Meditations IX.40
Either the Gods have no power or they have power. If they have no power, why pray to them56? But if they have power, why not rather pray that they should give thee freedom from fear of any of these things and from lust for any of these things and from grief at any of these things [rather] than that they should grant this or refuse that. For obviously if they can assist men at all, they can assist them in this. But perhaps thou wilt say: The Gods have put this in my power. Then is it not better to use what is in thy power like a free man than to concern thyself with what is not in thy power like a slave and an abject? And who told thee that the Gods do not co-operate with us57 even in the things that are in our power? Begin at any rate with prayers for such things and thou wilt see. One prays: How may I lie with that woman!58 Thou: How may I not lust to lie with her! Another: How may I be quit of that man! Thou: How may I not wish to be quit of him! Another: How may I not lose my little child! Thou: How may I not dread to lose him.59 In a word, give thy prayers this turn, and see what comes of it.
- 56.See vi. 44.
- 57.ix. 27. St. Paul, Romans viii. 26: τὸ πνεῦμα συναντιλαμβάνεται. Gataker very aptly quotes Augustine’s On the Grace of Christ i. 15: Cur petitur quod ad nostram pertinet potestatem, si Deus non adjuvat voluntatem?
Romans 8:26 has “the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities” (King James). Augustine’s Latin, in translation: “why is that asked for which lies in our own power, if God does not help the will?”
- 58.Seneca’s Epistles 10, near the end; Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece 50.
Seneca’s tenth letter closes with a saying of the philosopher Athenodorus: a man may know he is free of all desires when he asks the gods for nothing that he could not ask openly. The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem by Shakespeare.
- 59.Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xxi. § 3.
The passage records Marcus’s mourning for his seven-year-old son, Annius Verus, who died in 169.