionately and not feeling the sting in your soul,
nor as if you were lecturing him or desired some bystander to admire you,
but even if others are present, just in the way you would address him if you
were alone.
Remember these nine brief prescriptions, taking them as a gift from the
Muses, and begin at last to be a human being, while life remains. And be as
much on your guard against flattering them as against being angry with
them, for both faults are unsocial and tend to injury. And in your angry fits
have the maxim ready that it is not passion that is manly, but that what is
kind and gentle as it is more human so is it more manly, and that this is the
character which has strength and sinews and fortitude, not that which is
indignant and displeased; for as this is nearer to imperturbability so it is
nearer to power; and as grief is a mark of weakness, so also is anger, for
both have been wounded and have surrendered to the wound.
And, if you will, receive a tenth gift from the leader of the nine Muses, to
wit that it is madness to require bad men not to do wrong, for it is aiming at
the impossible. Still, to permit them to be such to others and to require
them not to do wrong to yourself is to be unfeeling and tyrannical.
19. You are especially to guard unremittingly against four moods of the
governing self, and to wipe them out whenever you detect them, using in
each case the following remedies: this imagination is not necessary; this is a
solvent of society; this which you are about to say is not from yourself, and
not to speak from yourself you must consider to be most incongruous.
The fourth thing that will cause you to reproach yourself is that this ensues
from your more divine part being overcome and yielding to the less
honourable and mortal portion, the body and its gross pleasures.
20. Your element of spirit and all the element of fire that is mingled in you,
in spite of their natural upward tendency, nevertheless obey the ordering of
the Whole and are held forcibly in the compounded body in this region of
the earth. Once more, all the elements of earth and of water in you, in spite
of their downward tendency, are nevertheless lifted up and keep to a
position which is not natural to them. In this way then even the elements are
obedient to the Whole and, when they are stationed at a given point, remain
there by compulsion until once more the signal for their dissolution is made
from the other world.
Is it not then monstrous that only your mind-element should disobey and be
dissatisfied with its station? Yet nothing is imposed upon it that does
violence to it, only what is in accord with its own nature, and still it does
not tolerate this, but is carried in a reverse direction. For movement towards
acts of injustice and habitual vice, towards wrath and sorrow and fear, is
nothing else but a movement of severance from Nature. Moreover, when the
governing self is discontented with any circumstance, then, too, it deserts its
proper station, for it is constituted for holiness and the service of God no
less than for just dealing with man. For these relations belong in kind to
good fellowship, or rather are even more to be reverenced than just
dealings.
21. ‘He who has not one and the same aim in life is unable to remain one
and the same through all his life.’ The saying is incomplete unless you add
what sort of aim it should be. For as the conception of all the variety of
goods which the majority of men fancy in any way to be good is not the
same, but only the conception of certain of the kinds of goods, namely the
general goods, so the aim to be set before oneself must be the social aim,
that is the aim of the Commonwealth. For he who directs every private
impulse to this will make all his actions uniform and because of this will
always be the same man.
22. The mountain mouse and the town mouse, and the fright and scurry of
the latter.
23. Socrates used to call the opinions of the multitude like other things:
‘Bogies’, things to frighten children.
24.
27 The Spartans used to put seats for visitors at their entertainments in
the shade, and to seat themselves wherever they found room.
25. Socrates’ message to Perdiccas to excuse a visit to his court; ‘to
avoid’, he said, ‘coming to a most unfortunate end, that is, to be treated
handsomely and not to have the power to return it.’
26. The writings of the school of Epicurus lay down the injunction to
remind oneself continually of one of those who practised virtue in the days
gone by.
27. The Pythagoreans say: ‘Look up to the sky before morning breaks’, to
remind ourselves of beings who always in the same relations and in the
same way accomplish their work, and of their order, purity, and nakedness;
for a star has no veil.
28. What a man Socrates was in his undergarment only, when Xanthippe
took his upper garment and went out; and what he said to the friends who
were shocked and retired when they saw him in that dress.
29. In writing and reciting you will not be a master before you have been a
pupil. This is much more true of living.
30. ‘You are a slave by nature: reason is not your part.’
31. ‘And my dear heart laughed within.’
32. ‘Virtue they will reproach, mocking her with harsh words.’
33. Only a madman expects a fig in winter; such is he who expects a child
when it is no longer permitted.
34. Epictetus used to say that, as you kissed your child, you should say in
your heart: ‘tomorrow maybe you will die’. ‘Those are words of ill omen.’
