Meditations VIII.37

Does Pantheia³⁶ now watch by the urn of her lord, or Pergamus? What, does Chabrias or Diotimus by Hadrian’s? Absurd! And had they sat there till now, would the dead have been aware of it? and, if aware of it, would they have been pleased? and, if pleased, would that have made the mourners immortal? Was it not destined that these like others should become old women and old men and then die? What then, when they were dead, would be left for those whom they had mourned to do? It is all stench and foul corruption in a sack of skin.³⁷

• 36.Lucian (doubtful attribution) (Images §§ 10, 22) mentions Pantheia as the matchless concubine of τῷ μεγάλῳ βασιλεῖ χρήστῳ καὶ ἡμέρῳ ὄντι (meaning apparently Lucius Verus). Lucian (Nigrinus §31) speaks of οἱ κελεύοντες καὶ παραμένειν τινὰς οἰκέτας τοῖς τάφοις.

  Pantheia was the mistress of Lucius Verus, praised for her beauty and accomplishments in Images. The first Greek phrase, in translation: “the great king, who is good and gentle”; the second, from the satirist Lucian’s Nigrinus: “those who order some of their servants to remain at their tombs.”

• 37.Epictetus’s Fragments 94. Compare Diogenes Laertius, Life of Anaxarchus § 2; Life of Zeno of Elea § 5. Howell, Familiar Letters, viii. 2, 50, speaks of “this small skinful or bagful of bones.”

  Anaxarchus was a philosopher in the entourage of Alexander the Great who, being pounded to death in a mortar, is said to have told his executioner, “Pound the bag of Anaxarchus; you do not pound Anaxarchus.” Zeno of Elea (5th century BC), known for his paradoxes of motion, is said to have borne torture with similar defiance. Howell’s Familiar Letters is a collection of letters.