Meditations VI.42
We are all fellow-workers towards the fulfilment of one object, some of us knowingly and intelligently, others blindly; just as Heraclitus, I think, says that even when they sleep men are workers and fellow-agents in all that goes on in the world.53 One is a co-agent in this, another in that, and in abundant measure also he that murmurs and seeks to hinder or disannul what occurs. For the Universe had need of such men also. It remains then for thee to decide with whom thou art ranging thyself. For He that controls the Universe will in any case put thee to a good use and admit thee to a place among his fellow-workers and coadjutors. But see that thou fill no such place as the paltry and ridiculous line in the play which Chrysippus mentions.54
- 53.Compare iv. 46. But Plutarch in his treatise On Superstition cites a saying of Heraclitus to the effect that sleepers live in a world of their own.
Plutarch’s On Superstition cites Heraclitus’s saying that those awake share one common world, while each sleeper turns aside into a world of his own.
- 54.Plutarch (On Common Conceptions Against the Stoics §§ 13, 14) vigorously denounces this sophism, as he counts it, of Chrysippus that what is evil in itself has a value as a foil to the good. He quotes Chrysippus (Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, Physics fragment 1181): ὥσπερ γὰρ αἱ κωμωδίαι ἐπιγράμματα γελοῖα φέρουσιν ἃ καθ’ ἑαυτὰ μέν ἐστι φαῦλα, τῷ δὲ ὅλῳ ποιήματι χάριν τινα προστίθησιν, οὕτως ψέξειας ἂν αὐτὴν ἐφ’ ἑαυτῆς τὴν κακίαν· τοῖς δὲ ἄλλοις οὐκ ἄχρηστός ἐστιν.
Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions Against the Stoics is a polemic on Stoic doctrine; Hans von Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta is the standard collection of the fragments of the early Stoics. The Greek, in translation: “for as comedies contain ridiculous lines which are bad in themselves but lend a certain grace to the whole play, so you might censure vice in itself, but it is not without use to the rest.”