Meditations IV.19

He whose heart flutters for after-fame³⁰ does not reflect that very soon every one of those who remember him, and he himself, will be dead, and their successors again after them, until at last the entire recollection of the man will be extinct, handed on as it is by links that flare up and are quenched. But put the case that those who are to remember are even immortal,³¹ and the remembrance immortal, what then is that to thee? To the dead man, I need scarcely say, the praise is nothing, but what is it to the living, except, indeed, in a subsidiary way?³² For thou dost reject the bounty of nature unseasonably in the present, and clingest to what others shall say of thee hereafter.³³

• 30.See ii. 17; iii. 10; viii. 44; x. 34.
• 31.See iv. 33.
• 32.iv. 19, 51; xi. 18, § 5. The Greek word covers the meanings expediency, management, or means to an end. We use it in a sort of double sense in the expression economy of truth.

  The Greek word is oikonomia, literally “household management.”

• 33.Marcus is perhaps finding real fault with himself for caring so much what people said of him; see Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xx. 5; xxix. 5. But the reading is doubtful.