Meditations X.10

A spider prides itself on capturing a fly; one man on catching a hare, another on netting a sprat, another on taking wild boars, another bears, another Sarmatians.²¹ Are not these brigands, if thou test their principles?

• 21.See Domaszewski’s plates in The Column of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza Colonna, 62. 102, for Marcus “taking Sarmatians”; and compare the story of Alexander and the Scythian, Quintus Curtius vii. 8.

  The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome’s Piazza Colonna is carved with a spiral frieze of his Danube campaigns; Alfred von Domaszewski published its reliefs. The Sarmatians were nomadic peoples north of the Danube, among them the Iazyges, against whom Marcus fought in the 170s. Quintus Curtius Rufus was a Roman historian of Alexander the Great; at vii. 8 Scythian envoys rebuke Alexander for making war on peoples who had done him no wrong.