Meditations XII.3
Thou art formed of three things in combination—body, vital breath, intelligence.8 Of these the first two are indeed thine, in so far as thou must have them in thy keeping, but the third alone is in any true sense thine.9 Wherefore, if thou cut off from thyself, that is from thy mind, all that others do or say and all that thyself hast done or said, and all that harasses thee in the future, or whatever thou art involved in independently of thy will by the body which envelopes thee and the breath that is twinned with it, and whatever the circumambient rotation outside of thee sweeps along, so that thine intellectual faculty, delivered from the contingencies of destiny, may live pure and undetached by itself, doing what is just, desiring what befalls it, speaking the truth—if, I say, thou strip from this ruling Reason all that cleaves to it from the bodily influences and the things that lie beyond in time and the things that are past, and if thou fashion thyself like the Empedoclean Sphere with its circle true in its poise well-rounded rejoicing,10
and school thyself to live that life only which is thine, namely the present, so shalt thou be able to pass through the remnant of thy days calmly, kindly, and at peace with thine own ‘genius.’11
- 8.ii. 2; iii. 16. Here πνευμάτιον = ψυχὴ (soul) in its lower sense, see Index III.
Pneumation, “little breath”; psychē, “soul.”
- 9.See x. 38.
- 10.viii. 41; xi. 12. Compare Horace’s Satires ii. 7, 95: in seipso totus teres atque rotundus.
The quoted line is from Empedocles, the 5th-century BC philosopher of Acragas, describing the Sphere, the perfectly unified state of the cosmos. Horace’s Latin, in translation: “whole in himself, smooth and round,” said of the Stoic wise man.
- 11.See ii. 13; iii. 5 etc.