Meditations V.12

What are counted as good things in the estimation of the many thou canst gather even from this. For if a man fix his mind upon certain things as really and unquestionably good, such as wisdom, temperance, justice, manliness, with this preconception in his mind he could no longer bear to listen to the poet’s, By reason of his wealth of goods; for it would not apply. But, if a man first fix his mind upon the things which appear good to the multitude, he will listen and readily accept as aptly added the quotation from the Comic Poet. In this way even the multitude have a perception of the difference. For otherwise this jest would not²⁹ offend and be repudiated, while we accept it as appropriately and wittily said of wealth and of the advantages which wait upon luxury and popularity. Go on, then, and ask whether we should prize and count as good those things, with which first fixed in our mind we might germanely quote of their possessor, that for his very wealth of goods he has no place to ease himself in.³⁰

• 29.Namely, as in the case of things really good.
• 30.From Menander, Fragment 530, Kock’s edition. The substitution of πτύσῃ for χέσῃ would mitigate the coarseness of the phrase, and we might then compare Diogenes Laertius, Life of Diogenes 6 and Life of Aristippus 4, passages in which we are told that the philosopher being taken to a magnificent house where spitting was forbidden spat in his host’s face, explaining that he could find no other place.

  Haines’s “ease himself” softens Marcus’s verb, chesē, “relieve himself”; his suggested reading would replace it with ptysē, “spit,” which is the verb in the anecdote he then cites.