Meditations VII.31
Make thy face to shine with simplicity and modesty and disregard of all that lies between virtue and vice. Love human-kind. Follow God.42 Says the Sage: All things by Law, but in very truth only elements. And it suffices to remember that all things are by law: there thou hast it briefly enough.43
- 42.1 Peter ii. 17. Compare Seneca’s On the Happy Life 15: Deum sequere. Dio Chrysostom’s Orations ii. 98, Reiske’s edition.
1 Peter 2:17 has “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (King James). Seneca’s Deum sequere: “follow God.”
- 43.The reading and meaning are uncertain. The Sage is Democritus, and we should expect atoms rather than elements to be mentioned. Leopold aptly quotes Sextus Empiricus’s Against the Mathematicians vii. 35: νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν, νόμῳ θερμόν νόμῳ ψυχρόν . . . ἐτεῇ δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν. Fournier cleverly makes a hexameter of the words πάντα νομίστ’, ἐτεῇ δὲ μόνα στοιχεῖα <κενόν τε>.
J. H. Leopold edited the Greek text of the Meditations for the Clarendon Press. The Greek from Sextus Empiricus, in translation, quotes Democritus: “by convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold . . . but in reality atoms and void.” Fournier’s hexameter, in translation: “all things are by convention, but in reality only elements and void.”