‘No,’ he replied, ‘nothing that means an act of Nature is of evil omen, or it
would be a bad omen to say that the corn has been reaped.’
35. The unripe grape, the ripe bunch, the dried raisin, all are changes; not to
nothing, but to what at this moment is nothing.
36. ‘There is no robber of the will,’ as Epictetus says.
37. He said too: ‘you must find out an art of assent, and keep your
attention fixed in the sphere of the impulses, that they may be controlled by
reservation, be social, and in proportion to value; and you must wholly
abstain from desire and employ aversion in regard to nothing that is not in
our own control.
38. ‘So we are contending,’ he said, ‘for no ordinary prize, but for whether
we are to be sane or insane.’
39. Socrates used to say: ‘What do you want? To have souls of rational or
irrational beings?’ ‘Rational.’ ‘What rational beings, sound or inferior?’
‘Sound.’ ‘Why don’t you seek them?’ ‘Because we have them.’ ‘Why then
do you fight and disagree?’
1. It is in your power to secure at once all the objects which you dream of
reaching by a roundabout path, if you will be fair to yourself: that is, if you
will leave all the past behind, commit the future to Providence, and direct
the present, and that alone, to Holiness and Justice. Holiness, to love your
dispensation—for Nature brought it to you and you to it; Justice, freely and
without circumlocution both to speak the truth and to do the things that are
according to law and according to worth. And be not hampered by another’s
evil, his judgement, or his words, much less by the sensation of the flesh
that has formed itself about you—let the part affected look to itself. If then,
when you arrive at last at your final exit, resigning all else, you honour your
governing self alone and the divine element within you, if what you dread is
not that some day you will cease to live, but rather never to begin at all to
live with Nature, you will be a man worthy of the Universe that gave you
birth, and will cease to be a stranger in your own country, surprised by what
is coming to pass every day, as at something you did not look to see, and
absorbed in this thing or in that.
2. God beholds the governing selves of all men stripped of their material
vessels and coverings and dross; for with His own mind alone He touches
only what has flowed and been drawn from Himself into these selves. You,
too, if you make it your habit to do this, will rid yourself of your exceeding
unrest. For it would be strange that one who does not behold the poor
envelope of flesh should yet lose his time in admiring dress and dwelling
and reputation, and all such trappings and masquerade.
3. There are three things of which you are compounded: body, vital spirit,
mind. Two of these are your own in so far as you must take care of them,
but only the third is in the strict sense your own. So, if you separate from
yourself, namely from your mind, all that others do or say, all that you
yourself did or said, all that troubles you in the future, all that as part of the
bodily envelope or natural spirit attaches to you without your will, and all
that the external circumfluent vortex whirls round, so that your mind power,
freed from the chain of necessity, lives purified and released by itself—
doing what is just, willing what comes to pass, and speaking what is true; if
you separate, I say, from this governing self what is attached to it by
sensibility, and what of time is hereafter or has gone by, and make yourself
like the sphere of Empedocles,
‘rounded, rejoicing in the solitude which is
about it’, and practise only to live the life you are living, that is the present,
then you will have it in your power at least to live out the time that is left
until you die, untroubled and with kindness and reconciled with your own
good Spirit.
4. I often wonder how it is that everyone loves himself more than all the
world and yet takes less account of his own judgement of himself than of
the judgement of the world. At all events, if a god appeared to him or some
wise master and bade him think and contemplate nothing within himself
without at the same time speaking it out loud, he would not tolerate it even
for a single day. Thus we respect whatever our neighbours will think about
us more highly than we respect ourselves.
5. How was it that the gods, who ordered all things aright and with love to
man, overlooked this one thing only, that among mortal men some
altogether good, who had, so to speak, most commerce with the Godhead,
and by holy acts and solemn rites had grown in the highest degree familiar
with Him, should, once dead, never come into being again but be entirely
extinguished?
Now, if indeed it is so, be certain of this that, if it ought to have been
otherwise, the gods would have made it so; for were it just, it would also be
possible, and were it accordant with Nature, Nature would have brought it
about. Therefore from its not being so, if indeed it is not so, you should
believe that it ought not to come to pass. For you yourself see that, by
questioning thus, you are arguing a point of justice with God. Now we
should not be debating thus with the gods unless they were most good and
most just; and if this is true, they would not have permitted any part of the
ordered world they govern to be unjustly and unreasonably neglected.
