Meditations XI.30

’Tis not for thee, a slave, to reason why.⁷⁸

• 78.It is not clear whether λόγος here means speech or reason or both. The citation, of which the author is not known, has no obvious application; still less has the following quotation from Homer.

  Sections XI.30 through XI.39 are quotations rather than Marcus’s own reflections. Haines’s footnotes identify a line from Homer’s Odyssey (XI.31) and one from Hesiod’s Works and Days (XI.32); the sayings at XI.33–38 come from Epictetus’s Discourses, sometimes named and sometimes not, and “quoted, not verbatim”; the saying of Socrates at XI.39 is “only found here.”