Meditations XI.7

How clearly is it borne in on thee that there is no other state of life so fitted to call for the exercise of Philosophy as this in which thou now findest thyself.²⁰

• 20.Compare Lucan’s Pharsalia i. 493: “exeat aula qui vult esse pius”; Montaigne iii. 9 (Florio’s translation): “Plato saith that who escapes untainted and clean-handed from the managing of the world escapeth by some wonder.” See also above, viii. 1.

  Lucan was a Roman poet of Nero’s reign whose Pharsalia narrates the civil war between Caesar and Pompey; the Latin, in translation: “let him who would be righteous leave the court.”