Book II
II.1¶Say to thyself at daybreak:1 I shall come across the busy-body, the thankless, the bully, the treacherous, the envious, the unneighbourly.2 All this has befallen them because they know not good from evil. But I, in that I have comprehended the nature of the Good that it is beautiful, and the nature of Evil that it is ugly, and the nature of the wrong-doer himself that it is akin to me, not as partaker of the same blood and seed but of intelligence and a morsel of the Divine, can neither be injured by any of them—for no one can involve me in what is debasing—nor can I be wroth with my kinsman and hate him. For we have come into being for co-operation, as have the feet, the hands, the eyelids, the rows of upper and lower teeth. Therefore to thwart one another is against Nature; and we do thwart one another by shewing resentment and aversion.
- 1.See v. 1.
- 2.Compare Seneca’s On Anger ii. 10.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and adviser to Nero. On Anger is his three-book treatise on the passion; at ii. 10 he argues that the wise man will not be angry with wrongdoers, since no one is born wise and error is common to all.
II.2¶This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breath and the ruling Reason. Away with thy books3! Be no longer drawn aside by them: it is not allowed. But as one already dying disdain the flesh: it is naught but gore and bones and a network compact of nerves and veins and arteries. Look at the breath too, what sort of thing it is; air: and not even that always the same, but every minute belched forth and again gulped down. Then, thirdly, there is the ruling Reason. Put thy thought thus: thou art an old man4; let this be a thrall no longer, no more a puppet5 pulled aside by every selfish impulse; nor let it grumble any longer at what is allotted to it in the present or dread it in the future.
- 3.Compare ii. 3.
- 4.Compare ii. 6; i. 17, § 6; Dio’s Roman History 71. 24, § 4. Marcus would be a little over 50. Contrast i. 17, § 6, and note. Cromwell when 51 writing from Dunbar says, “I grow an old man.”
Marcus was born in 121, so Haines’s “a little over 50” places this entry around 171–172. Cromwell was writing from Dunbar, where he defeated the Scottish army on 3 September 1650.
- 5.iii. 16; vi. 16, 28; vii. 3, 29; xii. 19. Compare Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata ii. 3; iv. 11.
Clement of Alexandria was a Christian theologian and teacher; the Stromata (“Miscellanies”) is his loosely organized work on the relation between Greek philosophy and Christian belief.
II.3¶Full of Providence are the works of the Gods, nor are Fortune’s works independent of Nature or of the woven texture and interlacement of all that is under the control of Providence. Thence6 are all things derived7; but Necessity too plays its part and the Welfare of the whole Universe of which thou art a portion. But good for every part of Nature is that which the Nature of the Whole brings about, and which goes to preserve it. Now it is the changes not only of the elements but of the things compounded of them that preserve the Universe. Let these reflections suffice thee, if thou hold them as principles. But away with thy thirst for books,8 that thou mayest die not murmuring but with a good grace, truly and from thy heart grateful to the Gods.
- 6.See vi. 36; xii. 26.
- 7.Referred to by Arethas on Dio Chrysostom’s Orations 32. 15 as πάντα ἄνωθεν ῥεῖ. Compare St. James, Epistle i. 17.
Arethas, a Cappadocian bishop of about 900, knew the Meditations and refers to it in marginal notes on Lucian; Haines’s Introduction attributes the similar notes on Dio Chrysostom, such as this one, “possibly” to him as well. The note quotes the passage as panta anōthen rhei, “all things flow from above.” Dio Chrysostom, the “golden-mouthed,” was a Greek orator and philosopher, not to be confused with the historian Cassius Dio. The epistle of James (1:17) has “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.”
- 8.See ii. 2.
II.4¶Call to mind how long thou deferrest these things, and how many times thou hast received from the Gods grace9 of the appointed day and thou usest it not. Yet now, if never before, shouldest thou realize of what Universe thou art a part, and as an emanation from what Controller of that Universe thou dost subsist; and that a limit has been set to thy time, which if thou use not to let daylight into thy soul, it will be gone—and thou!—and never again shall the chance be thine.
