Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Translated by Aaron Poochigian

For my father, the philosopher Donald Poochigian (1943–2017)

Introduction

The emperor Marcus Aurelius spent most of the last decade of his life (170–180 AD) waging war. In 166 AD Germanic tribes invaded Roman territory in Upper Pannonia at the northeastern edge of the empire (roughly Austria today). The Marcomannic Wars (166–180 AD) that ensued kept Marcus away from Rome for years at a time.¹ This decade of conflict also was the one in which he wrote most, if not all, of the philosophical notebook we know as Meditations.

Headings that likely belong to Marcus’ original manuscript set the composition of two of the twelve books (2 and 3) at specific military outposts: the first, a garrison on a tributary of the Danube and the second, the Roman fortress of Carnuntum, the capital of Upper Pannonia. The war seeps into the text in other places as well. Marcus at one point describes a perfected soul as an “impregnable mental fortress.”² He also likens life to “fighting in a foreign war”³ and gives us scenes of a siege and hacked-off body parts.

Against the background of the horrors of war, Marcus continued his regular practice of Stoicism in pursuit of its great goal: living in harmony with Nature, which runs the universe. We can imagine him residing in tents and other temporary structures during this time and stealing some brief interval to add to his notebook in the morning before waging war or in the evening after war had been waged. In several entries Marcus tells himself to repeat set speeches mentally on first waking. This suggests he had a morning practice.⁴ The sessions may well have involved a sort of meditation. He exhorts himself to retreat inwardly as often as he can.

What has most attracted readers to Meditations has traditionally been the inner work Marcus does in the entries. One can’t help but take the “you” that he is addressing (himself) as referring to oneself. Presented in often brief, digestible chunks, Meditations lends itself to daily efforts toward self-improvement. Like contemporary readers, the readers of antiquity were drawn to the me-focused instructions that it contains. An anonymous poem about Meditations from the late first millennium AD shows that the work held therapeutic appeal in the distant past as well: To overcome whatever pain you feel

open this blessed book and read it well.

You will discover rich rules that pertain to what will be, what is, and what has been and learn that passing pleasures, like heartache, have no more substance than a wisp of smoke.⁵

Marcus makes clear, though, that the primary objective of all the inner work is service to one’s fellow humans.⁶ The friendliness and beneficence that human beings owe each other is in fact built into the fabric of the Stoic universe.

Like other philosophers before him,⁷ Marcus ranks the forms of existence in a hierarchy. At the bottom are inanimate, material things, then come plants, then animals, then human beings—the “rational animals.” In this scheme inferior classes of existences are designed to serve those above them. Thus, say, horses are designed to serve human beings, and oats, in turn, are designed to serve horses (and other higher sorts of beings). We human beings, however, are different from the inferior existences. We are designed to serve each other.⁸

This duty arises from our membership in a pan-human ethical community: the human commonwealth (koinōnia), literally “the commonality.” We fulfill our duties to it both when we help others individually and when we work to benefit whole groups through policies and political actions. In the same way as a particular state has laws to hold it together, the human commonwealth operates in terms of universal principles of justice. Seneca and Epictetus, the two major Stoic thinkers closest in time to Marcus, even describe human beings as having dual citizenship in the human commonwealth and their home countries. Marcus makes that status explicit for himself: In so far as I am the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, my home city is Rome. In so far as I am a human being, my home city is the world. What benefits these two cities—that alone is the good I pursue.⁹

Marcus goes on to take relations with his fellow citizens of the human commonwealth a step further. Through the Stoic practice of “identification” (oikeiōsis, from the Greek word oikos for “house”), he works not just toward seeing others as his compatriots but toward “making himself at home” with them so that they become as close to him as family.

Given the service Marcus sees human beings as owing each other, the wars he waged may seem at first blush to be at odds with his principles. Stoicism, however, is not necessarily opposed to war. In her book Stoic Warriors the scholar Nancy Sherman explains that, though strong emotions are normally anathema to Stoics, “anger that can arouse a bit of shame or humiliation may bring out a fighting spirit that otherwise lies dormant.”¹⁰ What’s more, the Stoic authority Epictetus maintains that one’s occupational and philosophical obligations should be in a harmonious relationship with each other.¹¹ Marcus was scrupulously dutiful while he was emperor, and waging war was one of his imperial duties. There’s also the fact that the prolonged clash with the Germanic tribes was defensive, not a war of conquest. Finally, he would have seen his enemies as “savages,” anyway.¹² Worse than “barbarians” (barbaroi), they are apanthrōpoi, that is, “those outside of humanity.”¹³

In Marcus’ conception, people banish themselves from the human commonwealth when they act antisocially, and aggression certainly counts as antisocial.¹⁴ He stresses that the separation is a reflexive act: We are the ones who cut ourselves out of the pan-human community “by hating and spurning” a fellow human being.¹⁵ Fortunately Zeus in his beneficence has bestowed the option of reattachment upon us. We can graft ourselves back onto the tree of humanity as soon as we let go of what caused the severance. Savages, however, have forgone any possible reintegration into humanity. They are explicitly no longer human and thus devoid of the rationality that humans share.¹⁶ One’s duty to serve the human commonwealth would not apply to them. In one entry, in fact, Marcus compares his enemies the Sarmatians, ancient Iranian allies of the Germanic tribes, to animals that humans hunt as game.¹⁷

A revolt that broke out in 175 AD during the Marcomannic Wars gives us the opportunity to see Marcus react to aggression shown not by savages, but by a Roman citizen, someone he would have considered a friend. Avidius Cassius, a general serving in the province of Syria Palestina, announced in April of 175 AD that he had heard reports that Marcus had died of what historians call “the Antonine plague,” likely smallpox. It was ubiquitous in the empire at the time. Avidius proclaimed himself emperor on the alleged basis of the support of the soldiers.

In a speech before the troops serving with him on the northeastern frontier, Marcus announced that he wanted to be merciful to Avidius. One source portrays him as saying that the “greatest prize of war and victory” is “to forgive one who has wronged you, to continue being friends with one who has transgressed against friendship and to remain faithful to one who has broken faith.”¹⁸ Marcus was ready to act, it seems, on his beliefs that no one intentionally does wrong and that the best way to deal with a wrongdoer is to teach them the error of their ways. Despite his good intentions, the revolt came to a violent end: A soldier killed Avidius and brought Marcus his head as proof of death. Still, the evidence suggests that Marcus, in accordance with his principles, sincerely aspired to forgive Avidius.

After years of leading legions in war, Marcus’ health started to deteriorate in 180 AD when he was fifty-eight. He fell ill at Vindobona (Vienna) and was brought to Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia today), where he had resided between campaigns. As if in acceptance of the inevitable, he hastened his death by rejecting food and liquids.¹⁹ In Meditations Marcus repeatedly argues that “dying is just one of the things we have to do in this life,”²⁰ and that it should be done “nonchalantly.”²¹ In the final entry of Meditations, fittingly concerned with death, Marcus writes that you should “leave life contentedly” because “what is releasing you is itself content.”²² One should model one’s deathbed behavior on that of Nature. He seems to have practiced what he preached.

When Marcus passed, someone, perhaps a secretary, chose to preserve his private philosophical notebook. This original was then copied and recopied by scribes down through the centuries. What we know as Meditations is based on six manuscripts that have survived until our own day, one almost complete and five containing excerpts.²³

The first chapter, or “book,” in the notebook is different from the eleven that follow. Marcus uses it to give thanks to exemplary people in his life and, in the final entry, to the gods. Though we can’t be certain this material came first in Marcus’ original manuscript, it works very well as an extended dedication. The remaining books consist of notebook entries that range in length from curt single sentences to expansive, itemized disquisitions. Some entries are polished and elegantly arranged; some are brusquely au naturel. They capture Marcus’ thoughts both in the moment and upon reflection.

Meditations is far from being a philosophical treatise that progresses in a linear way. The concepts that Marcus discusses surface and resurface unpredictably. They do recur with some frequency, and some readers have accused Meditations of being repetitive. That charge, however, betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the work.

First off, the entries in it are a record of Marcus’ personal day-to-day practice of Stoicism. One should remember that he is trying to incorporate the principles he is discussing into his life. Throughout Meditations he is training himself to see the world in a specifically Stoic way in order to achieve the greater goal of living in harmony with Nature. Understanding the principles of Stoicism is one thing; living by them is another. The latter takes a lot of correction and habituation. From that perspective, repetition is as essential to Meditations as the repetition of poses is in a yoga practice.

Secondly, apart from a few quotes from Euripides and other authors,²⁴ Marcus doesn’t repeat sentences verbatim. The overarching stylistic mode of Meditations as it has come down to us is theme and variation. Motifs combine with other motifs in different contexts. For models of this mode, one should look not to philosophy but music. The first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance, an example of the sonata-allegro form, develops its themes with a similar richness.

When it comes to Meditations, Marcus has tended to be treated as a philosopher, a thinker, alone. This book aims to highlight his work as a literary artist, too. He received extensive training in Latin and Greek rhetoric under the guidance of Fronto and Herodes Atticus, two of the most prominent stylists of his day. His assignments consisted of writing prose and verse in a variety of voices and from varying perspectives.

The notebook entries show great range. Marcus indulges in wordplay and artful syntactic arrangements. Paradox appeals to him, and he utters addresses to his own soul and to Nature through the highly rhetorical figure of apostrophe. In one entry he even “transfuses” a human being and an olive by enduing the latter with human capacities. His tonal jolts can be modernistic: Everything is as familiar and unsurprising as a rose in spring and ripe fruit in autumn, even disease, death, slander, betrayal, and the many things that thrill and trouble the ignorant.²⁵

He can wield words with violence and in one entry expresses admiration for Greek Old Comedy with its withering travesties of public figures. His own frequent critiques of different types of people range in tone from the gentler satire of Horace to the more savage sort written by Juvenal.

Marcus freely colors his arguments and injunctions with similes and metaphors. Some scenes and images recur, resulting in cycles of imagery involving such things as wrestling, a river, and the stars. Scenes involving actors, for instance, pop up with varying significance. While they are held up as models of dishonesty and affectation in some entries, they serve as representative performers on the stage of life in others. The range of images Marcus deploys comes from both the classical literary tradition and his own experience.

Meditations is also rich in voices, imperious and querulous voices, voices that exalt and condemn. The great majority of the entries consist of a man exhorting himself. Two main speakers emerge from this reflexive enterprise: Marcus the instructor (or trainer) and Marcus the aspirant (or trainee).

The instructor’s job is to promulgate and inculcate principles. His commands and exhortations are addressed to a “you” (Marcus the aspirant). Though generally gruff and blunt, the instructor can wax poetic at times. He guides the aspirant through exercises and provides him with speeches to be repeated mentally in certain situations. He calls the aspirant out for failing to develop and use the divinely bestowed capacities he has. He even gives him instructions pertaining to facial expression and deportment.

The aspirant does assert himself at times. He refers to himself as “I”²⁶ and is endearingly fallible. For example, he wants to sleep in late, but the instructor calls him out for this dereliction of duty. The aspirant challenges himself to be a good person and concern himself only with whether or not he is doing what his nature requires. The first person (“I”) facilitates a self-examination of his actions as they are unfolding and of his mind as it is receiving impressions from without: Am I doing something? Then what I am doing should be good for humanity in general. Am I experiencing something? Then I should accept it because it has come from the gods out of the causal power that weaves everything together.²⁷

In other entries the aspirant expresses confidence in his progress and even congratulates himself for so adjusting his assumptions that external situations are not disrupting him. The voice of the aspirant is the one closest to the “I” of a diary.

A third character, known to scholars as “the objector,” speaks up at times.²⁸ His voice is that of a mere straw man, a foil to the instructor’s. He whines, contests, and despairs. His purpose is to say something wrong or ask a naïve question so that the instructor can step in and correct or answer him. In entry 8.32 we can see the instructor and objector interacting: There isn’t a single person out there who can stop you from serving your actions’ purposes.

But something outside of me will get in the way.

No obstacle can keep you from acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom.

In addition to these voices, there are those of hypothetical orators and actors and of the many authors whom Marcus quotes. We hear from philosophers such as Heraclitus, Plato, and Diogenes the Cynic and poets such as Euripides, Pindar, and even Homer. Though the work of one man, Meditations is polyphonic.

Marcus took to philosophy young. At age twelve, in a gesture of early-adolescent hero worship, he adopted the ascetic dress and habits of a traditional Greek philosopher. When his immensely wealthy mother caught him sleeping on the ground, they compromised: He would sleep on a couch covered with animal hide.²⁹ Philosophy and the demands of family and empire contended in him for the rest of his life.

The years of his youth would have seen him studying at home under private tutors hired by his politically influential maternal step great-grandfather Lucius Catilius Severus, who placed a premium on education. This education involved writing exercises as well as the study of philosophy, other prose, and poetry. The goal was to make Marcus adept at rhetoric so that he would be an effective communicator in a political career. He writes of the tutors of his youth with fondness and devotion. Looking back on these years in later middle age, he expresses gratitude that he did not make much progress in poetry because it would, he claims, have become a distraction to him. Philosophy, though, was different: He took to it early on and never let go.

Marcus’ philosophical allegiance became distinctly Stoic at some point in his teens. He credits his tutor Rusticus with introducing him to Epictetus’ Discourses, a core Stoic text. A letter written by Marcus in his mid-twenties preserves his enthusiasm over reading the work of the Stoic Aristo of Chios (fl. 260 BC). He writes that Aristo’s words make him aware of his moral shortcomings, and he is disappointed and angry with himself for his lack of progress.³⁰ Some scholars see Marcus’ strong reaction to the work of Aristo as marking a “conversion” to Stoicism. This characterization may sound a bit too much like a quasi-Christian epiphany, but Marcus does exhibit a religious fervor for the doctrine he promulgates in Meditations.

Marcus continued to show a love for philosophy after his accession in 161 AD. Whereas the emperor Domitian had banished all philosophers from Rome in 93 AD, Marcus welcomed them, attended their lectures, and established four endowed chairs for the four main schools of philosophy, including Stoicism, in Athens. In a letter written to Marcus early in his reign (c. 162 AD), Fronto, a tutor and friend, gives expression to the tension in the emperor’s life between philosophical ambition and dynastic duty: “even if you did succeed in achieving the wisdom of [the Stoic sages] Cleanthes and Zeno, you would still have to wear, unwillingly, the imperial purple robe instead of a philosopher’s raw-wool tunic.”³¹ Fronto knew very well that Marcus, however diligently he discharged his duties as emperor, would rather have been free to be a philosopher.

When Marcus wrote Meditations in the 170s AD, Stoicism had been in existence for over 450 years. It emerged in Athens, which was a hot bed of philosophical innovation during the fourth and third centuries BC. The name Stoicism arose from its founder, Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), delivering his lectures in the Stoa Poikilē, or “Painted Colonnade,” in the main marketplace of Athens. Though his works have survived only in fragments, it is clear that he laid the foundations of Stoicism by arguing that happiness depends on harmonizing one’s will with the divine reason that runs the universe. He also divided Stoic thought into its three branches: ethics, logic, and natural science, which was called “physics” by the ancients because it concerns what “grows” (phyō) in a material sense. Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279–206 BC), a subsequent head of the Stoic school, built on and further systematized Zeno’s work. Like Zeno’s writings, his survive only in fragments gleaned from writers who quote or paraphrase him.

Stoicism proved popular in Greece and eventually in the Roman Republic and Empire. The Roman Seneca (c. 4–69 AD) wrote at length in Latin on Stoic psychology and the nature of virtue as well as on science and theology. His works have survived and provide a detailed example of Stoic theory and praxis. The major Stoic philosopher closest in time to Marcus was Epictetus (c. 50–135 AD). He was born a slave in Hierapolis, a city in what is now western Turkey. Eventually, freed from servitude in Rome in the late first century AD, he went on to lecture on Stoic philosophy there until the emperor Domitian’s banishment of all philosophers from the city in 93 AD. He spent the rest of his life giving lectures in the city of Nicopolis in Greece. Like Marcus, he focused on ethics and the happiness that a Stoic aspirant can achieve by properly reacting to experiences and controlling what is in one’s control.³² Marcus quotes and alludes to his writings more than to those of any other Stoic authority.

The purpose of Meditations is to train oneself to live in harmony with Nature, the great Stoic goal. Each entry is an attempt to inculcate a Stoic mindset and promote right behavior. Though Marcus is up on Stoic logic and science, he only brings in syllogisms and cosmology when they support some ethical point he is making. He moves easily and with great familiarity through the fully developed and systematized body of thought he inherited from his philosophical predecessors. The universe he describes, the Stoic universe, comes with an array of cosmic and mental powers and related phenomena.

First there is Nature, the living system of the universe. To the Stoic, there is nothing outside of it, so it is everywhere. Marcus describes it as a whole made up of subservient parts such as individual human beings and material objects. Though this gestalt is not fully personified in Meditations, Marcus does deem it worthy of prayer. Seen as a conglomerate, Nature is a perfect system. What it creates is good both for itself as a whole and for the individuals that make it up. It operates as change, everything from the change that movement causes to the transformation that we undergo at death. It is perpetually recycling decay into fresh creations.

Our duty to live in accordance with Nature means, among other things, accepting whatever it brings about for us in our lives. We should want to be in accord with it because it is fully good and does no harm to anyone or anything. If we think it has done harm, we are mistaken. Nature can, say, destroy your house with a tornado, but that’s not real harm. In Marcus’ strict construction of Stoic anti-materialism, all material things are equally irrelevant. The destruction of the house, an “object of indifference,” is neither good nor bad. Even one’s own death is neither good nor bad.

There is considerable overlap between Nature and two other prominent powers in the universe: the Logos and God. In fact, Marcus sees Nature, the Logos, and God converging into what are, ultimately, aspects of the same living cosmic order. Thus he explains that “for us rational animals, acting in accordance with Nature and acting in accordance with the Logos are the same thing.”³³

The Logos is, in essence, rationality actively causing the universe. It “pervades all matter”³⁴ and works in it in the same way that a consummate artist, one with full awareness of their craft, works in their preferred medium. Like Nature the Logos “contains no wrong, never does anything wrong and does no harm.”³⁵ What the Logos does do is provide benefits for existences in the universe, and these benefits are self-serving (in a positive sense) because they simultaneously further its own aims. Marcus describes the Logos as “bearing fruit” both for itself and everything else.³⁶

The Logos sets humans apart from the other species with a special status. We are rational animals, or “animals that contain the Logos” (logika zōia). This portion of the Logos within us, our “personal logos,” is what makes us self-aware, reflective, and intellectual.³⁷ Meant to be the guide for our behavior, it becomes invulnerable to pain and harm and rejects what is unworthy of its attention once we start using it correctly. This rationality within us is also what links us to the gods.

