Meditations VII.35

[From Plato.]⁴⁸ Dost thou think that the life of man can seem any great matter to him who has true grandeur of soul and a comprehensive outlook on all Time and all Substance? “It cannot seem so,” said he. Will such a man then deem death a terrible thing? “Not in the least.”

• 48.Plato’s Republic 486 A.

  In Republic 486 A Plato argues that a mind which contemplates all time and all being will not think human life a great thing. This is the first of a series of quotations running through VII.52, with a few reflections of Marcus’s own among them: passages of Plato, marked as such in Haines’s text, and lines of Euripides, several from lost plays that Haines identifies by fragment number.