- 9.προθεσμία, literally “a time-limit for enforcement of claims after which they lapsed.”
II.5¶Every hour make up thy mind sturdily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with scrupulous and unaffected dignity and love of thy kind and independence and justice; and to give thyself rest from all other impressions. And thou wilt give thyself this, if thou dost execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last,10 divesting thyself of all aimlessness11 and all passionate antipathy to the convictions of reason, and all hypocrisy and self-love and dissatisfaction with thy allotted share. Thou seest how few are the things, by mastering which a man may lead a life of tranquillity and godlikeness; for the Gods also will ask no more from him who keeps these precepts.
- 10.§ 11; vii. 69; Seneca’s Epistles xii.
The Epistles are Seneca’s 124 letters to his friend Lucilius on Stoic ethics. The twelfth, on old age, urges that each day be ordered as though it were the last.
- 11.See §§ 16, 17; iv. 2.
II.6¶Wrong thyself,12 wrong thyself, O my Soul! But the time for honouring thyself will have gone by; for a man has but one life, and this for thee is well-nigh closed,13 and yet thou dost not hold thyself in reverence, but settest thy well-being in the souls of others.
- 12.Apparently a sarcastic apostrophe, which is not in Marcus’ usual manner.
- 13.See ii. 2.
II.7¶Do those things draw thee at all away, which befall thee from without? Make then leisure for thyself for the learning of some good thing more, and cease being carried aside hither and thither. But therewith must thou take heed of the other error. For they too are triflers, who by their activities have worn themselves out in life without even having an aim whereto they can direct every impulse, aye and even every thought.
II.8¶Not easily is a man found to be unhappy by reason of his not regarding what is going on in another man’s soul; but those who do not attend closely to the motions of their own souls must inevitably be unhappy.
II.9¶This must always be borne in mind, what is the Nature of the whole Universe, and what mine, and how this stands in relation to that, being too what sort of a part of what sort of a whole; and that no one can prevent thee from doing and saying always what is in keeping with the Nature of which thou art a part.
II.10¶Theophrastus in his comparison of wrong-doings—for, speaking in a somewhat popular way, such comparison may be made—says in the true philosophical spirit that the offences which are due to lust are more heinous than those which are due to anger.14 For the man who is moved with anger seems to turn his back upon reason with some pain and unconscious compunction15; but he that does wrong from lust, being mastered by pleasure, seems in some sort to be more incontinent and more unmanly in his wrong-doing. Rightly then, and not unworthily of a philosopher, he said that the wrongdoing which is allied with pleasure calls for a severer condemnation than that which is allied with pain; and, speaking generally, that the one wrong-doer is more like a man, who, being sinned against first, has been driven by pain to be angry, while the other, being led by lust to do some act, has of his own motion been impelled to do evil.
- 14.Here Marcus deviates from the strict Stoic doctrine, which allowed no degrees in faults.
Theophrastus was Aristotle’s successor as head of the Peripatetic school. The Stoic doctrine Haines refers to is the paradox that all wrong acts are equal, which Cicero sets out in his Stoic Paradoxes.
- 15.For συστολή compare Diogenes Laertius (Life of Zeno) 63, ἔλεος εἶναι πάθος καὶ συστολὴν ἄλογον.
Systolē, “contraction,” is the term the quoted passage uses in defining pity as “a passion and an irrational contraction.” Diogenes Laertius (probably 3rd century) wrote the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, whose seventh book covers Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, and his successors.
II.11¶Let thine every deed and word and thought be those of a man who can depart from life this moment.16 But to go away from among men, if there are Gods, is nothing dreadful; for they would not involve thee in evil. But if indeed there are no Gods, or if they do not concern themselves with the affairs of men, what boots it for me to live in a Universe where there are no Gods, where Providence is not? Nay, but there are Gods, and they do concern themselves with human things;17 and they have put it wholly in man’s power not to fall into evils that are truly such. And had there been any evil in what lies beyond, for this too would they have made provision, that it should be in every man’s power not to fall into it. But how can that make a man’s life worse which does not make the man worse?18 Yet the Nature of the Whole could not have been guilty of an oversight from ignorance or, while cognizant of these things, through lack of power to guard against or amend them; nor could it have gone so far amiss either from inability or unskilfulness, as to allow good and evil to fall without any discrimination alike upon the evil and the good. Still it is a fact that death and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and penury, do among men one and all betide the Good and the Evil alike, being in themselves neither honourable nor shameful. Consequently they are neither good nor evil.