Stoics generally saw traditional Greco-Roman religion, polytheistic religion, as compatible with their beliefs. They understood Zeus and the other gods to be manifestations and aspects of Nature and the Logos. The great Stoic authority Chrysippus, in fact, identifies the cosmic order with a single male God: “the universe is itself God.”³⁸ Stoic writers regularly refer to him as “Zeus.” The poet Aratus (315–240 BC), for example, exclaims, “Our roads and markets are all full of Zeus. / Zeus fills our ports and fills the seas.”³⁹ Marcus in turn calls the whole universe “the city of Zeus.”⁴⁰

This Zeus, interchangeable with rational intelligence, has bestowed a portion of his rationality on us. Marcus the instructor explains: “Zeus has given each of us a bit of himself, a guiding spirit, to be our scout and chaperone. It is made of mind and the Logos, and you should do whatever it asks.”⁴¹ In this religious perspective our “guiding spirit” (daimōn) is what connects us to the greater rationality by connecting us to Zeus.

The bit of divinity in us guides our interpersonal relations as well as our mental operations. In traditional ancient Greek religion Zeus was, among other things, the god of hospitality and presided over guest-host relations. In Meditations his social role has expanded to include all human interactions. He is “the creator” of the human commonwealth and, in a special dispensation, has given us the power to rejoin it if we cut ourselves out of it with antisocial behavior.⁴²

Marcus does at times refer to “the gods” in the plural, and in those passages they are fragments of a greater divine rationality, which is summed up in Zeus. The other gods are rarely mentioned by name.⁴³ Marcus asserts unequivocally that they “do care about human affairs.”⁴⁴ One of the ways they help us is through Providence, that is, by always giving us what we need at the time we need it. Though Marcus rejects demonic possession and resurrection as superstition, he does believe that the gods communicate with us through dreams and oracles. He also believes that they reveal themselves in our experiences and assist us in answer to our prayers.

Marcus exhorts himself to pray for the well-being of a group or state rather than for material objects and personal success. If we do pray for ourselves, we should be asking for the ability to become more virtuous. He discourages covetous and personally protective prayer because supplicants will be disappointed if they end up not getting what they want. That disappointment would cause them to fall out of harmony with Zeus (and Nature). We should instead be embracing everything that happens even if it feels hard to take, because it contributes to the greater health of the universe as well as to the momentum and smooth operation of Zeus.⁴⁵

Zeus and the other gods have expectations for us, and we meet them by being at peace with our lot in life and by feeling and expressing gratitude to them.

When acknowledging that every human being contains a portion of the Logos, Marcus sometimes refers to it as one’s “guiding spirit” or “personal logos.” Most often, however, he calls it the “ruling power” (hēgemonikon). It is, along with our flesh and breath, one of the three things that make us up. It sets us apart from the nonrational species as rational animals. It is our most important component because, if cultivated properly, it will guide us to right living.

Our ruling power is in a state of disharmony with Nature when it is “a slave, a puppet tugged by selfish urges, a malcontent impatient with fate and the present moment or mistrustful of what will come.”⁴⁶ It should instead so control our assumptions and reactions that we refuse to entertain delusions. Once it can sustain that control, it will be an impregnable fortress. The ideal for a human being is to live in obedience to this inner portion of the Logos, and that means focusing on what really matters: virtuous action.

Occasionally, Marcus uses the word “soul” (psychē) in a way that encompasses our words “breath” and “mind.” He sees a soul as material and palpable, though not solid. We can feel it when we exhale a puff of air. Marcus assumes that souls take up space and are perishable. His conception then is quite different from the standard Western conception of a soul as immaterial and immortal. Furthermore, whereas many faiths see the soul as a link to the divine, it serves no such function in Meditations, where our ruling power is what connects us to the gods.

Despite the physicality of his conception of the soul, Marcus also regularly understands it to mean “mind” in the sense of a place in which thoughts, feelings, and impressions from the five senses occur. We should, he advises, evaluate ourselves independently of what the souls of others are thinking about us. A soul, in fact, commits an outrage against itself when it pegs its sense of self-respect on the thoughts that are in other people’s souls. People who focus on others’ souls and neglect their own can only be unhappy because they are dependent on what they cannot control instead of what they can. With the proper self-restraint, a soul can become “perfected and indomitable.”⁴⁷ When it does, it ignores sensual temptations, feels kindly toward all human beings and acknowledges, with gratitude, that everything with which it has been provided comes from the gods. It also becomes happy.

A final recurring character in Meditations is phantasia, a frequent inhabitant of the soul. It is the root of our word “fantasy.” Marcus uses phantasia to refer to a sensory impression that appears in a mind as well as to an irrational reaction to such an impression. The Stoics of antiquity recognized two types of mental impressions: those being received from a present external object and those that are stored from past experiences. They provide us with the cognitive material that our minds process.

In one passage Epictetus describes a phantasia as an involuntary imposition on one’s mind triggered by an external event.⁴⁸ He gives a peal of thunder as an example. The loud sound imposes itself on our consciousnesses. How we respond to it, however, is up to us. One could react with shock and cry out or refuse to “assent” to the impression, thus cutting off any emotional consequences the peal might have. Stoics train themselves to use their ruling powers to subject a phantasia to a conscious and rational vetting process that culminates in the rejection or acceptance of it.

Marcus also uses the word to refer to suspicious, even paranoid, mental images that arise in response to sensory impressions. He exhorts himself to erase these visualizations from his consciousness when he is in an emotionally charged situation: “Black out what you are imagining.”⁴⁹ A phantasia in your mind can lead to unwarranted malice or desire. The feelings it generates are similar to paranoia in that they have no sure basis in fact and demand a distortedly large amount of mental attention. Still worse, you can get lost in your own suspicions and become “a wanderer in what you are imagining.”⁵⁰ A phantasia can also prolong and intensify negative sensations by focusing one’s attention on them. It makes pain, for example, “smart more than it actually does.”⁵¹ In this sense, phantasia is distraction and self-deception. It leads us astray when we should stay focused on using everything “exactly as it deserves to be used.”⁵²

Marcus makes it easy to forget that the person inhabiting this conceptual universe was the most powerful person in the world at the time he was writing. Modesty and humility recur in his lists of desirable virtues, and he abhors all pomp and affectation. These aversions started young. When, at age sixteen, he was compelled to assume a place in the ranks of dynastic succession as the future emperor Antoninus’ adopted son, he was, we are told, “appalled rather than delighted.”⁵³ He moved from his childhood home to the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill with reluctance. In Meditations he expresses scorn for courts where one finds “bodyguards and showy clothing, candelabra, statues of so-and-so—all that kind of pomp.”⁵⁴ He warns himself against becoming “Caesarified” and extravagant.⁵⁵ His ideal court is one where the emperor can dress and behave like any other citizen without provoking comment.

Marcus’ scorn for bling has literary implications as well. Though he uses rhetorical structures very effectively to reinforce what he has to say, he rails against gratuitous, merely showy verbiage. His stated ideals for communication are straightforwardness and sincerity. This position fits with the larger purpose of Meditations. Seneca admiringly quotes the legendary philosopher Socrates as saying that the way one uses language is a reflection of one’s character.⁵⁶ Striving to perfect one’s prose style mirrors the greater effort to perfect one’s life.

Portrayals of Marcus in art, literature, and scholarship have tended to be polarized. He ends up either a saint or a prig. The film Gladiator (2000), for example, gives us an idealized portrayal of him as a beatific philosopher king. This is the Marcus who champions “the concept of a society in which people enjoy freedom of speech and equal standing before laws equal to all.”⁵⁷ In a biography that came out not long after the film, however, he is reduced to a callous killjoy.⁵⁸ Both of these portrayals, based on caricatures of tendencies in his personality, date back to antiquity.⁵⁹

This book strives to capture the human being who lived a life that fell between impeccable virtue and unfeeling Grundyism. What emerges is a person who, like us, is striving to use the time he has alive in the best way he can. Like us, he is forever negotiating between ideals and scruples, on the one hand, and what reality demands, on the other. The translation in this book does its best neither to sanitize nor sully Marcus’ Greek in the hope of conjuring up the man himself as he gives voice to his fervor, earnestness, and, at times, indignation.

It is remarkable that Meditations has enjoyed a meteoric rise from a handwritten manuscript that happened to be preserved 1,845 years ago to a full-fledged popular phenom. Whereas roughly 16,000 copies of it were sold in 2012, over 100,000 were sold in 2019. Its audience just keeps growing. Part of its popularity is due to a general American fondness for self-help. Unlike most self-help books, however, Meditations has crossed over from personal to professional use. Marcus’ Stoicism has a great deal in common with cognitive behavioral therapy, the approach that most therapists today take with their patients. Like Meditations, CBT involves making internal adjustments to one’s assumptions about the world. Marcus made that inner work part of his daily routine: Today I escaped from all “situations.” Or, rather, I cast them out. They weren’t outside of me, but down in my assumptions.⁶⁰

Step by step, Marcus moved himself closer to the ideal of living in harmony with Nature, and many thousands have traveled on the trail he cut. The human need for guidance is, it seems, perennial, and Meditations truly is a fully functional guide to living: It tells us how to relate to ourselves, others, and God (or the gods). There is a quaint irony in the fact that there is so much popular enthusiasm for a work that was originally just a man writing for himself with no thought that his words would outlive him.

1 Named after the tribe the Marcomanni, these wars were waged against a number of Germanic tribes and their Iranian allies, the Sarmatians.

2 See 8.48.

3 See 2.17.

4 The Stoic Seneca, in contrast, set aside time in the evening for a reflective retrospective of the day (On Anger, 3.36).

5 The Greek Anthology, 15.23. Arethas (roughly 860–939 AD), archbishop of Caesarea, also expresses enthusiasm for Meditations.

6 See 7.55 and 12.20.

7 See, for example, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.13, and On the Soul, 3.11.

8 See 4.3, 5.30, 7.55, 8.56, 8.59, and 11.18 and Cicero on Stoic philosophy in Concerning the Ends of Good and Evil, 3.62–64.

96.44; see also 11.21.

10 Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford University Press, 2005), 84.

11 Epictetus, Discourses, 1.4.17.

12 See 7.65.

13 For barbarians, see 7.48 and 9.30.

14 Seneca writes that obedience, not anger, is the proper virtue of the soldier (On Anger, 1.9).

15 See 11.8.

16 See 7.65. For a similar subhuman brute, see Epictetus, Discourses, 1.5.9. He calls him “worse than a corpse.”

17 See 10.10.

18 Cassius Dio, The History of Rome, 72.26.

19 Historia Augusta, “Marcus Aurelius,” 28.3.

20 See 6.2.

21 See 3.7.

2212.36. Given the fact that later hands edited Meditations, we cannot be certain that this entry was the last in the notebook Marcus left behind. It does provide a very fitting conclusion to the work.

23 For more on the textual history of Meditations, see the Translator’s Note.

24 Marcus, for example, quotes three passages by Euripides in 7.38, 7.40, 7.41, and again together in 11.6.

254.44.

26 Aspirant speaking with “I”: Book 1, 4.4, 4.23, 4.30, 5.4, 5.10, 5.13, 5.20, 5.25, 6.10, 6.21, 6.22, 6.32, 6.44, 7.5, 7.14, 7.15, 7.17, 7.20, 8.23, 8.39, 8.42, 8.43, 8.45, 8.56, 9.13, 10.6, 10.21, 10.24, 11.13, 12.4, and 12.28. He is the speaker of 48 of the 488 entries. The instructor very rarely refers to himself as “I.” He does so once to hedge an assertion with doubt (6.42), once to clarify his meaning (9.1), and once to challenge the aspirant (9.29).

278.23.

28 See 4.13, 4.49, 5.1, 5.28, 5.33, 6.27, 6.50, 8.1, 8.32, 8.47, 8.50, 11.18, and 12.5. A similar objector character recurs in Epictetus’ Discourses.

29 Historia Augusta, “Marcus Aurelius,” 2.6. The training encouraged sleeping on the ground and wearing animal hide.

30 Fronto, Ad Marcum Caesarem, 4.13. The letter appears in Haines, 1.214–218.

31 Fronto, On Eloquence, 1.12.

32 Epictetus, Discourses, 1.4.1.

33 See 7.11.

34 See 5.32.

35 See 6.1.

36 See 9.10.

37 See 11.1; see also Epictetus, Discourses, 1.1.4.

38 Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 1.39.

39 Aratus, Phaenomena, 2–4.

40 See 4.23.

41 See 5.27.

42 See 11.8.

43 Marcus mentions the sun god Helios in 8.19 and Clotho, the spinner of the yarn of Fate, in 4.34. Asclepius, the god of medicine, is used for the sake of comparison in 5.8. He reappears with Ceres, goddess of the grain, in a stock exemplum in 6.43. The Muses and Apollo serve as an extended metaphor in 11.18.

44 See 2.11.

455.8.

46 See 2.2.

47 See 1.16.

48 Epictetus, Fragments, 9.17.

49 See 7.29.

50 See 8.51.

51 See 7.64.

52 See 8.29.

53 Historia Augusta, “Marcus Aurelius,” 5.3.

54 See 1.17.

55 See 6.30.

56 Moral Letters, 114.1; quoted also by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.47.

57 See 1.14.

58 Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Da Capo Press, 2010), 23.

59 Historia Augusta, “Marcus Aurelius,” 1.1, 19.21, and 22.5.

609.13.

Translator’s Note

Meditations is a philosophical notebook the emperor Marcus Aurelius kept for purposes of personal improvement. He no doubt did not intend it to be published. The text of it was preserved, nonetheless, by some unknown hand and subsequently copied and recopied by scribes. All those manuscripts have now been lost to time except for one at the Vatican, which is almost complete, and five that contain excerpts. Printed editions have also been useful in reconstructing what Marcus wrote, with the first, that of Wilhelm Xylander (published in 1558), preserving the text of a complete manuscript that was subsequently lost.

There have been editorial accretions to the work over the centuries. To start with, the title Meditations dates only to the seventeenth century when it was used for the first English translation. In late antiquity the work, almost certainly untitled at first, is referred to only generally as a collection of exhortations. In the Byzantine era Arethas of Caesarea (c. 860–939), an archbishop and scholarly theologian, gave it the title Ethical Works Written to Oneself. Some subsequent manuscripts used that title or something similar. What’s more, the division of the work into twelve books and 488 numbered entries is very likely an editorial accretion. The insertions had to have been made sometime between the second and eleventh centuries because the work is described as consisting of twelve books in the Byzantine encyclopedia the Suda (c. 1000 AD). Still, the apparent randomness of the entries in books two through twelve suggests that the sequence of the material in them is, more or less, the way Marcus left it. If an editor had rearranged the work, he would likely have grouped related material together.

Many readers of Meditations in translation are surprised to learn that Marcus wrote it in ancient Greek instead of his native Latin. The Mediterranean, especially the eastern half, had been Hellenized, that is, “Greekified,” during and after the conquests of the Greek-speaking Alexander the Great (335–323 BC). In the Roman Empire of Marcus’ day, Latin tended to be used in civil and military government and for legal transactions. Ancient Greek was the dominant language for science, literature, and philosophy. The philosopher-poet Lucretius famously laments the comparative “poverty” of Latin.¹ There are roughly three times more words in ancient Greek. One could be more precise in it. Furthermore, the great authorities of Stoicism, Zeno, Chrysippus, and Epictetus, all wrote in ancient Greek. They developed a technical vocabulary. By writing in Greek, Marcus saved himself the trouble of having to find ways to translate it into Latin.

The ancient Greek language had several different chronological phases during its lifespan. Marcus wrote in a kind called Koinē (“Shared” or “Standard”) Greek. It was the Greek spoken all over the empire in his day and the Greek in which the New Testament was written. Marcus distinguishes himself from the apostles, however, by writing in a more classically rhetorical style.

For this translation I used the Greek text of A. S. L. Farquharson in The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.² It was Farquharson’s life’s work. Where I (rarely) prefer a variant reading, I mark it with an end note. This whole book is greatly indebted to R. B. Rutherford’s study The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,³ which shows so abundantly that the work is literary as well as philosophical.

Ancient Greek is far fonder of conjunctions (and, but, for, etc.) than English. To prevent what would have come off as a cluttered and overfussy style, I refrain from translating them when the context implies them. Given its range of meanings in Meditations, the word psychē can be tricky to translate. I stick to “soul” as often as good sense in English allows. Where “soul” wouldn’t work, I render it as “breath” or “mind” depending on the context. I have opted, upon reflection, to leave the word Logos untranslated. It has a distinct, technical meaning in Stoic writings that “reason” or “rationality” would not supply. I capitalize it, along with “Nature” and “Providence,” when it refers to the cosmic power. I have also coined the translation “the human commonwealth” for koinōnia. The word “society” or “community” would have less precisely conveyed what Marcus means by it: a pan-human sociopolitical republic.

Much of Meditations was meant to be an aide-mémoire. Book 1 and many passages in the subsequent books consist of lists. I have presented them as separate parallel items in list format rather than en masse in a paragraph. This arrangement, I feel, best conveys the nature of the original and best guides the reader down the page. Where Marcus refers to things that, to him, are not truly good or bad but only popularly known as such, I use scare quotes: “good” and “bad.” Marcus’ prose can at times be elliptical, and I do in places supply clarifying phrases that are implicit in the text. I have used gender-neutral pronouns in the supporting material but not in the translation itself. They would not have accurately represented Marcus’ explicitly masculine pronouns and the androcentric and chauvinistic culture in which Meditations was written.

This translation highlights the many voices that speak in Meditations. It is helpful to think of the most prominent three as those of characters playing their parts in a greater philosophical psychodrama. Previous translations have tended to dissolve these voices into one general tone, but they are quite distinct. Marcus the instructor, the dominant voice, has the imperiousness of a drill sergeant. He knows all the answers and can wield the verbal lash to drive his point home. His tone, at times, resembles that of a parent reproaching a wayward teenager: There is just one life for each of us, and yours in a short time will be no more. And there you are, without one whit of self-respect, still grounding your sense of success in other people’s souls.⁴

The next most prominent voice in Meditations is that of Marcus the aspirant. It has, for the most part, gone unappreciated despite the fact that the aspirant is the speaker in 48 of the 488 entries. Whereas the instructor gives commands that promote the proper conduct of a Stoic life, we get to see Marcus the aspirant living that life when he, for example, offers up prayers to the Universe, Nature, and Zeus and tells the visualizations that come with phantasia to stay away from him.⁵ Unlike the instructor, the aspirant can be vulnerable. He confesses that he has anger issues and that he himself is the cause of his own inner torment: I don’t deserve to keep causing pain in myself because I have never intentionally caused pain in another.⁶

A third voice, that of the so-called objector, has its own tone and charm as well. Though his utterances tend to be brief, he can be expansive at times. His job is to be the instructor’s patsy, as in this interaction between them: Do you have the Logos in you?

I do.

Why not use it then?⁷

Marcus also frequently quotes passages from other authors. This translation has taken pains to render the voices of these philosophers and poets in such a way that their different tonal virtues come to the surface.

Translating Meditations was a very pleasant process. Given the originally private nature of the notebook, the work felt especially intimate. Sometimes, in fact, I felt like I was Marcus’ shrink. Day in, day out, his exercises were my exercises. His relentless earnestness came to endear him to me. His words flash with the fire of the true believer.

Aaron Poochigian New York, NY

January 2025

1 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 1.832.

2 Oxford University Press, 1944.

3 Clarendon Press, 1991.

42.6.

5 See 4.23 and 7.17.

68.42.

74.13.

Meditations

Book 1

1

From my grandfather Verus

Good character and a resistance to anger.

