Meditations 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.