- 16.above, § 5.
- 17.Compare Fronto’s On the Loss of a Grandson (Naber’s edition p. 233).
On the Loss of a Grandson is Fronto’s letter to Marcus on the death of his grandson, written near the end of Fronto’s life.
- 18.See iv. 8.
II.12¶How quickly all things vanish away, in the Universe their actual bodies, and the remembrance of them in Eternity, and of what character are all objects of sense, and particularly those that entice us with pleasure or terrify us with pain or are acclaimed by vanity—how worthless and despicable and unclean and ephemeral and dead!—this is for our faculty of intelligence to apprehend; as also what they really are whose conceptions and whose voices award renown; what it is to die, and that if a man look at death in itself, and with the analysis of reason strip it of its phantom terrors, no longer will he conceive it to be aught but a function of Nature,—but if a man be frightened by a function of Nature, he is childish; and this is not only Nature’s function but her welfare;—and how man is in touch with God and with what part of himself, and in what disposition of this portion of the man.
II.13¶Nothing can be more miserable than the man who goes through the whole round of things, and, as the poet19 says, pries into the secrets of the earth, and would fain guess the thoughts in his neighbour’s heart, while having no conception that he needs but to associate himself with the divine ‘genius’ in his bosom,20 and to serve it truly. And service of it is to keep it pure from passion and aimlessness and discontent with anything that proceeds from Gods or men. For that which proceeds from the Gods is worthy of reverence in that it is excellent; and that which proceeds from men, of love, in that they are akin, and, at times and in a manner,21 of compassion, in that they are ignorant of good and evil—a defect this no less than the loss of power to distinguish between white and black.
- 19.Pindar, Fragment (see Plato’s Theaetetus 173 E).
Pindar was a Greek lyric poet. The line survives because Plato quotes it in the Theaetetus, his dialogue on the nature of knowledge, in a digression describing the philosopher whose mind ranges over the depths of the earth and the heavens while ignorant of his neighbour’s affairs.
- 20.§ 17; iii. 6, 16. Compare Shakespeare, The Tempest ii. 1. 275: “Conscience, this deity in my bosom.” The δαιμόνιον of Socrates is well known.
The Shakespeare line is Antonio’s in The Tempest, dismissing conscience as a “deity” he does not feel. Marcus’s word here is daimōn, which Haines renders “genius”; Socrates’ daimonion, described in Plato’s Apology, was the inner divine sign that warned him against particular actions.
- 21.Marcus qualifies his departure from the strict Stoic view, for which see Seneca’s On Clemency ii. 4–6, where he calls pity pusillanimity, and says sapiens non miserebitur sed succurret. Marcus was far from a Stoic in this, see Herodian i. 4, § 2. See above, p. xiii.
On Clemency is Seneca’s treatise addressed to the young Nero; sapiens non miserebitur sed succurret, in translation: “the wise man will not pity, but will help.” Herodian was a Greek historian whose history of the emperors begins with the death of Marcus in 180. Haines’s “p. xiii” refers to a page of his own Introduction.
II.14¶Even if thy life is to last three thousand years or for the matter of that thirty thousand, yet bear in mind that no one ever parts with any other life than the one he is now living,22 nor lives any other than that which he now parts with. The longest life, then, and the shortest amount but to the same. For the present time is of equal duration for all, while that which we lose is not ours;23 and consequently what is parted with is obviously a mere moment. No man can part with either the past or the future. For how can a man be deprived of what he does not possess? These two things, then, must needs be remembered: the one, that all things from time everlasting have been cast in the same mould and repeated cycle after cycle, and so it makes no difference whether a man see the same things recur through a hundred years or two hundred,24 or through eternity: the other, that the longest liver and he whose time to die comes soonest part with no more the one than the other. For it is but the present that a man can be deprived of, if, as is the fact, it is this alone that he has, and what he has not a man cannot part with.