2

From my father (what I have heard and remember of him)

Modesty and manfulness.

3

From my mother

Piety, generosity, and an aversion to wrongdoing, the very thought of it.

Also, the frugality with which she lived. Other wealthy people refuse to live that way.

4

From my great-grandfather

Instruction that took place at home with excellent tutors instead of at one of the public institutions.

The belief that one should spend lavishly on education.

5

From my boyhood tutor

To root for no chariot racers (no matter whether they are on the Green Team or the Blue) and no gladiators, regardless of whether they fight with a short shield or a long one.

To endure discomfort and need little.

To do my own work and not meddle in that of others.

To reject all slander.

6

From Diognetus

That I shun purposeless pursuits.

That I disbelieve in all that wizards and witch doctors have to say about magic spells and exorcism and such things.

That I do not involve myself in quail fights and get into a tizzy over sports like that.

That I tolerate the free speech of others.

That I have made philosophy my home.

That I attended the lectures first of Baccheius, then of Tandasis and Marcianus.

That I wrote speeches expressing opposing viewpoints in my youth.

That I preferred a plank as a mattress and animal-hide bedding and all that the Greek training prescribes.

7

From Rusticus

Awareness that my moral character needs nurturing and correction.

An aversion to speechifying, writing on abstruse subjects, composing preachy little screeds, and ostentatiously playing the role of hermit or humanitarian.

An avoidance of rhetoric, poetry, and witticism.

A disinclination to walk around the house in imperial attire and do other such showy things.

The habit of writing my correspondence in a plain manner, as he did in a letter he sent my mother from Sinuessa.

An instinct to be conciliatory and quick to forgive toward those who have provoked or offended me as soon as they are ready to make up.

The habit of reading with attention to detail and not being content, in a dismissive way, with the gist of what is written.

A resistance to mere fluidity of speech.

The discovery of Epictetus’ Discourses, lent to me from his home library.

8

From Apollonius

Living with independence, being confident enough to dismiss the dice rolls of fortune, and focusing on nothing except the Logos, not even for a moment.

Remaining the same always, even when the pain cuts deep, or one’s child has died, or an illness drags on and on.

Knowing (from the clear evidence of him, a living model) that a man can be both resolute and easygoing.

Not snapping at people when I have to give explanations.

Knowing that there existed a man who saw his expertise and gift for expounding philosophical principles as the least of his good qualities.

Knowing how to accept my friends’ intended favors without feeling compromised by them or insensitively disregarding them.

9

From Sextus

Benevolence.

The model of a household run by a paterfamilias.

The concept of “living in accordance with Nature.”

Dignity without pretension.

A conscientious sense of what his friends needed.

Patience with the uneducated and the thoughtlessly credulous.

Geniality with everyone so that his company was more pleasant than any flattery and at the same time garnered the greatest respect from everyone present.

The discovery and deployment, in a straightforward way, of the principles essential to living a human life.

The ability to contain anger and the other passions.

The cultivation of a life of serenity and amiability.

The bestowal of praise without pomp and of knowledge without pedantry.

10

From Alexander the Grammarian

Not to nitpick.

Not to jump on an outright error, solecism, or lapse in tone when talking with others but instead to introduce, nonchalantly, the proper form of a particular expression by way of answer or in agreement or as part of group discussion about the subject in general (not merely the infelicitous phrasing of a thought) or by some other inoffensive and indirect means of correction.

11

From Fronto

That absolute rule comes with malice, histrionics, and hypocrisy.

That the exalted people from the “noble families” tend to be a bit cruel.

12

From Alexander the Platonist

Not to over-often and without real need tell people in conversation or correspondence, “I am too busy.”

Not to be constantly excusing myself from my obligations to the people around me by citing “urgent business.”

13

From Catulus

Not to be dismissive when a friend calls me out, even if he is doing so unjustly, but to try to restore the relationship to its previous footing.

Always to speak well of my teachers and with true devotion, as in the Domitius and Athenodotus story.

To show heartfelt affection to my children.

14

From Severus

Love for family, truth, and justice.

An introduction to Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dio, and Brutus.

The concept of a society in which people enjoy freedom of speech and equal standing before laws equal to all and of a ruler who understands his subjects’ freedom is of the utmost importance.

A steady, consistently zealous devotion to philosophy.

Beneficence, warm generosity, optimism, and confidence in the love of friends.

Candor with those one must reprove.

Absolute clarity when it comes to likes and dislikes, so that one’s friends don’t have to guess.

15

From Maximus

Self-mastery and a focus invulnerable to distraction.

Good cheer in all circumstances, even during illness.

A model of a well-balanced character, both dignified and kind.

The performance of the task at hand without complaint.

A confidence earned from others that one is sincere in all one says and benevolent in all one does.

Immunity to surprise and intimidation as well as to rush and reluctance.

A disinclination to give up hope and be depressed or grimace or respond with anger and suspicion.

Beneficence, forgiveness, and sincerity.

The model of a life that follows the right path without need of correction.

The model of social relations in which no one felt slighted by him or superior to him.

A sense of humor.

16

From my adoptive father

A mild temper and an unwavering commitment to decisions made after long deliberation.

An absence of vainglory when awarded so-called honors.

Industry and perseverance.

Ears open to all who propose policies that serve the public good.

The impartial bestowal of rewards on people, each according to his worth.

A time-tested sense of when to be firm and when to be accommodating.

A prohibition on the pursuit of boys for sex.

A respect for the people in one’s community.

Camaraderie with no expectation that his friends always dine or travel abroad with him and, when he returned, an unchanged fondness for the friends who had to stay behind to take care of some pressing concern.

A single-minded focus and knack for asking incisive questions at meetings of the imperial council and a refusal to accept first impressions or end discussion prematurely.

A dedication to keeping friends by never getting fed up with them or playing favorites.

Independence in all things.

Cheerfulness.

Prudence well in advance and self-effacing management of even the minutest details.

His restrictions on public praise and every form of flattery of him.

His focus on providing the empire with what it needed while responsibly administering public funds, and his willingness to accept criticism from certain people concerning these matters.

A lack of superstition when dealing with the gods and, instead of demagoguery, obsequiousness, and pandering when dealing with people, a perfect sobriety and reliability that eschewed vulgarity and novelty for novelty’s sake.

His acceptance of fortune’s abundant gifts, the good things in life, in so humble yet unapologetic a way that he could nonchalantly enjoy them when they were present and not miss them when they were gone.

The ideal of being a man no one calls a sophist, a fraud, or a pedant but all see as a seasoned, accomplished, and incorruptible expert capable of managing his own affairs and those of others.

Veneration for true philosophers without reproaching or succumbing to the other kind.

Approachability and a jocularity that knew its proper bounds.

Just the right amount of concern for his body so that he never came off as overfond of living or valetudinarian or unhygienic. (He very rarely needed medical assistance in the form of drugs and salves because of his proper self-care.)

This most especially: ungrudging deference to experts in eloquence, legal history, ethics, and all such disciplines and enthusiastic support for them to achieve recognition because of their expertise.

Steadfast adherence to tradition without making a big spectacle out of honoring it.

A settled character that, far from being fickle and erratic, sticks to familiar places and things.

The enthusiastic vigor with which he returned to his usual work after a migraine.

The very small number of state secrets he kept, and those all for the public good.

Sensibility and moderation when it came to subsidizing public games, building projects, donatives, and such things because he focused solely on what was necessary and ignored the glory he could have won from extravagant spending.

The habit of taking his daily bath at a reasonable hour.

An indisposition to add even more buildings to his estates, a lack of eccentricity in his diet, and a lack of interest in extravagant fabric and dyes and in the attractions of his slaves. (His attire came from his country estate in Lorium, and many other things from Lanuvium.)

The way he accepted a customs agent’s apology at Tusculum. (His whole character was like that.)

A lack of irritability, harshness, and impetuousness. (No one ever saw him “get worked up into a lather,” as the saying goes. Instead he calmly, systematically, and energetically gave each matter the time it was due, as if he were a man of leisure.)

His similarity to Socrates in that he was able both to enjoy and abstain from the luxuries that vulgar people are too weak-willed to live without and slavishly indulge in.

Resolve, persistence, and sobriety, come what may—the hallmarks of a man whose soul is perfected and indomitable, just as Maximus proved during his illness.

17

From the gods

That I have been blessed with good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good family and relatives in general, and almost entirely good friends.

That I have not blundered into offending any of those people, since I do have the sort of disposition that would have done so, had the occasion arisen. (By the gods’ beneficence, circumstances have never converged for me in such a way as would have disgraced me.)

That I was not raised very long by my grandfather’s mistress.

That I did not lose my virginity until even somewhat beyond the proper time.

That I served under an emperor and father who whisked away the fog in me and made me understand there could be an imperial court without bodyguards and showy clothing, candelabra, statues of so-and-so—all that kind of pomp. (His was a court where an emperor could reduce himself almost to a private citizen and not be considered slack or inappropriately informal when carrying out, imperially, business that concerns the public good.)

That I chanced upon such a brother as could lead me, by the strength of his character, to self-respect, and all that with his esteem and affection cheering me on.

That my children were all born mentally sound and without deformities.

That I never got very far in rhetoric or poetry or other such pursuits because I would easily have become engrossed in them if I had felt I was making real progress.

That, when I promoted my tutors each to the government position he seemed to desire, I did it early on and did not leave them dangling because they were so young with the mere hope of eventual preferment.

That I know Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus.

That I have attained vivid and frequent mental impressions of what it means to live one’s life in accordance with Nature. (In so far as the gods, their communications and assistance, and my enthusiasm are concerned, nothing is stopping me from living in accordance with Nature right now. That I am still falling short of it is entirely my own fault because I have not heeded the promptings, the almost outright instructions, of the gods.)

That my body has held out so long in such a life as I have led.

That I never even touched Benedicta and Theodotus and that, after I did eventually succumb to an erotic urge, I was cured of all that sort of thing for good.

That, as often as I became angry with Rusticus, I never did anything that, with time, I would have regretted.

That, destined though she was to die at an early age, my mother spent her final years with me.

That, whenever I have wanted to help someone in need of money or something else, I have never found I do not have the means.

That I have never fallen into so great a need that I had to ask for such assistance.

That my wife is exactly as she is, so obliging, so loving, and so unaffected.

That there has been an abundance of suitable tutors for my children.

That remedies were bestowed on me through dreams, especially for vertigo and bloody phlegm, and that I received a meaningful response from the Oracle at Caieta.

That, fervent as I am for philosophy, I never fell in with a mere manipulator of words or wasted my time scribbling histories and scrutinizing syllogisms or the movements of the heavenly bodies.

All of the blessings I have listed here

depend on the sustenance

of the gods and a happy chance.

Book 2

Written on the Gran River, a tributary

of the Danube, while on campaign against

the Germanic tribe the Quadi.

1

When you wake up each morning, prepare yourself with these words:

“I will encounter someone meddlesome, someone ungrateful, someone debauched, devious, slanderous, brutish. Those conditions have occurred in them because they cannot tell what is good from what is bad. I am different because I know that the good has a beautiful nature and the bad an ugly nature and that the nature of a wrongheaded person is kindred to my own, not by blood and birth, but because we both have a mind and portion of divinity.

“None of the people out there can do me any harm because I won’t let them ensnare me in shameful behavior. Nothing will make me hostile or spiteful toward these relatives of mine. As kinsmen, we were born to work together like pairs of feet or hands or like eyelids and rows of teeth, the upper and the lower. It would be unnatural for us to impede each other. Aggravation, repugnance—these are impediments.”

2

What you are consists of bits of meat, a whisper of breath, and a ruling power. (Throw all your books away now. No more distractions—they are not permitted here.) The first thing is to scorn your flesh as if you were dying this very moment: guts and bones, mere meshwork woven out of nerves, veins, arteries. Next look at what breath is: a fluctuating wind, perpetually disgorged and gulped back in again. The third part of us is the ruling power. Think of it this way: You are a venerable old man. You have grown out of letting this power be a slave, a puppet tugged by selfish urges, a malcontent impatient with fate and the present moment or mistrustful of what will come.

3

All that the gods control is full of Providence. Even the works of fortune come from Nature out of the convergence and intercourse of all that Providence governs. Everything flows from them, including what must come to pass and what benefits, as a whole, the world of which you are a part. Everything that Nature does and everything that furthers its aims are good for every part of it. Its components and compounds, by undergoing change, revitalize the universe.

(Take that as your doctrine and let it be enough for you. Cut off your thirsty dependence on books, or you will die muttering written words instead of basking in the truth of things and heartily thanking the gods.)

4

Remember how long you have been procrastinating and how often the gods have pushed back the deadline, and yet you never made use of the time. It is time now to learn what world you are a part of and who governs that world and how you fit in as an offshoot of it. Accept that your time is limited. If you do not use it to turn your hazy days to sunny skies, it will be up and gone (like you), and it won’t come back again.

5

Stubbornly focus every instant, like a Roman and a man, on doing what is at hand with conscientious and unaffected dignity, kindness, freedom, and justice. You can reserve, for your own benefit, this time apart from mental distractions. You will reserve it if you act on the assumption that every instant is your last and free yourself from aimlessness, diehard resistance to the ways of reason, self-contradiction, self-worship, and worries over what fate will decide. Don’t you see how few things a person has to master in order to live a harmonious and pious life? If you live by those principles, the gods can ask no more of you.

6

Go on and do it, soul, degrade yourself. Soon, though, there will be no time left for you to start respecting yourself. There is just one life for each of us, and yours in a short time will be no more. And there you are, without one whit of self-respect, still grounding your sense of success in other people’s souls.

7

Why do you let all that is going on out there distract you? Once you have stopped running around in circles, start setting time aside to study something truly worthwhile. But there is another blunder you must watch out for: People without a goal to guide their each and every thought and impulse, hard as they may be working in their lives, have nothing but nonsense to say.

8

It’s hard to see a man who ignores what is happening in other people’s souls as unhappy. Conversely, everyone who ignores what is happening in his own soul can only be unhappy.

9

Things you should always remember:

what the nature of the whole is

what your own nature is

how the two relate to each other

what kinds of parts make up the whole

the fact that you are a part of Nature, and no one can stop you from doing and saying things in accordance with it.

10

Theophrastus expresses himself like a true philosopher in his Comparison and Contrast of Human Follies. (If one speaks colloquially, such comparisons can be made.) He concludes that conflict caused by lust is worse than conflict caused by anger. The angry man, he argues, turns his back on reason because pain has caused uncontrollable revulsion in him. The man whom passion leads astray comes off, in contrast, as more intemperate and effeminate in his misbehavior because he surrenders to an urge for pleasure.

It’s perfect truth and good philosophy to say, as Theophrastus does, that the offender spurred by lust deserves greater reproach than the offender spurred by pain. The angry man, on the whole, is more like the victim of an injurious attack. The libidinous man, driven to action by lust, goes rushing toward wrongdoing.

11

You could leave life any moment—let that truth rule your thoughts, words, and deeds. If the gods exist, then what we meet when we pass on is nothing terrible. They would never move us anywhere bad. If the gods don’t exist or don’t care about human affairs, what’s life to me in a world devoid of gods and Providence?

But the gods do exist and do care about human affairs. They have given us everything we need to extricate ourselves from all that is truly bad in our relations. If there is anything bad beyond that, the gods would have given us the capacity to extricate ourselves from that as well. If something cannot harm a man, how could it damage his life in any way?

There is no chance that Nature (taken as a whole) would have failed to provide for such situations either because it was unaware of them or because it knew of them but lacked the power to prevent or amend them. Nor would it ever through inadequacy or incompetence make so great a blunder that good and bad things would indiscriminately befall good people and bad people alike. Death and life, celebrity and stigma, pain and pleasure, wealth and want—all these things happen to both good and bad people, so they are neither beautiful nor ugly and neither good nor bad.

12

Everything vanishes so swiftly: the bodies here in the world and the memories of them in the passing years. Can you accept that all the things our senses perceive—especially those that ensnare us with pleasure, repel us with pain, and blast us with prestige—are cheap and contemptible and sordid and putrescent and already dead? That is what thought is for. It is also for recognizing exactly what those people are whose prejudices and acclamations decide what ends up winning fame. Thought is also for accepting what death is. If you strip away the nightmares that have accrued around death and see it exactly as it is, what remains is nothing other than an operation of Nature. Anyone who trembles before an operation of Nature is childish. What’s more, death makes a beneficial contribution to natural processes. Finally, thought is for recognizing how human beings touch the gods, what part of us can do it, and what state that part must be in when it does.

13

There is nothing more pathetic than a man who runs around in circles looking into everything and, as the poet says, “delving into the things beneath the earth.” All the while he never stops casting about for signs of what is happening in the souls of those around him. People like him have failed to recognize that all you need to do is commune with the divine power inside of yourself and be sincere when serving it. The service consists of keeping that power undefiled by prurience, purposelessness, and discontentment with the things that come from the gods and human beings.

The things that come from the gods shame us into better behavior because they are impeccable. The things that come from human beings give rise to fellow feeling in us because of the kindship we humans share. Human action can also, in a way, rouse our pity when we encounter someone who clearly cannot tell the difference between good and bad—a limitation no less severe than being blind to the difference between white and black.

14

Even if you could live three thousand years or thirty thousand years, you would still need to bear in mind that no one loses any other life than the one he is living and lives any other life than the one he is losing. A very long life and a very short life come down to the same thing. The present moment is equal for all; the length of its lapsing is equal for all; once it is gone, it seems to have lasted a mere twinkling. That’s it, because we can’t lose the past and the future. How could we lose what we don’t have?

Remember these two truths:

that all things from time immemorial have been of the same sorts and cyclic, and it’s all one whether you see them recurring over one hundred years, two hundred years, or an eternity;

that “the man who lived for ages” and “the newborn gone-too-soon” lose, at death, exactly the same thing. The present moment is all we can ever be deprived of. It is all the time we have because we do not have past time and future time to lose.

15

“Nothing is anything, but thinking makes it so.” This aphorism by Monimus the Cynic has a clear thrust and clear implications for you if you take the truth it offers in the proper way.

16

The human soul most degrades itself

when it comes to resemble, as much as it can, a tumor, a growth on the world: To resent an individual thing that happens is to rebel against Nature, which contains the various natures of individual things

when it abandons or, conversely, menaces someone, the way angry people do

when it surrenders to pleasure or pain

when it dons an actor’s mask and cheats and lies

when, instead of aiming its impulses and operations at some intention, it dithers at random.

Even our most trivial exertions should serve some end. The overall end for us, the rational animals, is to live by the laws and logic that rule the original city and state—the universe.

17

Human existence—

Time: an instant.

Life: draining water.

Perception: a blur.

Bodily Condition: decay.

Soul: a spinning top.

One’s Chances: inscrutable.

Reputation: uncontrollable.

To sum up: The way of flesh is a river, and the soul’s affairs are a fever dream. Life is fighting in a foreign war, and posthumous fame is oblivion. Is there anything that can steer us through these straits?

Philosophy alone, and that amounts to

making sure you keep the divine power in you unharmed and uncontaminated;

mastering pain and pleasure;

doing nothing haphazardly, fraudulently, or with affectation;

acting independently of whether someone else has done or not done something;

accepting that both what chances to happen and what is destined to happen arise from the same wellspring, the source from which you yourself emerged;

above all, waiting serenely for death to bring the dissolution of the elements that constitute every living being.

