Meditations III.1
We ought not to think only upon the fact that our life each day is waning away, what is left of it being ever less, but this also should be a subject for thought, that even if life be prolonged, yet is it uncertain whether the mind will remain equally fitted in the future for the understanding of facts and for that contemplation which strains after the knowledge of things divine and human. For if a man has entered upon his dotage, there will still be his the power of breathing,1 and digestion, and thought, and desire, and all such-like faculties; but the full use of himself,2 the accurate appreciation of the items3 of duty, the nice discrimination of what presents itself to the senses, and a clear judgment on the question whether it is time for him to end his own life,4 and all such decisions, as above all require well-trained powers of reasoning—these are already flickering out in him. It needs, then, that we should press onwards, not only because we come each moment nearer to death, but also because our insight into facts and our close touch of them is gradually ceasing even before we die.
- 1.vi. 16. Aristotle’s Problems i. 21: ὅπερ ἐν τῷ θώρακι ἀναπνοή, τοῦτο ἐν τῷ σώματι διαπνοὴ διὰ τῶν ἀρτηριῶν (arterial breathing).
The Problems is a collection of questions in natural science transmitted among Aristotle’s works. The Greek, in translation: “what breathing is in the chest, transpiration through the arteries is in the body.”
- 2.Compare Seneca’s Epistles 60: vivit is qui se utitur.
Seneca’s Latin, in translation: “he lives who makes use of himself.”
- 3.See vi. 26.
- 4.x. 8, § 3. The right of suicide was part of the Stoic creed (Zeno and Cleanthes both took their own lives). Marcus allows it when circumstances make it impossible for a man to live his true life (v. 29; viii. 47; x. 8. Compare Epictetus’s Discourses i. 24, § 20; i. 25, § 18). Hadrian (Justinian’s Digest 28. 3. 6, § 7) enumerates as causes of suicide taedium vitae, valetudinis adversae impatientia, iactatio (in the case of certain philosophers). Marcus himself, if Dio’s Roman History (71. 30, § 2) is to be trusted, threatened, in a letter to the Senate, to commit suicide, and according to Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus (xxviii. 3) actually hastened his own death by abstaining from food.
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, and Cleanthes, his successor as head of the school, were both said to have ended their own lives in old age. The Digest passage, on the validity of wills made by those who took their own lives, records Hadrian’s list of motives: taedium vitae, “weariness of life”; valetudinis adversae impatientia, “inability to bear ill health”; and iactatio, “display,” which Haines notes was said of certain philosophers.