Meditations XI.21

He who has not ever in view one and the same goal of life cannot be throughout his life one and the same.⁷¹ Nor does that which is stated suffice, there needs to be added what that goal should be. For just as opinion as to all the things that in one way or another are held by the mass of men to be good is not uniform, but only as to certain things, such, that is, as affect the common weal, so must we set before ourselves as our goal the common and civic weal. For he who directs all his individual impulses towards this goal will render his actions homogeneous and thereby be ever consistent with himself.⁷²

• 71.Compare Dio’s Roman History 71. 34, § 5: ὅμοιος διὰ πάντων ἐγένετο καὶ ἐν οὐδενὶ ἠλλοιώθη. Aristides, To the King § 113 (Jebb’s edition), says he was ὁ αὐτὸς διὰ τέλους.

  The historian Dio’s Greek, in translation: “he was the same in all things and in nothing changed”; Aristides’: “the same to the end.”

• 72.See i. 8.