Meditations VIII.25
Lucilla18 buried Verus, then Lucilla was buried; Secunda Maximus,19 then Secunda; Epitynchanus Diotimus, then Epitynchanus; Antoninus Faustina, then Antoninus. The same tale always: Celer20 buried Hadrianus and then Celer was buried. And those acute wits, men renowned for their prescience or their pride, where are they? Such acute wits, for instance, as Charax and Demetrius [the Platonist21] and Eudaemon, and others like them. All creatures of a day, dead long ago!—some not remembered even for a while, others transformed into legends,22 and yet others from legends faded into nothingness! Bear then in mind that either this thy composite self must be scattered abroad, or thy vital breath be quenched, or be transferred23 and set elsewhere.
- 18.The mother of Marcus, not as Gataker, Long, etc. the daughter.
George Long published an English translation of the Meditations in 1862. Marcus’s daughter Annia Lucilla was the wife and then the widow of Lucius Verus, which is why Gataker and Long took “Lucilla buried Verus” to refer to her; Haines takes the pair to be Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, and his father, Annius Verus.
- 19.See i. 15.
- 20.See Index II.
- 21.Arethas on Lucian’s On the Dance § 63 alludes to this passage, but Lucian’s Demetrius is the Cynic whom in Demonax § 3 he couples with Epictetus. (Compare also The Ignorant Book Collector § 19.) See Index II.
Lucian’s Demetrius is Demetrius the Cynic, a friend of Seneca who taught at Rome in the 1st century, a different man from the Platonist Marcus names.
- 22.See xii. 27.
- 23.Or, leave thee; but compare v. 33.