It is natural for material things to be perpetually turning into other kinds of material things. Why, then, do people so resent their transience and decay? Material things can only undergo change in harmony with Nature, and nothing bad could ever be in harmony with Nature.

Book 3

Written at the fortress of Carnuntum

1

Our lifetime is dwindling every day, and we constantly have less left. There’s that, and then there’s this: Even if someone does live for a long time, nobody knows whether his mind will hold out and still be capable of managing his own affairs and reflecting on the experiences that teach us what gods and humans are.

When someone starts revealing in his speech that his mind is gone, he goes on breathing, eating, imagining, feeling urges, and the like. What he has lost the power to do is live with purpose, accurately assess his duties, learn from experiences, and decide whether the time has come to die. The rational faculty he had trained to do all those sorts of things has been snuffed out in him.

There is urgency, then, both because death is drawing forever nearer and because we lose our ability to think along with our awareness of what is going on around us.

2

One has to be on the lookout for exceptional sights that, though inadvertent by-products of Nature, still have their own appeal and charm. When bread is being baked, for example, cracks form in the crust, and they, though faults, one could say, in the baker’s art, look strangely perfect and excite our appetite in a special way. Figs burst in their prime, and an olive’s imminent peril of dropping into decay lends it a peculiar beauty. The nodding of ears of wheat, the furrows on a lion’s brow, the foamy slaver dripping from a boar’s mouth and so many other things, though far from comely when looked at on their own, fit in as embellishments adorning Nature’s works and can entrance us.

If a person has enough experience and a deep understanding of the natural world as a whole, almost everything will please him with its presence, even Nature’s incidental offspring. He will look at a real-life wild beast’s gaping jaws with no less delight than at a painting or sculpture that had captured them. He will see a sort of bloom and ripeness in elderly men and women and take in the attractions of his slaves with unlascivious eyes. This vision is not accessible to all, but only the one who has become truly intimate with Nature and its creations.

3

Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, after curing so many illnesses, got sick himself and died. The Chaldeans with their horoscopes predicted the fated death dates of countless people, and then their own fated demises arrived on schedule. Alexander the Great, Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar razed many cities to the ground and cut down thousands upon thousands of foot soldiers and cavalrymen in battle and still eventually had to die, too. After Heraclitus spent his life arguing that fire is what vitalizes the universe, he drowned in his own dropsy while smeared with cow dung. Lice killed Democritus; louses killed Socrates.

So, yes, what does a lifetime come to? You boarded, set sail, and have arrived. Now step ashore. If into an afterlife, it will, like this life, be brimming with the gods. If into oblivion, you will no longer be at the mercy of pain and temptation and no longer be a slave to the earthenware receptacle that is your body—a master vastly inferior to what is compelled to wait upon it. The lackey: intelligence and divinity. The overlord: clay full of gore.

4

Don’t spend any of the life you have left speculating about what’s in other people’s minds, unless you do it in pursuit of the common good. If you do get caught up in them, you will be wasting time that would be better spent on something else. To be specific, when you set about imagining what people are doing, intending, saying, contemplating, utilizing, and other such things, you end up straying from what should be a strict observance of the ruling power within you. You should shut all that is gratuitous and futile out of the sequence of your thoughts, especially idle curiosity and malice.

Train your mind to work in such a way that you could at any moment answer the surprise question, “What are you thinking right now?”, with a full and ready disclosure of exactly this or that. It should be immediately clear from your answer that your thoughts are unconvoluted, benevolent, socially appropriate, and removed as much from hedonism and sensuality as from contentiousness, envy, paranoia, or any other angry feeling—anything you would blush to admit had been in your mind.

A man who can pass that test, once he accepts at last his place among the truly excellent, is a sort of priest, an agent of the gods, because he knows how to use the divinity lodged within him. That power renders him innocent of lust, invulnerable to pain, impervious to pride, and unaware of any wrongness in the world. He is a wrestler in the greatest match of all and will not be pinned by anything that touches him. His whole being is dyed the color of justice, and he embraces what has been allotted to him with his whole soul. He rarely, and only ever at the insistence of the public good, thinks about what other people are saying, doing, and thinking. Having only his own project to perfect, he focuses day and night on his one strand in Nature’s woven whole. He makes sure he does his work well and never doubts that what happens to him is good. The destiny he carries inside himself just keeps carrying him onward.

He understands, moreover, that all of us rational animals are kin and that, while human fellowship demands he care about each of us, he will not share the opinions of everyone, but only of those who live in accordance with Nature. He knows, from experience, those who don’t live that way—the kinds of things they do at home and on the town at all hours of the day and night and the types they fall in with. He disregards the praise such people give him. They aren’t even people they themselves would praise.

5

Don’t be grudging, selfish, careless, or antagonistic in your actions.

Don’t befrill your thoughts with flashy literary refinements of style.

Be neither a babbler nor a busybody.

Make sure the god within you rules a man who is a fully mature citizen and Roman and an emperor who serves like a soldier at his post, even as he numbers the days until his official discharge from this life.

Be prepared so that, when the time comes, you don’t have to write a last-minute will or summon someone to be a witness.

Be genial, undemanding, and independent of the reassurance other people can provide.

Make sure you are standing upright and not just propped upright.

6

If you find something better than truth, justice, self-control, and manly vigor, that is, better than what a self-reliant mind generates when adhering to right reason and accepting its portion of uncontrollable events—which is all to say, if there truly is something that excellent out there for you, devote your whole soul to it so that you get the most out of it.

If you can’t find anything better than the divinity stationed within you to rule your urges, interrogate your thoughts, “drag you away,” as Socrates used to say, from sensory perceptions, teach you your position under the gods, and push you to help your fellow humans—that is, if you find nothing other than the god inside you consequential and worthwhile, don’t make room in your life for anything else.

If you do end up stepping aside from the path in pursuit of something, you will have a hard time giving undivided attention thereafter to your own personal good thing, which is what you should be cultivating. It’s sacrilegious to force the rational and social good inside you to compete with things that don’t share its nature, things like a need for praise, power, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Those sorts of pursuits, though they do seem at first to fit comfortably into your life, suddenly take over and become a compulsion. That’s why you (I’ll say it again) must keep everything simple and consensual by choosing the greater good and holding on tight to it.

Some argue that “the greatest good is the one that has the most benefits.” If an apparent good thing benefits what rules over reason in you, then cleave to it. If it only benefits the animal in you, admit that and stick to that opinion about it without making a big show of doing so.

Just make sure you keep assessing the merits of everything without getting distracted.

7

Never accept as beneficial to you anything that will eventually force you

to break your faith;

to abandon all shame;

to suspect, execrate, or hate someone;

to live in hypocrisy;

to lust for something better left hidden behind walls and curtains.

On the outside, the man fully devoted to his own mind and the worship of his inner divinity does not “make a tragedy” of his life. There’s no handwringing, no demanding space for a soliloquy or a crowd as audience.

Above all else, he lives his life neither chasing, nor evading, anything whatsoever. He doesn’t care if his soul stays in his body for a longer or shorter bit of time. No, even if it’s his time right now, he is prepared to do that deed as nonchalantly as all he does with modesty and good taste every day. The one concern he has in his life is to keep his mind from falling into a state unbecoming of a rational and social animal.

8

The mind of a corrected and fully purified person contains no infection, taint, or necrosis. What’s more, death does not catch him with his life’s work half-done, like an actor forced to make a mid-play exit. He is, in his behavior, neither fawning nor pompous, neither dependent on others nor independent of them, with nothing to divulge and nothing to hide.

9

Cherish your power of appraisal. It depends entirely on that faculty whether your ruling power commits some error of judgment at odds with Nature and the ways of rational animals. Proper use of it guarantees thorough thinking, compassion for fellow humans, and devotion to the gods.

10

Throw away everything except these few words. Cling to them alone—

Each person lives only in his present moment, and it’s a twinkling. What he lived is dead and gone, and what he may live in the future is inscrutable. Our lives are tiny, and we live them in tiny corners of the world. The longest-lasting posthumous fame amounts to next to nothing in time and, when glory is passed along like in a relay race, the people who successively receive it don’t even have knowledge of themselves, let alone of people who died in the distant past.

11

Here’s another bit of advice, on top of all the preceding encouragement:

Make a practice of sketching or outlining what presents itself to your mind so that you can see what it is stripped down to its essence and as an existence separate from other existences. You should also repeat its name to yourself and the names of the components into which it will dissolve.

Nothing promotes greatness of mind so much as methodically and earnestly interrogating everything that occurs in our lives. This constant scrutiny shows us how each thing fits into the universe, what purpose it has, and how it serves the whole, as well as how it can serve human beings, all of us citizens of the exalted city in comparison to which all other cities are mere houses.

Here are the proper questions: What is this object in my mind? What is it made up of? How long will it naturally persist? What virtue is needed to confront it? Gentleness? Courage? Honesty? Loyalty? Simplicity? Self-reliance? One of the others?

When assessing such objects, you should say to yourself:

“This one comes from God, and this one from the conjunction and interweaving of fate and chance in coincidence, and this from a human being, my natural kin and fellow citizen, though one of those who does not know how to live in accordance with Nature. I do know, but I will assess his work fairly, understandingly, and in accordance with the law of human sympathy. As far as such morally neutral things are concerned, my purpose is to hit on their true value.”

12

If you do the work in front of you with enthusiasm, vigor, goodwill, and right reason,

if, instead of wasting your days chasing some cheap substitute, you keep your watch fixed on the flawless god within you (as though you will have to return it intact),

if, while adhering to these practices, you also do not hunt or evade anything but operate exclusively in accordance with Nature in the present moment,

finally, if all you say accords with the frank speech of the Heroic Age,

then you will be living a good life.

And there is no one who can stop you from achieving it.

13

Just as a doctor keeps his scalpels and other gear on hand in case of emergency, you should always have your principles with you so that you can accurately dissect what belongs to the gods and what belongs to man. Focus on those last two things, and you will end up performing every action, even the most inconsequential one, with proper respect for the human and the divine and the bond between them. One can only do what’s human correctly if one compares it to what’s divine, and vice versa.

14

Stop wasting effort. You know you will never actually reread, later on in old age, the little book of lecture notes you are compiling or whatever History of the Greeks and Romans or Anthology of Favorite Passages you may have started. Throw aside every fruitless hope, and dash for the greater goal. If you have even the least respect for yourself, save yourself while you still can.

15

Most people have no idea what, say, “stealing” is or “planting,” no idea of “buying” or “being at peace” or “seeing to what needs to be done” because grasping what those things are belongs not to the eyes, but to the other sort of vision.

16

There’s body, vitality, and intelligence. The body provides sensory perceptions; vitality, impulses; and intelligence, guiding principles.

Yes, we can take in sensory impressions, but so can cattle. Examples of beings that are or were puppets to the senses include beasts like wild boars, men who act like women, the tyrant Phaleris, and Nero. We share the power in our minds that guides us toward what’s right with atheists, traitors, and people with ugly secrets.

Though human beings, including the sorts just mentioned, are mostly alike, there does remain the special character of the good person. He welcomes and befriends whatever chance drops and fate weaves for him. He knows not to defile the divinity within him or overload it with stimuli. He keeps it calm by dealing with the divine in an organized way and neither saying anything untrue nor doing anything unjust.

It doesn’t matter to him if no one understands that he is living a model life of simplicity, modesty, and goodwill. Rather than becoming frustrated with people, he stays true to the path that leads to his life’s end—an inevitability he will face with purity, inner peace, readiness, and an eager acceptance of his destiny.

Book 4

1

So long as the master power within us is living in accordance with Nature, it will readily adapt itself to what has been given to it and what is possible. It has no preferred medium.

Provided there is no conflict of interest, it sets itself moving toward a given goal. If it comes up against obstructions to that goal, it takes them in as fuel, as fire does to whatever is tossed into it. Mere candle flame would be smothered, but our ruling power is a blaze and instantly accommodates and consumes combustibles like that, turning them into propellants that make it leap even higher.

2

Never do anything at random or at odds with the principles that lead to the perfection of your life.

3

People often go to the country or the coast or the mountains on a “retreat,” and you have customarily felt a strong urge to do the same. That need is utterly irrational because you are able to retreat into yourself whenever you feel like it. A man can withdraw to no more soothing and untroubled a getaway than his own soul, especially if he has those sorts of things inside him that take him away to tranquility as soon as he starts deeply considering them. (By “tranquility” here I mean “inner harmony.”) Be sure to visit the refuge inside you with great frequency, so that you can refresh yourself. The guiding principles you find in there should be concise, fundamental, and capable of both washing away all your pain and sending you back to what you faced before in such a way that you feel no indignation.

What is there, anyway, that could make you indignant? The wickedness of your fellow humans? Consider these established truths: that we rational animals are meant to help each other; that tolerance is a part of justice; and that no one ever does a truly wrong thing voluntarily. (You could also think of all the people laid out as corpses and cremated through the ages after living lives of conflict, suspicion, vindictiveness, and violence. They will give you pause.)

Are you indignant, instead, because of the life that Nature has allotted you? Call this dichotomy freshly back into your mind—either divine Providence or random atoms. Remember, too, that the universe has been proved to resemble a community of fellow citizens.

Is it bodily demands that won’t leave you alone? Be sure to remember that, once intellect has extricated itself and come to know its power, it has nothing to do with our sighing, panting breath. Call up also all you have learned secondhand about pleasure and pain and all the sensations you have allowed yourself to experience.

Are you going to let your little bit of fame lead you astray? Always remember

how swiftly all things are forgotten,

how chasms of infinite time gape on either side of our life,

how vacuous applause is,

how fickle and ignorant those people are who try to mete out praise,

how tight a space surrounds all glory.

The Earth is a speck, and your home is a minuscule corner of it, and the people who sing your praises are inconsequentially few and of questionable character.

From here on out make sure you take your vacations in those inner little acres of yourself. Above all, don’t agonize or put yourself out over anything, but live in freedom and see things as a man, a human being, a citizen, and an animal that must die.

Let these two truths rank among the uppermost of those you turn to:

First, objects can’t touch your mind because they are outside of you and unable to move on their own. Our trials and tribulations arise exclusively from our inner interpretations.

Second, all the things you see around you will change and cease to be before you know it. Always bear in mind the countless transformations you have witnessed in your time.

To sum up: The universe is flux, and life, presumptions.

4

Because all of us humans have a share of intellect, we all have a share in the Logos (it’s what makes us rational animals).

If that’s true, we all have a share of inner guidance telling us what and what not to do.

If that’s true, we all have a share in the laws we make based on that guidance.

If that’s true, we are all fellow citizens under those laws.

If that’s true, we all belong to the same commonwealth.

If that’s true, our world operates as one big commonwealth.

Who would try to argue there is some other polity to which every single human being belongs?

Our awareness and capacities for reason and rulemaking come from our participation in this pan-human commonwealth. Where else would they come from? Just as the part of me that is made of clay comes from the clay earth itself, and the water in me comes from a second element, and my breath from a third, and my heat and fire from a fourth, so my intellect has to come from somewhere. Nothing comes from nowhere, and nothing departs to nowhere.

5

Death, like birth, is one of Nature’s mysteries. Complementary, the pair of them operates as the coalescence and disintegration of the same materials. One’s own deterioration is absolutely not something to be ashamed of. Decay isn’t at odds with our nature as intelligent animals or with the laws that rule our physical makeup.

6

Wrongdoers naturally and inevitably do the wrong they do. Anyone who expects such people not to act like that may as well believe there could be a fig tree with no sap in it.

You should also always bear in mind that you and the person in question will both very soon be dead, and, shortly thereafter, not even the slightest mention of your names will survive.

7

Get rid of your inner reaction, and you get rid of the presumption “I have been harmed.” Get rid of the presumption you have been harmed, and you get rid of the harm.

8

Nothing out there can make a human being worse than he was, so nothing can make his life worse than it was or harm him in any way, inside or out.

9

The power that naturally bestows benefits on us can never do otherwise than it does.

10

If you just look closely enough, you will discover that everything that happens happens as it should. I mean this in terms not only of causes and effects but of rightness. It’s as if someone who gives everything its due were bringing everything to pass.

Keep paying as close attention to an object of contemplation as you did when you started. And make sure you contemplate it with your mind focused also on what a good person should do according to the conception of goodness you have formed. Cleave to that ideal in everything you endeavor to do.

11

Don’t look at things the same way as a wrongdoer looks at them or hopes to make you look at them. No, see what’s really there.

12

You should always keep these two rules handy:

1.Do only what the imperial and legislative logos in you ordains for the benefit of humankind.

2.Be open to changing your mind if someone sets you straight and drives you out of a conviction you held. The reassessment, though, should always be based on some tenet of justice or on the common interest. Those considerations should be paramount, not pleasure or popularity.

13

Do you have the Logos in you?

I do.

Why not use it then?

When your mind is doing its proper work, there is nothing more you could ask for.

14

You entered existence as a part of conglomerate Nature, and you will inevitably vanish back into what gave you life in the first place. To be more specific, you will return, through a process of transformation, to the generative logos of the world.

15

When grains of frankincense are tossed onto the same blazing altar, one gets there first, another later, but it doesn’t matter.

16

Ten days at the most—that’s all the time it would take for you to go from a wild beast or ape to a god in other people’s eyes, if you just turn back to your guiding principles and adoration of the Logos.

17

You won’t live for ten thousand years, so don’t act like you have that time. Inevitable death is hanging over you. While you are still alive, while you still can, be a good person.

18

The man who pays no mind to what his neighbor is saying, doing, and thinking enjoys serenity. He focuses solely on whether his own actions are just and reverent. As the tragedian Agathon once wrote,

Don’t let your eyes run off to others’ black

depravities. Don’t ever deviate.

Race like a sprinter cleaving to a straight

line on the home straight of a running track.

19

A man who gets all aflutter over the thought of posthumous fame has never stopped to consider that the people keeping his memory alive will very soon be dead, just like himself. Their successors soon will be dead in turn, and so on, until all remembrance of him goes out for good after successive flare-ups and extinguishments.

Even if your fans were immortal, and your fame eternal, why would you care? It goes without saying that renown means nothing to the dead. And what good is it to the living, except maybe in some utilitarian way? You end up forgoing Nature’s gift to you in the present moment to focus on the approval of others.

20

None of the things that are in any way beautiful have even the slightest acclaim in them. They are self-contained and beautiful all on their own. Praise makes nothing better or worse. Yes, this is true of the things more popularly hailed as beautiful: everyday material objects and fine art. But the things that are truly beautiful—do they need anything outside themselves? No, they are self-contained, like justice, truth, goodwill, and integrity. None of them needs praise to be beautiful or loses beauty because of disparagement. Would an emerald be less beautiful if it went unpraised? Or gold? Ivory? Purple fabric? A lyre? A dagger? A blossom? A shrub?

21

If every soul of every person going back for eternity survived the flesh, how can the air have room enough for them all? Conversely, how could the Earth have room enough for all the bodies buried in it over the course of the infinite past?

