Meditations XI.13

What if a man think scorn of me? That will be his affair. But it will be mine not to be found doing or saying anything worthy of scorn. But what if he hate me? That will be his affair.³¹ But I will be kindly and goodnatured to everyone, and ready to shew even my enemy where he has seen amiss, not by way of rebuke³² nor with a parade of forbearance, but genuinely and chivalrously like the famous Phocion,³³ unless indeed he was speaking ironically. For such should be the inner springs of a man’s heart³⁴ that the Gods see him not wrathfully disposed at any thing or counting it a hardship. What evil can happen to thee if thou thyself now doest what is congenial to thy nature, and welcomest what the Universal Nature now deems well-timed, thou who art a man intensely eager that what is for the common interest should by one means or another be brought about?

• 31.v. 25; Epictetus’s Discourses iii. 18, § 9; x. 32.
• 32.See xi. 18, § 9.
• 33.Marcus is probably thinking of Phocion’s last words, see Aelian, Historical Miscellany xii. 49: μηδὲν Ἀθηναίοις μνησικακήσειν ὑπὲρ τῆς παρ’ αὐτῶν φιλοτησίας ἧς νῦν πίνω (namely, the cup of hemlock); but Heylbut (Rheinisches Museum 39, p. 310) refers to a story in Musonius Rufus, p. 55, Hense’s edition.

  Phocion was an Athenian general and statesman, condemned and executed by the Athenians in 318 BC. Aelian compiled the Historical Miscellany, a collection of anecdotes; the Greek, in translation: “to bear the Athenians no grudge for the loving-cup from them which I now drink.” The Rheinisches Museum is a German classical journal; Otto Hense edited the remains of Musonius Rufus.

• 34.Compare St. Luke xi. 39: τὸ ἔσωθεν ὑμῶν—“the inward parts.”