Meditations X.30

Does another’s wrong-doing shock thee? Turn incontinently to thyself and bethink thee what analogous wrong-doing there is of thine own,⁴² such as deeming money to be a good⁴³ or pleasure⁴⁴ or a little cheap fame⁴⁵ and the like. For by marking this thou wilt quickly forget thy wrath, with this reflection too to aid thee, that a man is under constraint⁴⁶; for what should he do? Or, if thou art able, remove the constraint.

• 42.See vii. 26; xi. 18, § 4.
• 43.Marcus had a horror of avarice; compare Vulcacius Gallicanus’s Life of Avidius Cassius viii. 5: in imperatore avaritiam acerbissimum esse malum. Yet he was accused of it and repudiated the charge (Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xxix. 5); and he is also exculpated by Dio’s Roman History (71. 32, § 3), and in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (i. p. 62) we find an Egyptian official expressly calling him ἀφιλάργυρος.

  Vulcacius Gallicanus is another of the purported authors of the Historia Augusta; the Latin, in translation: “in an emperor avarice is the bitterest evil.” The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are documents recovered from the site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; aphilargyros, “free from the love of money.”

• 44.See on v. 5.
• 45.See on iv. 19.
• 46.See vii. 63.