Meditations XII.24
Thou must have these three rules ready for use. Firstly, not to do anything, that thou doest, aimlessly,40 or otherwise than as Justice herself would have acted; and to realize that all that befalls thee from without is due either to Chance or to Providence, nor hast thou any call to blame Chance or to impeach Providence. Secondly this: to think what each creature is from conception till it receives a living soul, and from its reception of a living soul till its giving back of the same,41 and out of what it is built up and into what it is dissolved. Thirdly, that if carried suddenly into mid-heaven thou shouldest look down upon human affairs42 and their infinite diversity, thou wilt indeed despise them,43 seeing at the same time in one view how great is the host that peoples the air and the aether around thee; and that, however often thou wert lifted up on high, thou wouldst see the same sights, everything identical in kind, everything fleeting. Besides, the vanity of it all!
- 40.See iv. 2; viii. 17; ix. 28.
- 41.The living soul was supposed by the Stoics to be received at birth, see Opinions of the Philosophers (attributed to Plutarch) v. 15, and On Stoic Self-Contradictions 38; and for a reputed conversation on this subject between Marcus and the rabbi Jehuda, see Talmud, Sanhedrin 91 b (The Jewish Encyclopedia, Funk & Wagnalls, 1902).
The Opinions of the Philosophers is a summary of philosophical doctrines transmitted among Plutarch’s works. The Talmud passage (Sanhedrin 91b) records a conversation on when the soul enters the body between the rabbi Jehuda, usually taken to be Judah ha-Nasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, and an emperor it calls only “Antoninus”; Haines, citing The Jewish Encyclopedia, calls it a “reputed” conversation with Marcus, and which emperor is meant is uncertain.
- 42.See vii. 48; ix. 30.
- 43.Compare Lucian’s Charon (throughout). What Marcus means by ἐναέριοι and ἐναιθέριοι (or the neuters of these) is not clear. But compare Apuleius’s On the God of Socrates, about the middle, and his disquisition on δαίμονες; and the interesting parallel 2 Kings vi. 17.
Enaerioi, “beings of the air”; enaitherioi, “beings of the ether.” Apuleius’s On the God of Socrates is a treatise on daimones, beings intermediate between gods and men. In 2 Kings 6:17 Elisha’s servant is shown the mountain “full of horses and chariots of fire” (King James).