Meditations VI.2
Make no difference in doing thy duty2 whether thou art shivering or warm, drowsy3 or sleep-satisfied, defamed or extolled, dying or anything else. For the act of dying too is one of the acts of life.4 So it is enough in this also to get the work in hand done well.5
- 2.See vi. 22.
- 3.Galen (Kühn’s edition, volume 14 page 3) says of Marcus that, owing to the theriac which he prescribed him, συνέβαινεν αὐτῷ νυστάζειν καρωδῶς ἐν ταῖς ὁσημέραις πράξεσιν.
The Galen passage concerns the theriac he prepared for Marcus; the Greek, in translation: “it happened that he dozed heavily in his daily business.”
- 4.Compare Seneca’s Epistles 77, near the end: Unum ex vitae officiis, mori.
Seneca’s Latin, in translation: “dying is one of the duties of life.”
- 5.A saying of the “Wise Men.” See Suidas. Compare Lucian’s Necyomantia 21. It was a trait of Marcus, Dio’s Roman History 71. 26, § 4.
The “Wise Men” are the Seven Sages of archaic Greece, to whom a set of maxims was traditionally attributed. “Suidas” is the older name for the Suda, once taken to be the name of its author. In Lucian’s Necyomantia, Menippus visits the underworld, where Tiresias advises him that the best life is the ordinary one, attending well to what is at hand.