Just as in this world corpses break down over however long, and their decomposition makes room for other corpses, souls released into the air continue to exist only for a limited time. Then they break down and combust as they rejoin the generative logos of the world. By disintegrating they make room for freshly arriving souls.

Some claim that souls go on to live forever, and that’s the answer.

But in addition to all the bodies being buried, you should take into account all the animals eaten each day by us and the other carnivores. How very many are ingested and then, in a way, interred in the bodies of their devourers? And yet there is room for them all because they dissolve into our blood and sublimate to air or fire.

What is the best method to get to the truth here? A clear distinction between matter and what gives it shape.

22

Don’t let your thoughts go astray. Give every impulse what it deserves and subject every sensory impression to your power of judgment.

23

What is in harmony with you, O Universe, is in harmony with me. The gifts you lavish, each in its due season, always reach me at the right time, neither too early, nor too late.

And you, O Nature: All that your seasons bring is fruit to me. From you all things arise, in you all things abide, and to you all things return.

A poet once exclaimed, “O beloved city of Athens,” and will you not say, “O beloved city of Zeus”?

24

A philosopher advises, “If you want to be happy, focus on a few things only.” Wouldn’t it be better to say, “Do what necessity requires” and “Do all that the logos of a social animal demands.” Those precepts bring contentment, along with the focus on few things. It’s true: The vast majority of what we say and do is irrelevant. If a man can cut the gratuitous out of his life, he will be calmer and have more time for what really matters.

Every time you are called to act, make sure you ask yourself, “Is this a necessary thing?” Take away both unnecessary action and the waste of thought that comes with it, and you can be sure nothing you do will be superfluous.

25

Try the life of a good person on for size. He gets to be content with what has been allotted to him out of the universe, at peace with his actions (all done right) and at rest in his kindly disposition.

26

You’ve looked at lots of things; now take a look at these:

Do not disrupt yourself.

Strip yourself down to simplicity.

Does anyone ever do real harm? Only to himself. Are you worried about something that happened to you? All is well. The universe wove all the occurrences of your life together as your lot long ago in time immemorial.

That life, though, is short. What you have to do is use reason and rightness to get some good out of the present moment. (And be sure your mind stays sober when you take a break.)

27

The universe is either prearranged or a tossed-together hash that is still somehow a universe. Is it even possible that there be some form of order inside of you but disorder in the universe? Disorder though the various things in it are accommodating of each other and perfectly blended?

28

These things go together:

A dark character; a womanish character; an intractable character—predatory, bovine, or infantile; the imbecile disposition; the corrupted temperament and the temperaments that belong to gluttons, mercenaries, and tyrants.

29

Every stranger to this universe, ignorant of his exclusion and of what is going on around him, is a fugitive from the social logos. Everyone who shuts the eyes of his intelligence is blind. Everyone who lives off others because he can’t furnish what his life needs himself is a derelict.

Finally, everyone who rejects and secedes from the social logos when something doesn’t go his way is a tumor in this universe. What has caused that “setback” caused his very existence. Whoever severs his soul from the united soul of rational animals cuts himself out of the human commonwealth.

30

Here’s one philosopher who still does his work, though he can’t even afford a cloak. Here’s another who somehow keeps going, though books are beyond his means. A third one, half-naked, explains, “No bread for me: I live on reason alone.” And here I am, getting no sustenance from my learning, however tightly I cleave to it.

31

Love the art you have learned and find peace in it. Spend the rest of your life devoting all you have in you, with all your soul, to the gods. And never be a slave or tyrant to anyone.

32

Go back, in your mind, to the time of Vespasian, for example, and you will see people getting married and rearing children, people ailing, dying, warring, celebrating, traveling for business, farming, toadying, crowing, mistrusting, conspiring, wishing death on others, grumbling at what’s around them, craving sex, amassing extravagance, and pining to be a consul or a king. And all those people and their lives just wound up nowhere.

Go back again to the more recent reign of Trajan. It’s just the same: Everyone from that time is dead.

Now look at them—the ages and the nations, see how many men with their ambitions have passed in a twinkling and disintegrated into the four elements.

In the end, the most effective means is to call to mind people you yourself know, the ones who are snatching at vanities instead of cleaving to what they are meant to do, resting happy with it, and always acting in accordance with it. To reach that ideal, it is essential that you have an accurate assessment of worth and proportion ruling your every action. Guided by that, you won’t ever give up in frustration (unless you are spending too much time on a less important matter).

33

Words that were living language once are now obsolete. In much the same way, the words that stand for celebrities of yore now are obsolete: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and a little later Scipio and Cato, then Augustus, then Hadrian and Antoninus. Their lives ended and, that instant, turned to fairytale. An instant later and all-embracing oblivion will have completely buried them.

But this “obsolescence” belongs exclusively to those who shone with exceptional brightness. Everyone else, as soon as the last breath goes, “turns unnoticeable and is named no more.”

What would eternal fame be, anyway, if someone could have it?

A bunch of nothing.

What should we zealously pursue instead?

Right thoughts,

actions useful to the human commonwealth,

speech that cannot tell a lie,

and a temperament that welcomes everything that happens as a necessary and normal outpouring from the true source and wellspring of all virtue.

34

Fully surrender yourself to Clotho the Fate as she weaves your thread into whichever tapestries she pleases.

35

All things last for one day only, including memories and what the memories were of.

36

Be constantly noticing how everything that happens happens as change. Train yourself to understand that Nature, as a whole, loves nothing so much as to transform existences and replenish the stock of what they were before with fresh ones just like them. Everything in existence is the seed that germinates the future.

And you, you just keep assuming seed is merely what’s cast into a furrow or a womb, the same way common people do.

37

You will die anytime now, and you are not yet

uncomplicated,

imperturbable,

unsuspicious of the outside world and the so-called harm it can do,

well-disposed toward every fellow human,

and convinced that being wise and doing just deeds coalesce.

38

Observe how people (even the wise ones) act in answer to the ruling power inside them. See the sorts of things they shun and hunt.

39

What is to blame for the “wrong” you feel has been done to you? Certainly not some other person’s inner guiding power or a fluke or fluctuation in your environment. What then? The power in you that decides you have been “wronged.” Stop it from doing that, and all is well.

Even if what’s covering it, your beloved flesh, is hacked, scorched, and reduced to pus and necrosis, your inner assessor of harm should remain serene. It should know well that all the things that can happen to good and bad people alike are neither good nor bad. Which is to say, the things that both followers and opponents of Nature can experience are neither in accordance with nor at odds with Nature.

40

Always think of the universe as an all-embracing living being, one substance and one soul. And notice how all things reach toward the vantage point of that all-embracing living being, so all things move as one. And how things work together as causes. And how they make up a well-knit, intricate tapestry.

41

As Epictetus liked to say,

“You’re just a wisp of soul dragging your corpse around.”

42

Just as there is nothing bad in undergoing change, so there is no special good in arising from change.

43

Yes, time is a river running with everything that is happening, and it rushes with violent insistence. The moment something is spotted, it vanishes, and something else replaces it, only to be whisked away in turn.

44

Everything is as familiar and unsurprising as a rose in spring and ripe fruit in autumn, even disease, death, slander, betrayal, and the many things that thrill and trouble the ignorant.

45

In a chain of events what comes after is duly linked to what came before. But the chain is not just a predetermined concatenation of causes and effects. It also pleases reason with its rightness. Just as everything that already exists fits into a greater harmony, so everything just now entering existence exhibits a wondrous integration with other things as it assumes its place in a sequence of events.

46

Always remember Heraclitus: “Water is the death of earth; air, the death of water; fire, the death of air,” and round and round they go. Remember, too, that “a man can forget where his journey is headed.” And this: “People quarrel with what they are constantly encountering”—the Logos while it is in the very act of running everything at once.

Also, don’t let yourself “do and say things as if you are asleep.” (Yes, even in sleep we find ourselves performing actions and uttering words.) And we shouldn’t “be like children” who are thoughtlessly doing “what we have been told.”

47

If a god told you that you would die tomorrow or, if not then, the next day for sure, you would have to be an extremely vulgar person to make a big deal out of getting that one extra day. The difference is insignificant, just as insignificant as the difference between “living to a ripe old age” and dying tomorrow.

48

Keep calling to mind the fact that all these sorts of people have died in the past:

Doctors who furrowed their brows over the ailing,

astrologers who made a big show of predicting the death dates of others,

philosophers who made innumerable statements about death and immortality,

heroes who slew multitudes,

tyrants who, with appalling arrogance, acted like gods as they abused their power over others.

And there are whole cities that are, in a manner of speaking, dead: Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless more. Think also of how people you know have started dying off, one by one. You bury other people, die, and then other people bury you, and all in a wink.

To sum up, disdain the things that all humans experience—they are transient and without value. What yesterday was a glob of ejaculate tomorrow will be a mummy or cremains. Just move through your moment alive in harmony with Nature, and you will meet your end gratefully, as a ripe olive falls, blessing the soil that gave it existence and thanking the tree it grew on.

49

Be like a headland on which waves are constantly breaking: It stands firm and stops the seething.

I’m so unlucky. Something bad has happened to me.

That’s nonsense. It’s:

“I’m fortunate. Despite that recent occurrence, I remain unhurt. The present cannot break me, and the future holds no threat.”

Whatever “bad” thing has happened to you could have happened to anyone, but few would have remained unhurt by it. Why was it a misfortune and not good fortune, anyway? Do you regularly consider a perceived “misfortune” anything other than a rift with your human nature? And don’t you think a rift with that nature runs contrary to the will of that nature? And now you know what that will is.

Can that “bad” thing that happened to you keep you from being just, magnanimous, self-controlled, prudent, circumspect, forthright, modest, independent, and endowed with all the other virtues by which man’s true nature comes into its own? Whenever some occurrence starts leading you to a feeling of hurt, call this precept to mind, and heed it: If you nobly bear what at first seemed a misfortune, you become fortunate.

50

Though not properly philosophical, it is still useful when it comes to scorning death to contemplate the men who held on to life for a long, long time. What more did they get than the ones who went early? They all wound up dead eventually—Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, and all the other holdouts who buried many before their graves were dug.

A lifespan is a trifling interval, and you, with your flimsy body, must go to such great trouble with such difficult people. And a life ends up not amounting to much. Go ahead, look back at past time gaping infinitely behind you. Then turn around and see the future before you, another unbroken expanse. Given the way things are, is it really any better to live for three full human generations instead of just three days?

51

Take the direct route, the one that follows Nature and leads to sound reason ruling everything you say and do. A life journey like that takes you away from torment, reluctance, cunning, and pretentiousness.

Book 5

1

Make sure you have this admonition ready for those mornings when you don’t feel like getting out of bed:

“I have woken up to do the work of a human being. And here I am resenting having to go do the work that is the reason I was born into this universe, the reason for my whole existence. Was I created to lie around enjoying the warmth of blankets?”

But it’s so pleasant here in bed.

Is pleasure-seeking the reason you are alive? More generally, were you born to feel sensations or take action?

Haven’t you seen ferns and sparrows, ants, spiders, and bees making their contributions to the orderly operation of the universe by doing what they are meant to do? And you—you don’t want to get up and do what humans are meant to do? You should be running to act in accordance with your nature.

We need to take breaks, too.

Yes, but Nature has set limits for those breaks as well as for eating and drinking. You, though, drag your periods of respite out longer than you should, longer than your body needs. And then you come up short in your actions by doing less than you could.

You must not love yourself, because if you did, you would love your own nature, including what it wants from you. There are artists and tradesmen who so adore their work that they forget to eat and bathe while toiling away at it. You have less zeal for your human nature than a metalworker does for his metal, a dancer for his dance, a moneymaker for his money, and a glory hunter for his empty glory. Infatuated people like that are just fine with skipping meals and losing sleep so long as they can keep striving to make their obsession a reality. Is your work to serve the public good of less worth in your eyes than those pursuits are in theirs? Not worth the trouble?

2

It is so very easy to shake off and shut out every distracting and discordant sensory impression and be, of a sudden, in perfect calm.

3

Judge no words and deeds that accord with Nature to be unworthy of you. And make sure that other people’s reproaches, and speech in general, don’t drag you off course. The only things that aren’t beneath you are right words and right deeds. Other people will go on each having their own ruling powers and acting on their personal compulsions. Don’t stop and look astray at them. End your run in unswerving pursuit of your own nature and the nature all humans share. The same road leads to both.

4

I will keep moving forward among the things that accord with Nature until I stop, collapse, and exhale for good the breath I had been inhaling every day of my life. The earthly substance I will be lying on will be the same that gave my father a bit of seed for me, my mother a bit of blood for me, and my midwife the splash of milk I needed. The same that daily through the years has provided me with food and drink. The same that supports my feet when I am walking. The same that I misuse in so many ways.

5

Face it, there’s no one out there who would praise you for being quick-witted. But so what? There are many other good qualities, and you can’t deny you were created to exhibit them. Exhibit them, then, since it is wholly in your power to do so: honesty, dignity, tolerance to pain, indifference to sensual temptation, contentment with your lot, a modest lifestyle, goodwill, independence, straightforwardness, discretion, and loftiness of purpose.

Can you really not see the many qualities you could start displaying right now? You have no excuse—no natural inadequacy or inaptitude, and you still choose to keep on coming up short of them. What, do you think you have some innate deficiency that compels you to be a grumbler and moneygrubber, a sycophant, a malcontent scapegoating your bit of flesh, a flunky and a braggart, and, in sum, a bother to your own soul?

By the gods, no, you have no inborn deficiency, and you could have been liberated from all your vices long ago. Only one imputation, if even that, would remain: that you have been somewhat tardy, you know, slow to grasp things. You need to train yourself out of your acceptance and neglect of your own dullness.

6

One man, when he has done a favor for another, is quick to mark it down on his mental balance sheet as a favor owed to him in return. A second man, after doing someone a favor, does not officially mark it down in his mind but still assumes, in his heart of hearts, that that person is his debtor. He is aware of what he has given. A third man, though, when he does a favor, isn’t even aware, in a way, of having done it. He is like a vine that provides its grapes gratis. Once it has dispensed its fruit, it asks for nothing in return, like a racehorse that has run its race, a hunting dog that has brought the quarry to bay, and a honeybee that has made its honey.

That man, when he has done a good deed, doesn’t stop to cry out for commendation. No, he just goes on to do another one, as a vine goes on to provide more grapes again the following autumn. You need to become one of those people who, in a way, aren’t even aware of the good they have done.

Yes, but we, in fact, should be aware of it, someone might say. It is a mark of a member of the human commonwealth to recognize his actions are contributing to that commonwealth. By Zeus in heaven, he should want his fellow citizens to know it, too.

Sure, what you have said is true, but you have missed the point I am making. Because of that error you will end up being one of the first two kinds of men I mentioned—the kinds led astray by a certain convincing semblance of reason. Make an effort to grasp what I am actually saying. Once you do, you need never fear that you will fail to perform any deed that serves the greater good.

7

A prayer from the Athenians:

“Beloved Zeus, pour down

rain, rain

on the fields and plains

of the Athenians.”

If you aren’t going to pray in this unpretentious and open manner, don’t bother praying at all.

8

People commonly say, “Asclepius the god of medicine has prescribed exercise on horseback or a cold-water bath or walking barefoot.” We might say, along the same lines, “Nature, taken as a whole, has prescribed illness to one man and a physical disability to another, deprivation to a third man, and so on.”

In the case of Asclepius, “prescribe” means “to order something that will restore health.” In the case of Nature, “prescribe” means “to make everything happen for a man in some way that is suitable to his destiny.” We say that what happens to us “fits” us, just as we say stonemasons have fit blocks of stone into walls and pyramids when those blocks harmonize with each other in some pattern.

The universe is one big harmony. Just as all the physical bodies in the universe make it the greater body it is, so all the various catalysts out there fomenting the events of destiny make it the supreme catalyst it is. Even the completely uneducated see their fates in just the way I have explained: They say a person “had something coming” in his destiny. That event was due for him—that is, prescribed to him. We should accept such occurrences just as we accept what Asclepius prescribes. Medical prescriptions are often unpleasant to take, yes, but we take them, all the same, because we want to be healthy.

The realization and the perfection of the things that properly belong to our shared human nature—those two goals should be just as important to you as your health. Welcome everything that happens, even if it feels hard to take, because it contributes to the greater health of the universe as well as to the momentum and smooth operation of Zeus. He never subjects anyone to events that do not benefit Nature as a whole. In the same way the specific natures don’t instigate anything that is at odds with what is in their purview.

There are two reasons, then, why you should welcome what happens to you:

1.The occurrence is for you—it was prescribed to you and in a way is specific to you because primordial forces long, long ago wove it into your destiny.

2.The power that runs the universe makes sure that whatever happens to each of us as individuals also serves to advance, perfect, and sustain itself.

You would be maiming the integrity of a conglomerate whole if you cut anything out of its interdependent and harmonious components and the causes behind them. And you are doing just that, as much as you can, when you resent something that has happened to you—you are committing an act of destruction.

9

Do not give way to frustration, resentment, or despondency if you are not yet grounding all your actions on right principles. If you get knocked out of them, just go right back to them. If the majority of your actions accord with our shared human nature, be at peace with yourself and just go on loving what you keep turning back to.

When you do turn back to philosophy, though, don’t do it as a student goes back to a teacher but as a man with an eye infection turns to a sponge, warm compress, lotion, or irrigation with water. That way you won’t just be acting like you obey reason; you’ll be finding ease in it.

Remember: Philosophy desires only what your nature desires. You are the one who desires what’s not in accordance with your nature. What could be more delightful than fulfilling one’s nature? Yes, it’s through delight that pleasure trips us up, but look at greatheartedness, independence, simplicity, solicitude, and religious devotion—aren’t they even more delightful than sensual pleasures? And what is more delightful than wisdom itself? I mean, if you stop to consider how smoothly and gracefully the power of knowledge and understanding moves through all that it does.

10

Things are so veiled, so to speak, that quite a few serious philosophers have concluded they are beyond comprehension. Even the Stoics find them hard to comprehend. What’s more, our assessments of sensory impressions are fallible. In this world, everyone is fallible.

Pass on to things in themselves. See how fleeting and worthless they are. A whore could possess them, or a rent boy, or a mugger. Then turn to the character of the people in your own household. It is all one can do to suffer even the most agreeable of them. And I won’t even mention how hard it is for a man to have to suffer living with himself.

Here I am, then, in darkness, filth, and the flux of matter and the moment, of things changing and being changed. I can’t even begin to imagine anything in this world worthy of my admiration, or even my attention.

Despite all that, I have to keep motivating myself as I await my coming natural dispersal. Rather than resent the delay, I must find peace in these two principles alone:

All that will happen to me will be in accordance with Nature.

I have the power to act always in obedience to God and my guiding spirit, and no one can ever make me do otherwise.

11

“To what end am I now directing my soul?” Ask yourself that question in every situation. Then examine yourself more closely by asking, “What exactly do I have inside the part of me called ‘the ruling power’? Who is running this soul of mine? A child? An adolescent? A woman? A tyrant? A beast of burden? A wild animal?”

