Meditations IV.48
Cease not to bear in mind how many physicians are dead after puckering up their brows so often over their patients; and how many astrologers after making a great parade of predicting the death of others;77 and how many philosophers after endless disquisitions on death and immortality; how many great captains after butchering thousands78; how many tyrants after exercising with revolting insolence their power of life and death, as though themselves immortal; and how many entire cities are, if I may use the expression, dead,79 Helice and Pompeii and Herculaneum, and others without number.
Turn also to all, one after another, that come within thine own knowledge. One closed a friend’s eyes and was then himself laid out, and the friend who closed his,80 he too was laid out—and all this in a few short years. In a word, fail not to note how short-lived are all mortal things, and how paltry—yesterday a little mucus,81 to-morrow a mummy or burnt ash. Pass then through this tiny span of time in accordance with Nature, and come to thy journey’s end with a good grace, just as an olive falls when it is fully ripe, praising the earth that bare it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.
- 77.iii. 3. Epictetus’s Discourses iii. 10, 15.
- 78.The same.
- 79.Lucian uses it, Charon 23.
In Lucian’s Charon, the ferryman of the dead and Hermes survey the world from a height; Hermes tells him that Nineveh has perished without a trace, that Babylon will soon be as hard to find, and that Mycenae and Cleonae are already ruins.
- 80.x. 34. This is invariably referred to ὁ μέν, “another closed his eyes,” but it must surely answer to τοῦτον.
- 81.See vi. 13.