Meditations V.33
But a little while and thou shalt be burnt ashes or a few dry bones, and possibly a name, possibly not a name even.67 And a name is but sound and a far off echo. And all that we prize so highly in our lives is empty and rotten and paltry, and we but as puppies snapping at each other, as quarrelsome children now laughing and anon in tears. But faith and modesty and justice and truth Up from the wide-wayed Earth have winged their flight to Olympus.68
What then keeps thee here?—if indeed sensible objects are ever changing and unstable, and our faculties are so feeble and so easily misled; and the poor soul itself is an exhalation from blood69; and to be well-thought of in such a world mere vanity. What then remains? To wait with a good grace for the end, whether it be extinction or translation.70 But till our time for that be come, what sufficeth? What but to reverence the Gods and to praise them, to do good unto men and to bear with them and forbear,71 but, for all else that comes within the compass of this poor flesh and breath, to remember that it is not thine nor under thy control?
- 67.See viii. 25; xii. 27.
- 68.Hesiod, Works and Days 197. Compare Euripides’ Medea 439 and Lucian’s Nigrinus 16, who, speaking of Rome, says much the same of αἰδὼς and ἀρετὴ and δικαιοσύνη. See also Dio’s Roman History 71, 24, § 2.
Hesiod was an early Greek poet; in Works and Days 197–200 Shame and Retribution abandon mankind and go up to Olympus. In Euripides’ Medea the chorus sings that shame no longer remains in Greece but has flown up to the sky. The satirist Lucian’s three Greek words: “shame,” “virtue,” and “justice.”
- 69.vi. 15. Compare Tzetzes’ Chiliades vii. 803; viii. 223.
- 70.Marcus never seems to have made up his mind which it was to be. See iv. 21; viii. 25; xi. 3.
- 71.These two constituted for Epictetus the whole “Law and the Prophets”; see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights xvii. 19.
Aulus Gellius was a 2nd-century Roman writer whose Attic Nights is a miscellany of notes on language, literature, and philosophy; he reports Epictetus’s two-word summary of ethics, anechou kai apechou, “bear and forbear.”