12

You can come to terms with the kinds of things most people think are “good,” if you approach the matter this way: A man should first come to recognize things that are actually, truly good—things like purposefulness, self-restraint, justice, and manfulness. With those virtues in his mind, he will no longer be able to pay heed to that old line of comic poetry about the man “rich in the good things of life.” It would no longer apply to him. If he first thinks of the things that seem good to most people, however, the line will strike him as a home truth every time he hears it.

Reactions to that line make clear that most people can perceive, in their minds, the difference between what seems good and what really is good. If they couldn’t, the line would not strike us as offensive and inappropriate in one sense and apt and witty in another, when we take it as referring to wealth and the windfalls that lead to fame and extravagant living.

Take the next step, now, and ask if it’s right for someone to value and accept as “good” things to which, when we contemplate them, that line aptly applies: that is, that the possessor of them, “through sheer abundance, doesn’t even have a pot to shit in.”

13

I am made of form and matter, and neither form nor matter in themselves will ever wither into nonexistence, because they never arose from nonexistence in the first place. And so it goes that every part of me will be assimilated, through change, into some other part of the universe, and that part, in turn, will change into another part, and so on, forever. It is because of just this process of change that I myself exist, and that my progenitors came to be, and that my descendants will keep coming to be infinitely in the other direction. Even if the universe is organized into finite epochs, there’s nothing that would conflict with these truths I have stated.

14

Reason and the art of reasoning are capacities fully sufficient to be what they are and do what they do. They arise from an origin uniquely their own and travel to the destination appointed for them. That is why they are called “true activities”—they signal the true path.

15

Stop calling things “human” that do not belong to you as a human. They are not required of a human being, and human nature does not subscribe to such things or find its perfection in them. Our purpose and Goodness itself, the fulfillment of that purpose, have nothing to do with them.

If such things actually were human prerogatives, yes, we would be wrong to scorn or resist them. A man who clearly did not want anything to do with them would not, then, merit praise, and a man who abstained from them would not be good (that is, on the assumption those things were good).

As it is, the more someone forgoes them and the more composedly he tolerates being without them, the better a person he is.

16

Your mind is what your recurring thoughts are, and your soul is dyed the color of these thoughts. Be sure to dye it, then, and keep dying it with thoughts like these:

A man can live well, no matter where he is living. Say he lives in a palace with a court—he can live a truly good life there.

Each being feels drawn to what it is made for: the very goal of its existence. Wherever that goal is found, a being’s good and benefit to the world can also be found.

The good for which we rational animals have been made is service to the human commonwealth. (It was proved long ago that this is so.) Isn’t it obvious, anyway, that what’s inferior is meant to serve its superiors and that we superior beings are meant to serve each other? Beings with souls are superior to the soulless existences, and we beings endowed with reason are superior to those with souls alone.

17

It’s insane to pursue the impossible. And it’s impossible that a bad person act otherwise than insanely.

18

Nature has designed you to be able to take whatever happens to you. Imagine that the same things are happening to someone else, and he (unlike you) remains unruffled and unsubdued by them because he either pays them no mind or shows fortitude. It’s outrageous that ignorance and an eagerness to please are stronger than wisdom in you.

19

Things out there can’t touch your soul in any way whatsoever. They most certainly can’t put pressure on it, let alone change its direction, because they can’t even access it in the first place. Your soul only ever pressures itself; it only ever changes its own direction. It makes the various things presented to it what they are to it on the basis of its interpretations.

20

In one sense, all my fellow human beings are just as close to me as members of my own household because I am bound, as a human being, to get along with them and be good to them. In another sense, those fellow humans, when they obstruct what I am meant to do, are no more my concern than the sun or the wind or a wild animal.

Other people, of course, can only ever obstruct some action of mine. They can’t be obstructions to my intentions and purposes because I can always adapt and find new ways forward. Which is to say: Our mind obviates every obstacle to our actions by turning it into an opportunity to innovate. What impedes an action of ours just ends up advancing it. Every obstacle in our way just helps us get ahead.

21

Treasure the best thing in the universe—the force that realizes and governs all that exists. Treasure what’s best in you as well. That personal “best thing” of yours does, in fact, share its nature with the greater cosmic one. You have, inside of yourself, a portion of the power that turns everything to its proper use. It’s what guides your life.

22

What doesn’t harm the state doesn’t harm the citizen. When you start seeing some action as harmful, break out your T square to assess its lack of rectitude. If it isn’t harming the state you’re in, it certainly isn’t harming you. If it is harming the state, don’t rage against the perpetrator. Show him what he has failed to see correctly.

23

Regularly contemplate the velocity with which emerging and existing things streak by and disappear for good. Matter is a river; it never stops flowing. Perpetual change is how it operates, and there are ten thousand different reasons for change. Almost nothing stands still, not even what’s right next to you.

On one side of you, the gaping maw of past time; on the other, the gaping maw of futurity into which everything will vanish.

How, then, are you not stupid when you gloat, obsess, or fret over things that will be troubling you only for a time, and a short time at that?

24

Remember how miniscule a smidgen you are of the whole of existence. How brief and fleeting an interval you have been allotted out of all of time. How limited a part you play in the run of destiny.

25

What’s it to me if someone has veered astray in his behavior toward me? Let him see to that. He has his own purposes, his own motivations. Unlike him, I at last have what our shared human nature wants me to have here in the present moment. I am doing what that nature wants me to be doing.

26

The ruling part of your soul, the master part, should remain unaffected by fleshly movements, whether they be spasms or relaxations. Let it draw a circle around itself so that it does not have to mix with them. Let it banish such fluctuations, each to its own place.

Still, when fleshly movements reach your mind by traveling up the reverse route that links up your soul-body whole, don’t struggle against them. Those are natural. All you have to do with such sensations is make sure your ruling power doesn’t label them “good” or “bad.”

27

“Live in harmony with the gods.” A man is doing just that so long as he can keep showing them his soul is at peace with his destiny. Remember that Zeus has given each of us a bit of himself, a guiding spirit, to be our scout and chaperone. It is made of mind and the Logos, and you should do whatever it asks.

28

Body odor that makes someone smell like a goat? Rotten breath? What are either of those aromas to you? So what if someone has an unkempt mouth and someone else neglected armpits? Those sorts of exhalations do indeed emanate from those sources.

But human beings have reason. We can take thought and learn the reasons why we are offensive.

That’s right! You have a share of reason, too, and can share your priorities with the offender’s. Teach him by example. Bring up the offense. If he catches on, you will have cured him, and there will be no more cause to cringe.

Just make sure you don’t carry on like you’re the star. Don’t prostitute your insight, either.

29

You can conduct your existence here on earth in the same way as you intend to conduct it once you have left this world. Just remember: If other people block your every attempt to live right, you should quit this existence. Just don’t do it because you feel you have been wronged.

The smoke is everywhere! I’m getting out of here!

Why do you think that death is a big deal?

Still, so long as a full blockade doesn’t shut you out, you should remain alive here and use your free will. Individual obstructionists here and there can’t keep you from doing what you have chosen to do. And you have chosen to act like a rational member of the human commonwealth.

30

The intelligence of the universe is also the intelligence of the human commonwealth. It has made lower beings subject to higher ones and linked us humans to one another in a sympathetic way. It is obvious that it makes some existences subordinate as it coordinates everything. It always gives everything exactly what it is meant to have. It is, in fact, what has brought us higher existences into a congruous relationship with each other.

31

How have you behaved in your life toward the gods? Toward your parents and siblings? Toward your wife and children? Toward your teachers and tutors? Toward your friends and your relatives in general? Toward your slaves? Stop and consider whether these lines from The Odyssey apply to your treatment of them:

His words and deeds have never crossed the line

with anyone.

Call to mind all you have been through and all you have endured. Then assume your life story and service to humanity have ended. Sum everything up with a backward look at all the beautiful things you have seen, all the pleasures and pains you have ignored, all the “glorious” distinctions you have disdained, and all the unkind people you have treated kindly.

32

Why would a knowledgeable, expert soul allow itself to be perplexed by ignorant, inept souls? What exactly makes for a knowledgeable, expert soul, anyway?

Awareness of

where things begin and end

and how the Logos pervades all matter and will go on running everything in the universe, cyclically in set epochs, into eternity.

33

You will soon be ash, skeleton, and a mere name, if even that. And a name is only a noise and the echo after it, anyway. And the things that people value are pointless, deteriorating, and as trifling as lapdogs biting each other and children squabbling or giggling very briefly before they start to cry. Trustworthiness, modesty, justice, and truthfulness—these are the virtues that lift us “from the wide ways of the earth to Mt. Olympus.”

What is it, then, that holds you to a world

where all you perceive is fluctuation and instability,

where organs of perception themselves are dull and gullible,

where your poor little soul is merely the breath of your blood,

where glory amounts to nothing, given the way people are here.

But what can I do?

Wait, in a grateful way, for annihilation or metamorphosis.

Still: How will I get by until the time is ripe?

By worshipping and exalting the gods,

by working to help your fellow humans,

by curbing yourself and carrying on.

And as for the things that have to do with your little bits of flesh and breath—they are neither yours nor meant for you.

34

You will flow easily through life if you just follow the right course and think and act in accord with its current. The souls of God and man, the rational beings, share these abilities:

to get around any dam across the river,

to grasp that good things come from a just character and just actions,

and to desire nothing more than that character and those actions.

35

If a certain wrongness and the consequences of that wrongness are not of my making and not harming the human commonwealth, why would I let them trouble me? What would “harm” to that commonwealth even mean, anyway?

36

Don’t let yourself get wholly caught up in sense impressions. Do everything you can to help people instead, each according to his plight. Just make sure that if someone’s perceived loss is of an object of indifference, you don’t see that loss as harm. That’s a bad habit.

When the old man in the comedy exits the stage to retrieve his adopted orphan’s toy top, he knows very well that it is of no real importance. You should feel the same way about such things.

You there man, orating at the podium, have you forgotten what the objects of indifference are?

“But the whole audience is fascinated with what I am saying right now.”

Is that any reason for you to be stupid, too?

37

“Once upon a time I was lucky wherever people found me.”

All that “lucky” means is that someone is ascribing good fortune to himself. Real good fortune consists of good habits in your soul, good motives, and good actions.

Book 6

1

The matter that makes up the universe is a compliant and readily malleable medium. The Logos that works in it has no reason whatsoever to turn it into something that’s wrong. The Logos, in fact, contains no wrong, never does anything wrong, and does no harm. It is under its direction that all things come into existence and reach perfection.

2

So long as you are doing what’s yours to do, it doesn’t matter

if you feel uncomfortably hot or cold,

if you are exhausted or fresh from a night’s rest,

if you are reviled or celebrated,

or if you are in the very act of dying or doing something

else.

Besides, dying is just one of the things we have to do in this life. In this matter as well we should use whatever we have before us in the present to make sure we do it correctly.

3

If you want to make sure the distinctive quality and value of something don’t escape you, look inwardly.

4

Everything in the universe will be turning into something else very, very soon. If it is an indissoluble whole, it will be sublimated into vapor. If it can fully disintegrate, it will be dispersed.

5

The Logos that runs this universe knows exactly what it is and what it is doing and what mediums it is using.

6

The noblest way to get revenge on an aggressor is to be nothing like him.

7

You should always be finding peace and pleasure in this primary pursuit:

serving the human commonwealth by going from one act to another with your mind on God.

8

Remember: The ruling power in you is self-starting and self-steering. It makes the things that appear before it what it wants them to be while in the act of making itself be what it wants to be.

9

What brings all things to perfection can only be Nature. The reason is: There isn’t any other kind of cause that could do all that it does, not an outside cause confining the universe or an inside cause confined by the universe or some wholly detached cause.

10

The universe is either (a) mishmash, confusion, and scatter or (b) unity, organization, and Providence.

If (a), why am I still dragging out my life in a chaos made of random combinations? Why would I care about anything other than “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”? Why would I let even that trouble me? No matter what I did, I’d end up mere “scatter” myself.

If (b), I should be worshipful and trust and rest in the power that runs that universe.

11

When circumstances put pressure on you, and you get all worked up, as they say, return to yourself immediately. Don’t jar with the rhythm of the universe one moment longer than a distraction demands. The way to learn the cosmic music is to come back home to it over and over again.

12

Imagine you have a stepmother in addition to your birthmother. Yes, you would take care of that stepmother, but your real mother would be the one you would be coming home to every day. So in your life there is the imperial court and there is philosophy. Let philosophy be the mother you return to, the one with whom you can relax. It makes the court tolerable to you, and you tolerable to the court.

13

It’s useful when you’re dining to see the flesh and other fare before you as, say, fish corpse, bird corpse, or pig corpse. Falernian wine, celebrated though it is, comes down to mere grape juice. Your imperial-purple robe (itself just sheep shearings) needed rock snail blood to dye it that color. By this method you can reduce sex, for example, to the chafing of a bit of exposed entrail and the spastic discharge of inguinal mucus. In addition to being capable of reaching out and touching a given external object, your thoughts can burrow into it until they reach its very essence.

You should go through your whole life looking at things that way. If something strikes you as praiseworthy at first, strip it bare. That way you expose what’s worthless about it by cutting out the myths behind any boast it might be making.

Delusion is very good at leading reason astray. When you are most sure some object deserves serious attention, you are most under its spell. Remember Crates’ words about Xenocrates.

14

The rabble mostly go for things that belong to the broadest categories: stones and timber, which are held together by physical cohesion, and figs, grapes, and olives, which are held together by their individual natures. People a little above them prefer things like flocks and herds of animals—things held together by the soul each species shares. The people still more refined prefer things grouped together by a rational soul, but rational only in respect to one art or trade or, say, the business of managing a large number of slaves.

Then there’s the man who cultivates a social as well as a fully rational soul. He never strays from it toward those other things. Nothing matters to him but keeping that soul focused on actions and states of being that serve reason and the human commonwealth. And he works with like-minded people to advance those causes.

15

Some things are rushing to enter existence, and others are rushing to leave it, and a part of what is arising is already extinguished. Currents and transformations are constantly refreshing the world in the same way as the unflagging spate of time is always turning boundless eternity into something new. Nothing stands still in this torrent. Why would you value any of the objects dashing by? Coveting an object in this world would be just like falling in love with a sparrow, only to find it has darted out of sight.

Human life is also fleeting like that. It is merely an exhalation from our blood and the inhalation of air. In fact, returning a breath you have taken to the air (something we are constantly doing) is no different than returning your whole ability to breathe to the elemental power from which you acquired it at birth. And that was just yesterday, as it were, or the day before.

16

Breathing through pores as plants do has no value. Breathing through a mouth and nose as cattle and wild animals do, no value. Receiving the imprint of sensory impressions, no value. Being a puppet to your urges, no value. Herding together with other humans, no value. Eating, no value. Eating, in fact, is no better than excreting what’s useless in the food we have eaten.

What does have value, then? Other people’s applause?

No value, just like the applause that comes from others’ tongues. (And that’s what popular acclaim comes down to: the clapping of tongues.)

Assume, then, you have dismissed fame as well. What remains that is worthwhile? As I see it: motivating and restraining yourself in accordance with your own distinct constitution. All pursuits and arts pursue that end.

The goal of every art: that what has been created readily serve the purpose for which it was created. Vintners, horse breakers, and dog trainers, for example, all work in that way. Teachers and pedagogy in general do the same. They’re seeking where the value is. When this pursuit goes well for you, you will never seek anything else.

Why won’t you stop ascribing value to everything that’s out there? So long as you keep doing that, you won’t be free, self-sufficient, and imperturbable. You will inevitably end up suspecting and resenting, even despising, the people who could steal some prized object from you. Still worse, you will plot against those who possess what you feel you need.

A man who covets objects like those can only ever be a muddle. Still worse, he faults the gods when he can’t acquire them. If you could just come to respect and value your mind, you would be both satisfied with yourself and living harmoniously with your fellow human citizens and the gods. You would, in fact, be using your time to exalt what the gods bestow and arrange.

17

There are the four elements always moving up and down and in a ring around us. Virtue, however, is active in none of them. It rises to heights closer to the gods by traveling smoothly up a path few people recognize.

18

People do such funny things. They go out of their way not to praise their contemporaries, even the ones they know. Oh, but to be praised by posterity, by people they have never met and will never meet—this is their obsession. That makes about as much sense as being miffed because people in the past didn’t praise you before you were born.

19

Don’t assume that, just because something’s too difficult for you, no one can do it. Believe, instead, that you can do everything that is both possible and correct for a human being to do.

20

Say you’re wrestling with someone for exercise, and he scratches and headbutts you. You wouldn’t mark him down in your mind as a bad person or punch him in revenge or suspect him of plotting to murder you. Yes, you would watch out for him in the future, but not as your personal enemy. You would just kindly get out of his way.

Let that reaction be a model for your relations with others. Overlook as much as you can in the behavior of those who “fight” you. You can always just get out of their way, as I’ve recommended. You don’t have to harbor suspicions or hold grudges.

21

If someone can prove to me, step-by-step with arguments, that I am thinking or acting wrongly, I will thank him and change my ways. All I want is to reach the truth, and the truth can do no harm. What’s harmful is living in delusion and ignorance.

22

I am doing what I am meant to do, and nothing outside of that can lead me astray. Nothing soulless. Nothing nonrational. Nothing adrift because it doesn’t know the way.

23

When dealing with animals and their nonrational activities and instincts, remember you have reason and they do not. Be magnanimous and generous to them.

When dealing with human beings, who do have reason, treat them as fellow members of the human commonwealth.

As for the gods: Call on them by name as you do whatever you are doing. The amount of time you spend behaving in these ways, though, doesn’t really matter. Even, say, three hours lived in this manner would be enough.

24

Alexander the Great and his stable boy came down to exactly the same thing when they died. They both either returned to the generative principle of the world or disintegrated into particles.

25

Work to grasp, en masse, the many things happening in the bodies and souls of you and all your fellow humans right now in the same brief moment of time. If you start there, you will not be astonished by the many more things transpiring outside us or by everything going on at once in the comprehensive oneness of the universe.

26

If someone asked you how to spell “Antoninus,” you wouldn’t enunciate, with condescending emphasis, each of the letters that are its elements. He’d likely feel offended if you did that, and you’d get angry in turn. Shouldn’t you, instead, just calmly tick off each of the letters in order?

Remember that your every duty in this world, just like that name, is a set of ordinal components. You should spend your days going through them. Don’t let outside noise distract you from your calculations and don’t get frustrated with those who find your method frustrating. Just carry on with completing the task before you in the correct way.

27

It’s cruel to prohibit human beings from pursuing the things they think are fitting and beneficial to themselves. So, yes, you are cruel, in a way, when you, in anger, prevent them from attaining what you know is off target. Those people really do think they are pursuing what fits and benefits them.

But they’re wrong.

All right, then: Rather than rage at them, teach them what is right with your words and behavior.

28

Death means no more reactions to sense impressions, no more urges pulling your strings, no more intellectual storytelling, and no more fleshly obligations.

29

Think about your life. It’s shameful that, though your body never stops operating, your mind does.

30

Make sure you aren’t dyed imperial purple. Don’t let yourself be Caesarified. It can happen. You should rather live your life as a simple, good, uncorrupted, earnest, unaffected, justice-loving, God-exalting, well-meaning, affectionate, and vigorous pursuer of all you are meant to achieve. Keep striving to remain what philosophy wants you to be. Be humble before the gods and helpful to your fellow humans. Life’s short, and the only fruit to grow in this life is a pious disposition and service to the human commonwealth.

