Meditations VII.3

Empty love of pageantry, stage-plays, flocks and herds, sham-fights, a bone thrown to lap-dogs, crumbs cast in a fish-pond, painful travail of ants and their bearing of burdens, skurryings of scared little mice, puppets moved by strings.² Amid such environment therefore thou must take thy place graciously and not ‘snorting defiance,’³ nay thou must keep abreast of the fact that everyone is worth just so much as those things are worth in which he is interested.⁴

• 2.See ii. 2 etc.
• 3.Compare ix. 41 (Epicurus).

  Epicurus founded the Epicurean school, which held pleasure, understood as freedom from pain and disturbance, to be the goal of life; IX.41 records his account of how he conducted himself in illness.

• 4.v. 16. Compare Demosthenes’ Olynthiac iii. 32: ἅττα γὰρ ἂν τὰ ἐπιτηδεύματα τῶν ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, τοιοῦτον ἀνάγκη καὶ τὸ φρόνημα ἔχειν. Compare Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata iv. 23.

  Demosthenes’ third Olynthiac urges Athens to act against Philip of Macedon; the Greek, in translation: “whatever men’s pursuits are, such must their spirit be.”