Meditations I.16

From my Father,³⁰ mildness, and an unshakable adherence to decisions deliberately come to; and no empty vanity in respect to so-called honours; and a love of work and thoroughness; and a readiness to hear any suggestions for the common good; and an inflexible determination to give every man his due; and to know by experience when is the time to insist and when to desist; and to suppress all passion for boys.³¹

And his public spirit, and his not requiring his friends at all to sup with him or necessarily attend him abroad,³² and their always finding him the same when any urgent affairs had kept them away; and the spirit of thorough investigation which he shewed in the meetings of his Council, and his perseverance; nay his never desisting prematurely from an enquiry on the strength of off-hand impressions; and his faculty for keeping his friends and never being bored with them or infatuated about them; and his self-reliance in every emergency, and his good humour; and his habit of looking ahead and making provision for the smallest details without any heroics.

And his restricting in his reign public acclamations and every sort of adulation; and his unsleeping attention to the needs of the empire, and his wise stewardship of its resources, and his patient tolerance of the censure that all this entailed; and his freedom from superstition with respect to the Gods and from hunting for popularity with respect to men by pandering to their desires or by courting the mob: yea his soberness in all things³³ and stedfastness; and the absence in him of all vulgar tastes and any craze for novelty.

And the example that he gave of utilizing without pride, and at the same without any apology, all the lavish gifts of Fortune that contribute towards the comfort of life, so as to enjoy them when present as a matter of course, and, when absent, not to miss them and no one could charge him with sophistry, flippancy,³⁴ or pedantry; but he was a man mature, complete,³⁵ deaf to flattery, able to preside over his own affairs and those of others.

Besides this also was his high appreciation of all true philosophers without any upbraiding of the others, and at the same time without any undue subservience to them; then again his easiness of access and his graciousness that yet had nothing fulsome about it; and his reasonable attention to his bodily requirements, not as one too fond of life, or vain of his outward appearance,³⁶ nor yet as one who neglected it, but so as by his own carefulness to need but very seldom the skill of the leech or medicines and outward applications.

But most of all a readiness to acknowledge without jealousy the claims of those who were endowed with any especial gift, such as eloquence or knowledge of law or ethics or any other subject, and to give them active support, that each might gain the honour to which his individual eminence entitled him and his loyalty to constitutional precedent without any parade of the fact that it was according to precedent.

Furthermore he was not prone to change or vacillation, but attached to the same places and the same things; and after his spasms of violent headache he would come back at once to his usual employments with renewed vigour; and his secrets were not many but very few and at very rare intervals, and then only political secrets; and he shewed good sense and moderation in his management of public spectacles, and in the construction of public works, and in congiaria³⁷ and the like, as a man who had an eye to what had to be done and not to the credit to be gained thereby.

He did not bathe at all hours; he did not build for the love of building; he gave no thought to his food, or to the texture and colour of his clothes, or the comeliness of his slaves. His robe came up from Lorium, his country-seat in the plains, and Lanuvium supplied his wants for the most part. Think of how he dealt with the customs’ officer at Tusculum when the latter apologized, and it was a type of his usual conduct.

There was nothing rude in him, nor yet overbearing or violent nor carried, as the phrase goes, “to the sweating state”; but everything was considered separately, as by a man of ample leisure, calmly, methodically, manfully, consistently. One might apply to him what is told of Socrates,³⁸ that he was able to abstain from or enjoy those things that many are not strong enough to refrain from and too much inclined to enjoy. But to have the strength to persist in the one case and be abstemious in the other³⁹ is characteristic of a man who has a perfect and indomitable soul, as was seen in the illness of Maximus.

• 30.Here Pius, his adoptive father, is meant, not as above (i. 2) his father Verus. For a first sketch of this eulogy of Pius see below vi. 30.

  Antoninus Pius was emperor from 138 to 161; at Hadrian’s direction he adopted Marcus in 138, and Marcus succeeded him. The distinction Haines draws is marked in the Greek, where I.2 has ho gennēsas, “the one who begot me,” and this section ho patēr, “the father.” VI.30 is a shorter portrait of Pius, in which Marcus urges himself to act in everything as Antoninus’s disciple.

• 31.It is not quite clear whether this means that Pius had put away this vice from himself or others, but the active verb seems rather to favour the latter view. Capitolinus’s Life of Pius ii. 1 calls him clarus moribus (compare also Aurelius Victor’s On the Caesars xv.), but Julian says he was σώφρων οὐ τὰ ἐς Ἀφροδίτην.

  Capitolinus calls Pius clarus moribus, “distinguished in character.” Aurelius Victor was a Latin historian whose On the Caesars is a short history of the emperors. Julian, emperor from 361 to 363, wrote the satire The Caesars, in which the gods judge past emperors; there he calls Pius sōphrōn ou ta es Aphroditēn, “temperate, but not in matters of love.”

• 32.Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, iii. 20; v. 44.
• 33.Compare St. Paul, 2 Timothy iv. 5.

  In 2 Timothy 4:5 Paul tells Timothy to “watch thou in all things” (King James); the Greek verb is nēphe, literally “be sober,” the phrase Haines uses here in translating Marcus.

• 34.Literally, that he was a “home-bred slave,” that is, impudent.

  Marcus’s word is ouernaklos, a Greek spelling of the Latin vernaculus, from verna, a slave born in the household.

• 35.Julian calls Marcus τετράγωνος—“a man foursquare.”

  Marcus’s own word here is teleios, which Haines renders “complete.” The parallel is from Julian’s The Caesars, where Dionysus describes Marcus, quoting the poet Simonides, as “four-square and made without a flaw”; Julian’s word is tetragōnos, literally “four-cornered.”

• 36.Capitolinus (Life of Pius xiii. 1) says he wore stays to keep himself upright in old age.

  Capitolinus, Life of Pius xiii. 1, says that Pius, tall and stooping in old age, had splints of lime-wood bound to his chest so that he could walk upright.

• 37.Literally, “distributions.” Compare Capitolinus’s Life of Pius iv. 9; viii. 11.

  A congiarium (from congius, a liquid measure) was a distribution of money or goods by the emperor to the people of Rome.

• 38.Xenophon’s Memorabilia I. 3, § 15. πολλοὶ would here seem = οἱ πολλοί.

  Xenophon’s Memorabilia (4th century BC) is his collection of recollections of Socrates. Haines’s Greek note reads polloi, “many,” here as equivalent to hoi polloi, “the many,” that is, most people.

• 39.The Greek may also mean “To be strong and to persist without excess in each case is characteristic,” and ἑκατέρῳ suits this better.