Be a disciple of Antoninus Pius in all respects. Remember

how enthusiastic he was to do anything that accorded with reason

how consistently levelheaded he was

how pious he was

how his face was like sunny skies

how gentle he was

how immune he was to vainglory

how much he valued having a full understanding before taking action

how he never let any matter slip by without first having thoroughly examined and fully grasped it

how he never disparaged in revenge even those who had unjustly disparaged him

how he was never in a rush

how he refused even to listen to slander

how accurately he appraised people’s characters and actions

how he never griped, cowered, harbored suspicions, or argued for argument’s sake

how content he was with little: a modest living space, humble bedding, ordinary clothing, a simple diet, and a small entourage of servants

how he could be persistent and patient at the same time

how he didn’t need to take time out to relieve himself until the evening, at the usual hour, because he ate so little

how steadfast and consistent his behavior was toward his friends

how he respected freedom of speech even in those who opposed his plans

how grateful he was when someone suggested a better course of action

how his religious fervor was free of superstition.

Model your behavior on his, and at your death you will have as clear a conscience as he did.

31

Keep sobering up; keep calling yourself back to yourself. The next time you grasp, on waking, that what had been troubling you was only illusion, push yourself to see the waking world as the same as the one you dreamed.

32

All I am is a paltry body with a soul in it. Everything is a matter of indifference to the body because it lacks the ability to make distinctions. To the intellect, only occurrences outside its purview are matters of indifference. Everything else is its prerogative. When the intellect takes action, though, it should focus exclusively on the present moment. Its past and future activities are matters of indifference in the here and now.

33

The work that hands and feet do is not at odds with Nature so long as the feet are doing what belongs to feet and the hands are doing what belongs to hands. In just the same way the work that a human being does, as a human being, is not at odds with Nature so long as he is doing what is properly human. Since that work isn’t at odds with Nature, it can’t be bad for him in any way.

34

Oh, how many pleasures have been relished by cutpurses, rent boys, parricides, and tyrants.

35

Have you not seen that experts are accommodating to laypersons only up to a certain point? They refuse to let go of the objective of their craft. They just won’t give it up. Isn’t it absurd, then, that an architect, say, or a doctor has more respect for the objective of his craft than you, a human, do for your human objective—the one that links you to the gods?

36

Asia, Europe: the boondocks of the universe.

All ocean: a droplet in the universe.

Mt. Athos: a speck in the universe.

The moment we are all living right now: next to nothing in

eternity.

Everything: minuscule, unstable, and momentary.

The universal ruling power has generated everything either directly or as its first cause. Even such things as a lion’s snarling maw, poisons, and annoyances like nettles are, thus, by-products of what is divine and beautiful. Stop assuming things like that are foreign to what you worship. Trace everything back to its original source.

37

The man who has seen the present moment has witnessed all there is, both all that has happened going infinitely into the past and all that will happen going infinitely into the future. It’s all the same: All things are of one family and share one form of being.

38

Regularly contemplate the way the many things in the universe connect and interact with each other. Since they are all, in a way, woven together, they support each other like members of one household. Though they enter existence one after the other, they all share the same centripetal tension, inspiration, and cohesion.

39

There are the life events that have been apportioned to you. Live in harmony with them. There are the people whose destiny is to live at the same time as you. Love them. (Make sure you really feel it.)

40

Every manmade tool, implement, and container is doing just what it should be doing so long as it is doing what it was made for. The makers of such objects, however, don’t remain with them. The power that is generating the universe does remain with naturally assembled things—it is inside them. There is all the more reason, then, to admire it.

Know that, if you just keep living to do what that power wants, everything in you will be in harmony with its intentions. You will be just the same as all the other things in the universe operating in harmony with it.

41

You are still seeing things outside of your control as “good” or “bad.” Those bad things will happen to you; those good things will elude you. It’s inevitable. And you will just end up resenting the gods and detesting your fellow humans. That is, you will blame those who have caused (or whom you suspect of having caused) the bad thing to torment you or the good thing to slip from your grasp. We end up doing wrong when we regard matters of indifference as good or bad.

Work on perceiving only what’s in your control as good and bad. Then there will be no pretext left for reproaching the gods or declaring war on a fellow human.

42

All human beings are working together toward the same goal. Some do it wittingly and wisely; others do it unawares, “as if sleepwalking,” to quote, I believe, Heraclitus. (That passage goes on to say the oblivious people are “workers and coworkers in a universe where things are coming to be.”)

There are different ways we humans work with each other. Malcontents and the opponents and challengers of the cosmic current are also welcome here. The universe can use people like them, too. What you have to do is decide what kind of worker you will be. The director of our conglomerate universe, of course, can only use you correctly. He will certainly accept you as a part of his work and workforce.

Just make sure you don’t become like a cheap and farcical line in a comedy, even though, as Chrysippus once said, such lines contribute to a comedy’s humor.

43

Does the sun try to do the work of the rain? Does Asclepius do the work of Ceres, goddess of wheatfields? Think of a single star. Though it is unique, it still works with the other stars toward the greater astral goal, doesn’t it?

44

If the gods have made a plan for me that includes all that I must experience in my life, that plan is what’s best for me. It’s hard, in fact, even to conceive of a god without forethought. And as for the gods doing harm to me—of what benefit could that harm possibly be to them and to the common good, which is the focus of their providence?

If the gods haven’t made a personal plan for me, they certainly have made one that furthers the shared interests of human beings in general. In that case, my duty would be to welcome and love everything that occurs as an effect that leads back to them as a first cause.

If the gods haven’t made any plans at all (a sacrilegious hypothesis), we shouldn’t offer sacrifices to them, pray to them, or invoke them as witnesses to our contracts. We do those things because we assume they are present in this world and helping us live our lives.

Even if the gods don’t have any plans at all for us humans, I can still make plans for myself and keep looking out for what’s beneficial. I know that what’s beneficial to human beings is acting in accordance with our physical makeup and nature. It’s my nature that makes me a rational member of the human commonwealth.

In so far as I am the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, my home city is Rome. In so far as I am a human being, my home city is the world. What benefits these two cities—that alone is the good I pursue.

45

Everything that happens to you as an individual benefits the universe as a whole. That’s all you need to know.

If you’re still curious, though, you could note as well that what benefits one person benefits another. Just make sure you mean “benefit” in the colloquial sense that includes matters of indifference.

46

You know how much spectacles in the arena and other theaters sicken you. And you’ve seen them all before. The monotony of pageantry makes every performance tired. And that’s what you have faced your whole life through: everything upstage and downstage is a cliché replacing the cliché that came before it.

How much longer here?

47

Practice imagining the various kinds of people of every occupation and from every nation lying dead in their separate groups. First focus on Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Then move on to other categories of people. We are each required to undergo the change that will take us to the same place as so many

invincible orators;

serious philosophers like Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates;

warriors of yore and latter-day generals;

tyrants;

thinkers like Eudoxus, Hipparchus, and Archimedes;

and others with keen natures and high minds, industrious, roguish, and stubborn men, who mocked our mortal and momentary human lives: Menippus, for example, and others like him.

Now stop and think how long all those noteworthy people have been dead and buried. How is death anything terrible to them? How about to the others lying there nameless?

There’s only one thing in this world that’s worth anything:

living a just life, a good life, with sympathy even for liars and criminals.

48

If you need to cheer yourself up, think of the privilege you have of living with your contemporaries. One has vitality, another modesty, a third generosity, and a fourth still another virtue. Nothing lifts our spirits so much as seeing virtues emanate from exemplary people around us and interacting with those people as much as we can. Be sure to keep them close.

49

You no doubt are not at all frustrated because your body weighs only so many pounds instead of three hundred. Don’t be frustrated, then, because you will live only so many years and not longer. In just the same way as you are content with the amount of body you have been given, be content with the amount of time you have been given.

50

Yes, do your best to change the minds of other people, but you must act against their will whenever the principles of justice lead you in that direction. If someone then forcibly blocks you from doing what’s just, accept both the obstruction and the fact that it is painless to you. You can, in fact, use it to work toward some virtue other than justice.

Remember that you both set out conditionally and weren’t attempting the impossible.

What was it that I did accomplish?

You made a conditional attempt. You have achieved that. What we propose to ourselves comes to pass.

51

The lover of fame sees other people’s attention as the “good” thing he should pursue. The lover of pleasure finds his “good” in his own sensory experiences. The man of intellect, however, knows that his personal good is in his own actions.

52

You are entirely capable of having no opinion whatsoever about a matter and, thus, of suffering no disturbance in your soul because of it. Outside things, in themselves, do not have the power to cause opinions in you.

53

Make it your habit to listen intently to the words of others and step inside their minds as far as you can.

54

What does nothing for the hive does nothing for the bee.

55

Say that sailors are saying bad things about their captain or invalids are insulting their doctor. To what other authorities can those people turn? And how could that captain, then, work toward the safety of everyone on board and the doctor toward the health of his patients?

56

Very many of the people who entered the world around the time you did are already gone.

57

Honey tastes bitter to people tinged with jaundice. Water is frightening to people who have been bitten by a rabid dog. And a ball is a beautiful thing to children.

What thing out there is causing anger in me?

Do you really think that a wrong assessment in you matters less than black bile in the jaundiced and venom in the rabid?

58

No one can stop you from living in harmony with the logos of your human nature.

Nothing can happen to you that is at odds with the Logos of Nature itself.

59

Those people who want to win others over in their pursuit of whatever object by whatever means—what are they really like?

Time will erase every object out there before they know it. It has already erased so much.

Book 7

1

What is vice? You’ve certainly seen it before. Whatever happens, remember you’ve seen it before. Whether you look up high or at your feet, you’ll find the same general things that cram the histories of antiquity and the middle period are cramming the histories of contemporary life as well. Our cities and houses are brimming with contemporary history. It’s nothing new. All of it is familiar and fleeting.

2

The principles you live by are alive. They could only ever die if the ideas behind them were extinguished. It’s on you to make sure their fire keeps burning.

“I have the power to make my reaction to anything out there what it should be. Why, then, should I ever be disturbed? None of the things outside my mind have anything to do with my mind.”

Fully grasp that speech, and you will be standing on your own two feet.

You also have the power to bring your life back from the dead. Just look at things the way you had been looking at them, and it will begin again.

3

Frivolous parades; theatrical productions; flocks and other sorts of herds; target practice for spearmen; a marrow bone flung at lapdogs; breadcrumbs tossed into a fishpond; the hard labor of ants beneath their loads; the scurryings of surprised mice; marionettes controlled by wires. Your job is to be benevolent and respectful in the middle of all of that.

Just remember that a man is only worth as much as the things he has been pursuing.

4

When you are talking with others, you should pay heed to every word being said. When you are feeling an urge for something, you should pay heed to everything going on in support of it. In the latter case, you should be able to discern the intended goal straight away. In the former, you have to keep going deeper until you grasp what the words express.

5

Is my understanding equal to a task or not? If it is, my job is to use it as a tool bestowed on me by the gods to complete that task. If it isn’t, I should yield that work to someone better able to do it (so long as there’s no reason why I shouldn’t). I could also do the best I can by enlisting an expert who would, in conjunction with my ruling power, work toward providing, at the right time, what the human commonwealth requires.

In the end, all I do, whether on my own or in collaboration, should aim for this goal: what fits and furthers our shared human cause.

6

So many eminently glorious men have been consigned to oblivion. So many of their glorifiers have been gone a long time, too.

7

Don’t be ashamed to ask for help in doing your duty. Say you’re a soldier engaged in siege warfare. What if, because of a crippled leg, you can’t scale the fortifications alone but, if someone lends you a hand, you can?

8

Don’t let the future distress you. You will come to what’s to come if you must, and you will face it fortified with the same rational mindset with which you are facing the present moment.

9

Everything in this universe is woven together, and the tapestry is holy. There’s hardly anything alien to anything else. Dovetailed each with others, the many things make up the universe by fitting into it.

There is only one universe composed of all there is, and one God penetrating everything. There is one form of matter, one law, one Logos shared by us intelligent animals, and one truth. That is: if the different kinds of existences that partake in that Logos really are all working toward the same state of perfection.

10

All material objects will in no time disappear back into the matter of the universe. All that shapes that matter will in no time disappear back into the Logos that is running the whole of the universe. In no time all remembrance of what we have lost will be buried in eternity.

11

For us rational animals, acting in accordance with Nature and acting in accordance with the Logos are the same thing.

12

Stand on your own two feet—no crutches.

13

Just as the limbs in a composite body are parts of one thing, so all of us separate human beings are designed to work together in one shared pursuit. You will sooner fully grasp this fact if you regularly repeat these words to yourself:

“Like all my fellow rational animals I, as a limb, contribute to the might of the universe.”

If you change the vowel and say you are just a mote in the universe, you clearly don’t love your fellow humans with all your heart. The performance of good deeds would still not be what’s giving joy to your life. You’d be doing them only out of a sense of duty and not yet in the conviction that the effort is also benefiting you.

14

Let any external thing that so desires go ahead and touch those parts of me that can feel that sort of impact. What’s affected in me can complain if it wants. So long as I don’t see that encounter as “bad,” I haven’t been harmed by it. It’s entirely in my power to stop seeing things as “bad.”

15

I have a duty to be a good person regardless of what people are saying about me or doing to me. I should be like an emerald (or, say, gold or clothing dyed imperial purple) that’s always repeating:

“No matter what people say or do, I must remain an emerald. I must stay true to my color.”

16

Your ruling power doesn’t make trouble for itself. It doesn’t, say, frighten itself or make itself succumb to desire. If someone is taking action to terrorize or torment it, let him do his worst. It can always, by controlling its assumptions, refuse to go out and confront such things.

As for your poor little body, it should watch out, if it can, to make sure it doesn’t suffer. If it does, let it speak its piece.

Then there’s your bit of soul: Capable of feelings like fear or pain, it has the power to form opinions in response to them. It will escape suffering, however, if you just keep it from making judgments like those.

Your ruling power is fully self-sufficient. It doesn’t need anything outside itself. If it does feel a need, it has made that need for itself. If it is disturbed or impeded, it has disturbed or impeded itself.

17

Happiness in a person is either a benevolent guardian spirit or a perfected ruling power.

Why, then, imagination, are your figments still affecting me? By all the gods in heaven, go back the way you came. I don’t need you, and you’re only visiting out of habit, anyway. I’m not mad at you.

Still: Just go.

18

You fear change? What could possibly happen in this world without some change being involved? What could be dearer or more fitting to Nature as a whole than change? You can’t take a warm bath without the firewood under the tub undergoing it. You can’t take in nourishment without your food undergoing it. Does anything useful happen without it?

Don’t you see that change operates in you in the same way and with the same necessity as it does in Nature as a whole?

19

The material of the universe, like a torrent, flows through all physical bodies. They are of one nature with Nature itself and work interdependently, like the limbs of our bodies.

Think of how many Chrysippuses, how many Socrateses, and how many Epictetuses time has swallowed. You should see every person, every thing in the world, from just the same perspective.

20

I have only one worry: that I do something not meant for my human design or in a way not meant for it or at a time not meant for it.

21

Very soon you will have forgotten all there is. Very soon all there is will have forgotten you.

22

Humans have a special power that lets them love even transgressors. This feeling arises when you see the person who has wronged you as family or as acting unintentionally or out of ignorance. And, of course, you will both be dead and gone soon, anyway. But what’s most extenuating is the fact that he didn’t do you any real harm. He didn’t damage your ruling power.

23

Nature uses the matter in the universe to shape, as if in wax for a ceramic mold, what will be, say, a pony. After shattering that, Nature uses the raw materials from it to make, say, a tree, then a human being, then whatever else. Each of these creations survives for a very short time. Just as there is nothing terrible in a clay vessel being made, so there is nothing terrible in its being shattered.

24

Scowling is very much at odds with Nature. And if you keep doing it, the good looks die away from your face and soon are so thoroughly extinguished that they can never be kindled again. But try to focus on just this one point: Scowling is not rational.

(If we lacked the power to recognize what’s wrong, what reason would there be for us to go on living?)

25

In the course of its work Nature will soon dissolve, by means of change, all the many things you see before you. From their materials it will then make other things and, in turn, from their materials still other things in order to keep refreshing the universe.

26

The moment someone does you wrong, stop and consider what his assumptions were about what’s good and what’s bad. If you do that, you’ll feel empathy with him instead of shock or anger. The reason is: You yourself no doubt rate as good either exactly the same thing as he does or something very like it. You’ll have to be indulgent with him then.

And if you’ve moved beyond seeing others’ actions as good or bad, you’ll all the more readily forgive him for looking at things the wrong way.

27

Here’s what you should do instead of imagining what it would be like if you had things you don’t have:

Pick out, first, the best of the items you do have on hand. Then think how zealously you would be trying to acquire it if you didn’t have it. At the same time make sure you aren’t so very pleased with it that you fall into the habit of overvaluing it. That would mean you’d be upset if it ever wasn’t there.

28

Withdraw into yourself. The nature of your ruling power is such that it is content when it is acting justly. That’s how it sustains its serenity.

29

Black out what you are imagining. Stop it from pulling your strings. Draw a circle around the present moment. Realize what is transpiring for you and others. Break everything down into what makes it up and what gives it shape. Remind yourself of your final hour.

And leave the wrong that person did to you back where the wrong was done.

30

Stretch your thoughts out toward what is being said.

Slip your intellect into what is happening and what makes it happen.

31

Use simplicity, modesty, and indifference to everything that lies between virtue and vice to cleanse yourself. Love your fellow humans. Heed divine guidance.

Democritus once said, “Everything is a convention of human thought except the four elements.” It is helpful to regard all non-elemental things as human convention, but very few, in fact, are.

32

Concerning death: It is dispersal if we are particulate. If we each are a unity, it is either obliteration or relocation.

33

Concerning pain: Unbearable sufferings carry us off for good; the rest become more bearable with time. And your mind can maintain its composure by walling itself off. And pain can’t damage your ruling power, anyway. As for those parts of you that think pain “harms” them, let them give their reasons if they can.

34

Concerning fame: Study the minds of fame-seekers until you know what kind of people they are and the sorts of things they hunt and shun. Think of how new sand piling up on a beach blots out the earlier sand. It’s just the same in life: Later deeds, as they accrue, soon blot out the earlier ones.

35

“Say there is a person who can take in all time and all matter at once from the lofty prospect of his mind. Do you think human life would be of much consequence to him?”

“Impossible,” he said.

“How about death? Would that be of any consequence to him?”

“None at all.”

36

“Doing good deeds and getting trashed for them—that’s what’s fit for a king.”

37

Your face is out there trying to regulate and compose itself in obedience to your mind, and your mind doesn’t even know how to regulate and compose itself. What a disgrace!

38

“How pointlessly we rage and rail

at things that can’t care how we feel.”

39

“Come and share your joyfulness

with gods who cannot die and us.”

40

“There is a reaping of lives

like that of teeming wheat.

One stalk survives;

one stalk does not.”

41

“If the gods no longer see

to my two sons and me,

their disconsideration

surely has a reason.”

