Meditations IX.3
Despise not death,8 but welcome it, for Nature wills it like all else. For dissolution is but one of the processes of Nature,9 associated with thy life’s various seasons, such as to be young, to be old, to wax to our prime and to reach it, to grow teeth and beard and gray hairs, to beget, conceive and bring forth. A man then that has reasoned the matter out should not take up towards death the attitude of indifference, reluctance, or scorn, but await it as one of the processes of Nature.10 Look for the hour when thy soul shall emerge from this its sheath, as now thou awaitest the moment when the child she carries shall come forth from thy wife’s womb.11
But if thou desirest a commonplace solace too that will appeal to the heart, nothing will enable thee to meet death with equanimity better than to observe the environment thou art leaving and the sort of characters with whom thy soul shall no longer be mixed up.12 For while it is very far from right to be disgusted with them,13 but rather even to befriend and deal gently with them,14 yet it is well to remember that not from men of like principles with thine will thy release be. For this alone, if anything, could draw us back and bind us to life, if it were but permitted us to live with those who have possessed themselves of the same principles as ours. But now thou seest how thou art driven by sheer weariness at the jarring discord of thy life with them to say: Tarry not, O Death, lest peradventure I too forget myself.15
- 8.But compare Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xxviii. 4 (of Marcus): mortem contemnens.
Capitolinus’s mortem contemnens: “despising death.”
- 9.See x. 36, § 2.
- 10.Compare Montaigne i. 19 (Florio’s translation): “The same way you came from death to life, returne without passion or amazement from life to death. Your death is but a piece of the world’s order, and but a parcel of the world’s life.”
Michel de Montaigne was a French essayist of the 16th century; John Florio translated his Essays into English. The chapter cited is titled “That to philosophize is to learn to die.”
- 11.Hardly a personal touch, as Vibia Aurelia, Faustina’s last child, was born in 166. Besides, ἔμβρυον has no article.
Haines’s second point is grammatical: embryon, “unborn child,” stands without the definite article, so the sentence speaks of any expected child rather than a particular one.
- 12.x. 36; Plato’s Phaedo 66 B.
In Phaedo 66 B Socrates describes the body as a hindrance to the soul’s pursuit of truth.
- 13.As Marcus himself often was. Compare v. 10; vi. 12; viii. 8.
- 14.See x. 4.
- 15.Compare the despairing echo of these words by General Gordon, who was a reader of Marcus, from Khartum: “There is nothing left for me to prevent me speaking evil of everyone and distrusting my dear Lord but death.”
Charles George Gordon, a British general, was killed at Khartoum in the Sudan when the city fell after a long siege by the forces of the Mahdi.