- 22.See iii. 10
- 23.Seneca’s Natural Questions vi. 32, near the end.
The Natural Questions is Seneca’s treatise on natural phenomena; its sixth book, on earthquakes, closes with reflections on the fear of death.
- 24.See xii. 36.
II.15¶Remember that everything is but what we think it. For obvious indeed is the saying fathered on Monimus the Cynic, obvious too the utility of what was said,25 if one accept the gist of it as far as it is true.
- 25.τῦφον εἶναι τὰ πάντα, Menander, Fragment 249, Kock’s edition (Diogenes Laertius vi. 3, § 2); Sextus Empiricus (Against the Logicians ii. 1) attributes the saying to Monimus.
Typhon einai ta panta, “all things are typhos”: literally “smoke” or “vapour,” and by extension delusion or empty conceit. Monimus of Syracuse was a Cynic philosopher and pupil of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope. Menander was the leading playwright of Athenian New Comedy, here cited by fragment number in Theodor Kock’s collection of the comic fragments; Sextus Empiricus was a physician and Skeptic philosopher, probably of the 2nd or 3rd century.
II.16¶The soul of man does wrong to itself then most of all, when it makes itself, as far as it can do so, an imposthume and as it were a malignant growth in the Universe. For to grumble at anything that happens is a rebellion against Nature, in some part of which are bound up the natures of all other things. And the soul wrongs itself then again, when it turns away from any man or even opposes him with intent to do him harm, as is the case with those who are angry. It does wrong to itself, thirdly, when it is overcome by pleasure26 or pain. Fourthly, when it assumes a mask, and in act or word is insincere or untruthful. Fifthly, when it directs some act or desire of its own towards no mark, and expends its energy on any thing whatever aimlessly and unadvisedly, whereas even the most trifling things should be done with reference to the end in view. Now the end for rational beings is to submit themselves to the reason and law of that archetypal city and polity27—the Universe.
- 26.Compare Euripides, Fragment 107: ὅταν γλυκείας ἡδονῆς ἥσσων τις ᾖ.
Euripides was the last of the three great Athenian tragedians; many of his plays survive only in fragments quoted by later writers. The line, in translation: “whenever someone is overcome by sweet pleasure.”
- 27.Aristides, Panegyric at Cyzicus § 427 (Jebb’s edition), ὁ γὰρ λογισμὸς αὐτῶν (Marcus and Lucius) θεῖος καὶ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἄνωθεν ἔχων τὸ παράδειγμα, καὶ πρὸς ἐκείνην ὁρῶν τὴν πολιτείαν.
The Greek, from Aristides’ speech at Cyzicus, reads: “For their reasoning is divine, and truly has its pattern from above, and looks toward that polity.” “Their” refers to Marcus and Lucius Verus as joint emperors.
II.17¶Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perception dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In a word all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. What then is it that can help us on our way? One thing and one alone—Philosophy; and this consists in keeping the divine ‘genius’ within pure28 and unwronged, lord of all pleasures and pains, doing nothing aimlessly29 or with deliberate falsehood and hypocrisy, independent of another’s action or inaction; and furthermore welcoming what happens and is allotted, as issuing from the same source, whatever it be, from which the man himself has issued; and above all waiting for death with a good grace as being but a setting free of the elements of which every thing living is made up. But if there be nothing terrible in each thing being continuously changed into another thing, why should a man look askance at the change and dissolution of all things? For it is in the way of Nature, and in the way of Nature there can be no evil. Written at Carnuntum.3031
- 28.See § 13.
- 29.See § 5, 16.
- 30.These words may very possibly be intended as a heading for Book III.
- 31.Now Haimburg in Hungary.
Carnuntum was a Roman legionary fortress on the Danube in Pannonia, east of Vienna, near the modern village of Petronell-Carnuntum. Haines’s “Haimburg” is the neighbouring town of Hainburg an der Donau, which in 1916 lay within Austria-Hungary.