Meditations VII.48

Noble is this saying of Plato’s.⁶⁰ Moreover he who discourses of men should, as if from some vantage-point⁶¹ above, take a bird’s-eye view of the things of earth, in its gatherings,⁶² armies, husbandry, its marriages and separations,⁶³ its births and deaths, the din of the law-court and the silence of the desert, barbarous races manifold, its feasts and mournings and markets, the medley of it all and its orderly conjunction of contraries.

• 60.What follows is obviously not a saying of Plato. We must therefore refer back to what precedes, or suppose that Plato’s words have dropped out.
• 61.ix. 30. Compare Lucian’s Charon § 15; Icaromenippus § 12.

  In both Lucian dialogues human affairs are surveyed from a height: in Charon by the ferryman of the dead and Hermes, in Icaromenippus by Menippus from the moon.

• 62.If κατὰ ἀγέλας be read, it will mean literally, drove by drove, that is, in its aggregations; if κάτω, ἀγέλας, the latter word must refer to gatherings of men.
• 63.This might mean treaties of peace, but there seems to be a system of contrasted pairs.