Meditations X.23

Never lose sight of the fact that a man’s ‘freehold’³³ is such as I told thee, and how all the conditions are the same here as on the top of a mountain³⁴ or on the sea-shore or wherever thou pleasest. Quite apposite shalt thou find to be the words of Plato³⁵: Compassed about (by the city wall as) by a sheep-fold on the mountain, and milking flocks.

• 33.See v. 3, § 4.
• 34.See iv. 3, near the beginning; x. 15.
• 35.Plato’s Theaetetus 174 D: Ἄγροικον καὶ ἀπαίδευτον ἀπὸ ἀσχολίας οὐδὲν ἧττον τῶν νομέων τὸν τοιοῦτον ἀναγκαῖον γενέσθαι σηκὸν ἐν ὄρει τὸ τεῖχος περιβεβλημένον. It is not easy to see the application of the words here. Marcus seems to mean that the king in the midst of his royal city is no better off, ipso facto, than the shepherd in his mountain fold. It is the little “plot within him,” his ruling Reason that makes the difference. The use of ἐν ὄρει twice in this section appears to have a reference to its use in § 15.

  The Greek of Plato, in translation: “such a man must become no less boorish and uneducated than herdsmen, for lack of leisure, with his wall thrown round him like a fold on a mountain.” The man Plato describes is a king.