Meditations XII.36
Man, thou hast been a citizen in this World-City,73 what matters it to thee if for five years or a hundred? For under its laws equal treatment is meted out to all. What hardship then is there in being banished from the city, not by a tyrant or an unjust judge but by Nature who settled thee in it? So might a praetor who commissions a comic actor, dismiss him from the stage. But I have not played my five acts, but only three. Very possibly, but in life three acts count as a full play.74 For he, that is responsible for thy composition originally and thy dissolution now, decides when it is complete. But thou art responsible for neither. Depart then with a good grace, for he that dismisses thee is gracious.
- 73.See ii. 16; iii. 11; iv. 4.
- 74.iii. 8; xi. 1; Epictetus’s Manual 17.
The image is of a praetor, one of the senior magistrates of Rome, dismissing a comic actor he has engaged before the actor has played his five acts. The seventeenth chapter of Epictetus’s Manual compares a man to an actor in a play, whose part, long or short, is chosen by the author.