6. Practise even the things which you despair of achieving. For even the left
hand, which for other uses is slow from want of practice, has a stronger
hold upon the bridle rein than the right; for it has been practised in this.
7. What ought one to be like both in body and soul, when overtaken by
death; the brevity of life; the gulf of Time hereafter and gone by; the
weakness of all matter.
8. Consider the causes of reality stripped of their covering; the relations of
your actions; the nature of pain, pleasure, death, fame; who is not the author
of his own unrest; how none is hindered by his neighbour; that all things are
what we judge them to be.
9. In the use of principles model yourself on the boxer, not the gladiator.
The one puts away the sword he uses and takes it up again; the other has his
hand always, and need but clench it.
10. See facts as they really are, distinguishing their matter, cause, relation.
11. How large a liberty man has to do nothing other than what God will
commend, and to welcome all that God assigns to him as a consequence of
Nature.
12. The gods must not be blamed; for they do no wrong, willingly or
unwillingly; nor human beings; for they do no wrong except unwillingly.
Therefore no one is to be blamed.
13. How ridiculous and like a stranger to the world is he who is surprised at
any one of the events of life.
14-
15. Either the Necessity of destiny and an order none may transgress, or
Providence that hears intercession, or an ungoverned welter without a
purpose.
If then a Necessity which none may transgress, why do you
resist? If a Providence admitting intercession, make yourself worthy of
assistance from the Godhead. If an undirected welter, be glad that in so
great a flood of waves you have yourself within you a directing mind; and,
if the flood carry you away, let it carry away flesh, vital-spirit, the rest of
you, for your mind it shall not carry away. Does the light of the lamp shine
and not lose its radiance until it be put out, and shall truth and justice and
temperance be put out in you before the end?
16. In the case of one who gives the impression that he did wrong, how do I
know that this was a wrong? And, if he certainly did wrong, how do I know
that he was not condemning himself, and so what he did was like tearing his
own face? One who wants an evil man not to do wrong is like a man who
wants a fig-tree not to produce its acrid juice in the figs, and infants not to
cry, and a horse not to neigh, and whatever else is inevitable. With that kind
of disposition what else can he do? Very well then, if you are man enough,
cure this disposition.
17-
18. If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it. Let your
impulse be to see always and entirely what precisely it is which is creating
an impression in your imagination, and to open it up by dividing it into
cause, matter, relation, and into the period within which it will be bound to
have ceased.
19. Perceive at last that you have within yourself something stronger and
more divine than the things which create your passions and make a
downright puppet of you. What is my consciousness at this instant? Fright,
suspicion, appetite? Some similar evil state?
20. First, do nothing aimlessly nor without relation to the end. Secondly,
relate your action to no other end except the good of human fellowship.
21. A little while and you will be nobody and nowhere, nor will anything
which you now behold exist, nor one of those who are now alive. Nature’s
law is that all things change and turn, and pass away, so that in due order
different things may come to be.
22. All things are what we judge them to be, and that rests with you. Put
away, therefore, when you will, the judgement; and, as though you had
doubled the headland, there is calm, ‘all smoothly strewn and a waveless
bay’.
23. Any single activity you choose, which ceases in due season, suffers no
evil because it has ceased, neither has he, whose activity it was, suffered
any evil merely because his activity has ceased. Similarly, therefore, the
complex of all activities, which is man’s life, suffers no evil merely because
it has ceased, provided that it ceases in due season, nor is he badly used
who in due season brings his series of activities to a close. But the season
and the term Nature assigns—sometimes the individual nature, as in old
age, but in any event Universal Nature, for by the changes of her parts the
whole world continues ever young and in her prime. Now what tends to the
advantage of the Whole is ever altogether lovely and in season; therefore
for each individual the cessation of his life is no evil, for it is no dishonour
to him, being neither of his choosing nor without relation to the common
good: rather is it good, because it is in due season for the Whole, benefiting
it and itself benefited by it. For thus is he both carried by God, who is borne
along the same course with God, and of purpose borne to the same ends as
God.
24. These three thoughts keep always ready for use: First, in what you do
that your act be not without purpose and not otherwise than Right itself
would have done, and that outward circumstances depend either on chance
or Providence; but neither is chance to be blamed, nor Providence
arraigned. The second, to remember the nature of each individual from his
conception to his first breath, and from his first breath until he gives back
the breath of life, and the mere elements of which he is compounded and
into which he is resolved. The third, to realize that if you could be suddenly
caught up into the air and could look down upon human life and see all its
variety you would disdain it, seeing at the same time how great a company
of beings,
in the air and in the aether, encompasses you, and that however
often you were caught up, you would see the same things-uniformity,
transience: these are the objects of your pride.
