Meditations XI.15

How rotten at the core is he, how counterfeit, who proclaims aloud: I have elected to deal straightforwardly with thee! Man, what art thou at? There is no need to give this out. The fact will instantly declare itself. It ought to be written on the forehead. There is a ring in the voice that betrays it at once, it flashes out at once from the eyes, just as the loved one can read at a glance every secret in his lover’s looks. The simple and good man should in fact be like a man who has a strong smell about him, so that, as soon as ever he comes near, his neighbour is, will-he nill-he, aware of it. A calculated simplicity is a stiletto.³⁵ There is nothing more hateful than the friendship of the wolf for the lamb. Eschew that above all things. The good man, the kindly, the genuine, betrays these characteristics in his eyes and there is no hiding it.³⁶

• 35.The word is Thracian for a native sword (Pollux, Onomasticon x. 38), as we might say a kukri. Here any concealed weapon to stab the unsuspecting.

  Marcus’s word is skalmē. Julius Pollux was a 2nd-century Greek lexicographer whose Onomasticon is a thesaurus arranged by subject. A kukri is the curved knife of the Gurkhas.

• 36.Compare Ecclesiasticus xix. 29: “A man shall be known by his look.”