25. Cast out the judgement; you are saved. Who then hinders your casting it
out?
26. Whenever you feel something hard to bear, you have forgotten (a) that
all comes to pass according to the Nature of the Whole, (b) that the wrong
is not your own but another’s, further (c) that all that is coming to pass
always did, always will, and does now everywhere thus come to pass, (d)
the great kinship of man with all mankind, for the bond of kind is not blood
nor the seed of life, but mind. You have forgotten, moreover (e), that every
individual’s mind is of God and has flowed from that other world, (f) that
nothing is a man’s own, but even his child, his body, and his vital spirit
itself have come from that other world, (g) that all is judgement, (h) that
every man lives only the present life and this is what he is losing.
27. Continually run over in mind men who were highly indignant at some
event; men who attained the greatest heights of fame or disaster or enmity
or of any kind of fortune whatever. Then pause and think: ‘Where is it all
now?’ Smoke and ashes and a tale that is told, or not so much as a tale.
And see that all such as this occurs to you together: Fabius Catullinus, for
instance, in his country retreat, Lusius Lupus in his gardens, Stertinius at
Baiae, Tiberius in Capri, and Velius Rufus—and generally some
idiosyncrasy coupled with vanity; and how cheap is all that man strains to
get, and how much wiser it were, with the material granted to you, to
present yourself just, temperate, obedient to the gods in all simplicity; for
pride smouldering under a cover of humility is the most grievous pride of
all.
28. To those who ask the question: ‘Where have you seen the gods, or
whence have you apprehended that they exist, that you thus worship them?’
First, they are visible even to the eyes; secondly, I have not seen my own
soul and yet I honour it; and so, too, with the gods, from my experiences
every instant of their power, from these I apprehend that they exist and I do
them reverence.
29. The security of life is to see each object in itself, in its entirety, its
material, its cause; with the whole heart to do just acts and to speak the
truth. What remains except to enjoy life, joining one good thing to another,
so as to leave not even the smallest interval unfilled?
30. One light of the Sun, even though it be sundered by walls, by
mountains, by a myriad other barriers. One common Matter, even though it
be sundered in a myriad individual bodies. One vital spirit, even though it
be sundered in a myriad natural forms and individual outlines. One
intelligent spirit, even though it appears to be divided. Now of the things we
have named the other parts, for instance animal spirits and material bodies
without sense, are even unrelated to one another; yet even them the
principle of unity and the gravitation of like to like holds together. But
understanding has a peculiar property, it tends to its fellow and combines
therewith, and the feeling of fellowship is not sundered.
31. What more do you ask? To go on in your mere existence? Well then, to
enjoy your senses, your impulses? To wax and then to wane? To employ
your tongue, your intelligence? Which of these do you suppose is worth
your longing? But if each and all are to be despised, go forward to the final
act, to follow Reason, that is God. But to honour those other ends, to be
distressed because death will rob one of them, conflicts with this end.
32. What a fraction of infinite and gaping time has been assigned to every
man; for very swiftly it vanishes in the eternal; and what a fraction of the
whole of matter, and what a fraction of the whole of the life Spirit. On what
a small clod, too, of the whole earth you creep. Pondering all these things,
imagine nothing to be great but this: to act as your own nature guides, to
suffer what Universal Nature brings.
33. How is the governing self employing itself? For therein is everything.
The rest are either within your will or without it, ashes and smoke.
34. This is a stirring call to disdain of death, that even those who judge
pleasure to be good and pain evil, nevertheless disdain death.
35. For him whose sole good is what is in due season, who counts it all one
to render according to right reason more acts or fewer, and to whom it is no
matter whether he beholds the world a longer or a shorter time—for him
even death has lost its terrors.
36. Mortal man, you have been a citizen in this great City; what does it
matter to you whether for five or fifty years? For what is according to its
laws is equal for every man. Why is it hard, then, if Nature who brought
you in, and no despot nor unjust judge, sends you out of the City—as
though the master of the show, who engaged an actor,
were to dismiss
him from the stage? ‘But I have not spoken my five acts, only three.’ ‘What
you say is true, but in life three acts are the whole play.’ For He determines
the perfect whole, the cause yesterday of your composition, to-day of your
dissolution; you are the cause of neither. Leave the stage, therefore, and be
reconciled, for He also who lets his servant depart is reconciled.