42

“I’ve got what’s just and good

right here by my side.”

43

“Don’t join the others in the dirge.

Don’t feel the throb of their death march.”

44

“I would give that man the right response instead:

You are not doing justice to this question, sir, if you are arguing that a man who’s worth anything should calculate the odds of a future action resulting in his death. He should focus exclusively on whether his actions are just or unjust and whether they belong to a good man or a bad one.”

45

“Here’s the truth, men of Athens: when a man is standing at a post he has assumed (by his own choice or under his general’s orders) he must remain there in harm’s way. His calculations should conclude that the shame of desertion is worse than death or anything else.”

46

“But consider this, fine sir: Integrity and goodness in general are completely separate from whether someone dies or doesn’t. Maybe a man who is truly a man shouldn’t care how long he survives. Maybe he shouldn’t cling to his life. Maybe, when it comes to matters of life or death, he should trust in divinity and heed what the old wives have to say: ‘There’s not one man alive who will elude his destined end.’ Maybe he should focus on this instead: how to live the best life he can in the time he has left.”

47

Look upward and swivel through the travels of the stars. Practice noticing how the four elements turn into one another. Thoughts like those wash out the squalor of life on Earth.

48

A fine sentence by Plato:

“If you want to speak or write about what it means to be human, you should survey life on Earth as if from a mountaintop:

assemblies, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, demises, courthouse uproars, wastelands, barbarians of various breeds, festivals, dirges, marketplaces—the whole clutter of things and concord of opposites.”

49

Look backward and study how the various forms of government have alternated. You can use what you learn there to predict future fluctuations. They will arise from the same sorts of things, so they won’t break the recurring rhythm. It’s all one whether you observe humanity for forty years or ten thousand. There would be nothing more for you to see.

50

“What Earth has mothered comes home to the Earth,

but what the seed cast from the stars brings forth

goes home to the sublime vault of its birth.”

Or a conglomeration of atoms breaks down into elemental components that feel nothing and go their separate ways.

51

“There they are, trying to divert the river’s path

with food, drink, magic spells, like such things sidetrack death.”

“There is a storm wind blowing from the gods’ domain.

Work without wailing, and you’ll weather it just fine.”

52

“No, that man’s merely better at wrestling.”

He isn’t better at helping people, controlling himself, facing what happens, and forgiving the transgressions of others.

53

The Logos links humans to the gods. When you are acting in accordance with it, there’s nothing for you to worry about. There’s no basis for suspecting an action is harmful if, in order to reap the benefit of doing it, you take the proper path and stay inside of what human beings are designed to do.

54

No matter the hour or where you might be, you have the power to be pleased with what is happening to you and to give thanks to the gods. You have the power to be just to the people around you. You have the power to handle sensory impressions in the here and now so skillfully that nothing unvetted ever sneaks in.

55

You shouldn’t pry, with lateral glances, into what the ruling powers of others are telling them to do. No, stare straight ahead at the destination to which

Nature as a whole is guiding you by giving you what you experience;

your own nature is guiding you by giving you your distinct duties as a human.

Every being should do, step-by-step, what its design requires. Nonrational beings are created to serve us rational beings because lower species are in every instance created to serve the higher. We rational beings, though—we’ve been created to serve each other.

The primary objective built into human design is service to the human commonwealth. The second is resistance to the passions of the flesh. The rational and intellectual capacity in us, in fact, possesses a special power that allows it to wall itself off and refuse to succumb to the activities of the senses and appetites (which animals possess as well). Our intellectual capacity wants to lead, not be usurped by such things. And it is right to feel that way. It was, in fact, created by Nature to put those things to use. The third objective of our rational design is to be free of rashness and delusion. By cleaving to these three objectives, your ruling power will travel the straight path and come into its own.

56

Imagine that you’re dead, that your lifetime has just ended. Now let Nature tell you how to live what you’ve got left.

57

All you have to do is love what happens to you, what was woven for you. Where could you find a better fit?

58

As things happen to you, think of people who have had the same things happen to them. They resented those experiences. They found them shocking and wrong. And where did they end up? Absolutely nowhere. Why would you want to react like they did?

Leave emotional fluctuations like those to the people who excite or succumb to them. You should be wholly focused on how to make use of what is happening to you. You’ll get the best out of it that way. It’ll be the medium you work in.

Just make sure you pay attention. Your greatest need should be for your deeds to be those of a virtuous person. Bear these two truths in mind as well: Your actions matter; their circumstances do not.

59

Keep digging into yourself. You can be sure that goodness will be continuously bubbling up out of the wellspring in you, if you just keep on digging.

60

Your deportment should be composed and never ungainly, whether you are in motion or at rest. What your face expresses when your mind is giving it a look of intelligence and dignity—that’s what you want in your whole body. Just make sure, too, that what you exhibit isn’t forced.

61

The art of life is more like wrestling than dancing because you have to stand ready and never let what’s coming at you take you down, no matter how unexpected it might be.

62

If you find yourself wanting recognition from others, start paying close attention to their characters and the kinds of ruling powers they have. Once you have seen all the way into the wellsprings of their urges and assumptions, you won’t want their recognition any longer, and you also won’t blame them for the wrong they do unawares.

63

Plato says: “No soul ever chooses to be devoid of the truth.” So also no soul ever chooses to be devoid of justice, self-control, kindness, and the other virtues. It is very, very important that you keep remembering the nonconsent in others’ souls because it will make you gentler with them.

64

Apply this thought whenever you are feeling pain:

“There’s nothing shameful about this feeling. It isn’t injuring the intelligence at the helm of me.”

Pain can’t damage anything in your mind that has to do with the Logos and the human commonwealth.

There’s also this saying of Epicurus to rescue you from most kinds of pain:

“It’s neither intolerable nor interminable so long as you keep its time limit in mind and stop your imagination from making it smart more than it actually does.”

Remember this as well: Many things that strike us as merely unpleasant are just the same as pain, though we don’t think of them as such: listlessness, say, or heat exhaustion or loss of appetite. If something like that is starting to annoy you, say to yourself: “I am giving in to pain.”

65

Don’t feel the same way about the savages as the savages feel about human beings.

66

When it comes to character, how do we know that Telauges was not a better man than Socrates? Yes, Socrates

died in a more illustrious manner,

more deftly debated the sophists,

more resolutely withstood a frosty winter night,

nobly chose to defy the order he was given to arrest Leon of Salamis,

and “swaggered about the streets of Athens” (though one could easily doubt this last detail is true).

But what you should look at instead is the sort of soul Socrates had. Did he

find fulfillment in being just to men and pious to the gods?

neither revile men’s wickedness nor slavishly serve their ignorance?

neither see the experiences Nature gave him as foreign to himself nor groan through them like they were hard to take?

never allow his mind to suffer with the sufferings of his flesh?

67

Nature mixed your soul-body compound in such a way that you are free to zone off parts of it and make only what’s truly yours your own. It’s entirely possible that you become as godlike as a man can be, and no one ever knows. That’s what you need to keep remembering, along with this: You can live a fulfilling life with a narrow range. Yes, you have abandoned your hope of becoming a logician and a scientist, but that’s no reason to give up on mastering how to be independent and self-controlled, how to serve the human commonwealth and how to agree with the gods.

68

You can live a life of great serenity, a life liberated from outside coercion, though the whole world’s population is crying out against you, though wild beasts are tearing the clay that has congealed around you limb from limb. Even in situations like those, nothing should prevent your mind from maintaining its tranquility, appraising everything in its environs with precision, and using whatever is at hand.

The assessor in you should say to everything he encounters:

“I know what you amount to in actual fact, though your reputation among most people says you’re something else.”

The workman in you should say to everything that meets his scrutiny:

“You’re just what I was looking for! Whatever presents itself to me is material for works of virtue that serve the human commonwealth and accord with the Logos—that is, material for practicing the art that links humans to the gods.”

What’s happening right now is a medium fit for both gods and humans to work in. It’s a familiar and elastic substance, not a foreign and intractable one.

69

Perfection of character comes down to this:

living each day like it is your last, without hysteria, without apathy, and without histrionics.

70

Immortal though they are, the gods don’t resent having to put up with so many swarming despicable human beings day in, day out, for ages and ages now. What’s more, the gods help humans in all sorts of ways. But you there, doomed to prove mortal at any moment, reject your fellow humans, though you’re just another despicable yourself.

71

It would be ludicrous if someone weren’t even trying to escape from his own wickedness (something he can actually do) but was trying to escape from the wickedness of others (something that can never be done).

72

Linked as it is to the Logos and the human commonwealth, your inner power duly dismisses as inferior whatever it deems to be nonintellectual and asocial.

73

When you have done someone good, and he has enjoyed the benefit of it, why do you look for some third thing beyond that? Only a fool would expect acclaim or something in return when he has done a good deed.

74

No one ever grows tired of receiving what’s beneficial, and bestowing benefits is in accordance with Nature. So you should never grow tired of receiving what’s beneficial by doing what’s beneficial to others.

75

Conglomerate Nature at some point stirred itself to create a universe. And now

either everything is proceeding sequentially from that act

or nothing fits into any sort of plan, not even the most fundamental goals toward which the cosmic ruling power is directing its efforts.

If you keep calling those alternatives to mind, you will more serenely face the many things that cross your path.

Book 8

1

To prevent conceitedness, start by thinking this:

“It’s too late now—you won’t be able to live your whole life, or at least your whole adult life, as a philosopher. Plus, it’s obvious to everyone, even yourself, that your current lifestyle is far from the philosophical ideal. You’ve been so big a muddle, in fact, that it would now be difficult for you to earn the title of philosopher. Your whole situation is in the way of it, anyway.”

Then, once you have come to see, truly, how matters stand, throw away your entire awareness of how you come off to others. Henceforth be satisfied if you spend the rest of your life, however long that might be, doing what Nature asks. Focus, then, on knowing what Nature is asking for—no distractions.

You yourself know how far you’ve ranged in your experiences, and yet you’ve never found “the good life” anywhere, not in logic, opulence, celebrity, or sensual indulgence.

Where is it, then?

It’s wherever you are doing what your human nature demands.

And how can you be sure you are doing that?

By using principles to guide your intentions and actions.

Which principles might those be?

The ones that teach you good from bad. To wit:

What’s good is to do what makes you just, self-controlled,

manful, and independent.

What’s bad is to do the opposite of that.

2

Before you start doing any action, ask yourself the following questions:

“How does it pertain to me as an individual?”

“Will I end up regretting having done it?”

Then go on: “I will be dead any moment now, and then no more everything. What more could I want from life than to do the work at hand as a being who is intelligent, concerned with serving the human commonwealth, and living by the laws the gods propound?”

3

How do Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Pompey the Great stack up against the philosophers Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? The latter three examined what they encountered, both what makes it up and what gives it shape, and their ruling powers were liberated. As for the former three, they were worriers over many things, slaves to many things.

4

Go ahead, explode with rage. Just know that people will go on doing exactly what they had been doing all the same.

5

First make sure that you aren’t disturbing yourself. Remember all is well because all things are happening in accordance with Nature. And you will be a nothing that is nowhere in no time, anyway, like Hadrian and Augustus before you.

Next fix your gaze on the matter at hand and see what it really is. You should keep in mind the while that you must be a good person and do what your human nature asks of you without deviation and with as much justice as you can muster. Make sure, as well, that your actions are kind, self-controlled, and untheatrical.

6

Nature’s task is to use change to move things that are in a certain state in this environment to a different state elsewhere. That is, to transfer them from here to there. Everything is in flux, but there’s no need to be afraid of anything unprecedented happening. All the things that can happen here are old news. Even their proportions stay the same.

7

A given thing is in a state of fulfillment when it is traveling down the right path for its nature. You, with your human nature, are doing just that when you are

letting nothing false or uncertain into what you are imagining;

focusing your energies on serving the human commonwealth;

limiting your appetites and distastes to what you can sate and avoid;

welcoming the experiences Nature has apportioned to you.

Your human nature fits in as a part of aggregate Nature in the same way that a leaf’s nature fits in as a part of a plant’s nature. The difference is that a leaf’s nature is to be insentient, nonrational, and restricted in movement. Human nature, in contrast, means unrestricted movement and intellectual awareness. It also means just actions whenever you are giving every single matter exactly the proportion of time, resources, intention, energy, and contingency planning it merits.

What you should look to, however, is not whether two things are identical in every detail but how one whole thing (with its various components) relates to another aggregate whole.

8

You may not have time to sit down and read at your leisure, but you can always curb your anger, overcome pain and pleasure, and dismiss all thought of glory. What’s more, you can be patient with senseless and ungrateful people. You can even care for them.

9

Make sure that no one, not even you yourself, hears you disparaging court life any longer.

10

Regret is a kind of self-reproach for having missed out on something beneficial. What’s beneficial can only be good as well, and every upstanding, truly good person should be seeking it. Such a person could never regret having missed out on some pleasure, though. Pleasure is neither beneficial nor good.

11

This thing here with its own distinct design—what is it in and of itself? What mode of existence is it? What is it made of? What molded it into the shape it has? What is it doing in this world? How long will it last?

12

Whenever you don’t want to get out of bed, remind yourself that doing deeds that serve the human commonwealth accords both with human design and human nature. And sleeping? That’s something even nonrational animals do. The actions a being does in accordance with its distinctive nature are more specific and natural to it than other actions. They also go more smoothly.

13

Constantly (that is, as much as you can), use your knowledge of the natural world, the passions, and logic to interrogate every sensory impression that surfaces in your mind.

14

Ask yourself this question every time you meet a new person:

“What beliefs does he have about what is good and what is bad?”

Once you know he has such and such beliefs about pleasure and pain (and what causes them) and such and such beliefs about fame, infamy, dying, and being alive, it won’t be remarkable or surprising to you when he acts in such and such ways. Plus, your understanding of him will remind you that he can’t help acting in those ways.

15

It would be ridiculous if it struck someone as strange that fig trees produce figs. Consider yourself just that ridiculous when you find anything the fruitful universe yields strange. It would be ridiculous in the same way if a fever seemed strange to a doctor or a headwind seemed strange to a helmsman.

16

Remember that if you change your mind because someone has set you straight, you aren’t any less independent. The change was your own doing, made at your own instigation, as your own decision, in response to your own intellect.

17

Say it’s in your power to do a particular action. The question then becomes: What reason is there for you to do it? And if someone else has the power to do that action, and you don’t, what in the world could you blame for that? The atoms? The gods? Faulting either would be insane.

You shouldn’t be blaming anything at all. Set an offender straight if you can. If you can’t, then set the matter itself straight. If you can’t even do that, what use was the concept of blame in the first place? Don’t waste your time on pointless things.

18

Things don’t fall out of the universe when they die. Since they stay here, they also undergo change here by disintegrating into component parts that serve as the raw materials of the universe (as they did of you). Yes, those materials are constantly undergoing change, but you never hear them complain.

19

Every single thing—every horse, for instance, or grapevine—exists for a reason. Why is that fact still surprising to you? Helios himself would say, “I exist for a reason,” and so would the other gods. You exist for a reason, too. What is it? Pleasure-seeking? Check in and find out if the intellect in you will permit that occupation.

20

Nature looks out for all things at every stage of their development—not just their beginnings and endings, but their trajectories in between. A boy who is tossing a ball into the air and catching it on the way down has the same attentiveness.

What’s good about the ball ascending? What’s bad about it descending or hitting the ground? Why’s it better for a bubble to remain a bubble? What’s wrong with it bursting?

Lanterns are like that, too.

21

Turn everything inside out and assess what sort of thing it is. What will it be like when it is old, ill, or distressed?

Praiser and praised, nostalgist and nostalgia, all have short lifespans. And they exist here in the sticks of the universe—a land where people are at odds with each other and a man is at odds with himself. The whole Earth is just a speck in the universe, anyway.

22

Focus on what’s in front of you, regardless of whether it’s a situation, an action, doctrine, or the words that make that doctrine up.

(And, yes, you do deserve what you are suffering—you are the one who keeps pushing the pursuit of good personhood back from today to tomorrow.)

23

Am I doing something? Then what I am doing should be good for humanity in general. Am I experiencing something? Then I should accept it because it has come from the gods out of the causal power that weaves everything together.

24

Think of how bathing presents itself to your senses: the oils, sweat, and grunge; the sludge-tinged water. Everything about it is revolting. Such is everything presented to us in every part of life.

25

After laying Verus to rest, Lucilla died in turn. After laying Maximus to rest, Secunda died in turn. After laying Diotimus to rest, Epitynchanus died in turn. After laying Faustina to rest, Antoninus died in turn. It’s always the same: After laying Hadrian to rest, Celer died in turn.

And one must ask where all the clever, prescient, and self-important people ended up? (You know, authorities like Charax, Demetrius, Eudaemon, and others of their ilk.) Each lived for a day and died ages ago. Some of them weren’t even briefly remembered. Others were reduced to the legends about them. Still others have been forgotten even by legend.

Always remember that death means

either your breath-body compound completely disintegrates

or your whisper of breath, when it isn’t entirely snuffed out, undergoes change and travels from its old post to a new one elsewhere.

26

Human happiness consists of fulfilling duties specific to human beings. It’s a human duty

to act benevolently toward other humans,

to scorn the vagaries of the five senses,

to discern which sensory impressions are trustworthy,

to admire both Nature as a whole and everything going on inside it.

27

You have three sorts of connections:

one to the receptacle surrounding you,

another to the divine catalyst that is making everything happen,

a third to the people with whom you coexist.

28

Pain is a negative experience that affects either the body or the soul. If the body, let the body go ahead and protest. If the soul, the soul has the power to sustain its calm and clarity by refusing to recognize the pain as bad. The judgments we make, and the urges, desires, and aversions we feel are inside of us. No harm from outside of us intrudes there.

29

Keep repeating these words to yourself when you need to blot out what you are imagining about things:

“It’s wholly up to me right now whether I wipe feelings of malice and need—every disturbance—out of my soul. I will see everything as it truly is, instead, and focus on using it exactly as it deserves to be used.”

Remember that your nature has given you that much control.

30

When you are addressing others, whether it be in the Senate House or one-on-one, express yourself fittingly and without affectation. Use honest speech.

31

The people in the court of Emperor Augustus—his wife and daughter, his progeny and progenitors, his sister, Agrippa, his relatives, associates, and friends like Arius and Maecenas, the physicians, the priests in charge of the sacrificial rites—they’re all dead. That whole court is dead.

Then move on to other dead courts and the extinction of whole groups of people. The family of Pompey the Great, for instance. Then think of one of those grave inscriptions that ends “. . . the last of his line.” Think of how that dead man’s ancestors took pains to ensure there would always be a successor, but someone had to be the last. And here again we find the extinction of an entire group of people.

32

You must make your life out of your actions as you do them one by one. It’s enough, though, if each action serves its purpose as best as present circumstances allow. There isn’t a single person out there who can stop you from serving your actions’ purposes.

But something outside of me will get in the way.

No obstacle can keep you from acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom.

Yes, but an action of mine could end up thwarted in some other way.

Accept it then and prudently divert the course of your present action toward what you can actually achieve. That way you come up with a new plan that better accords with the situation in question.

33

Accept things humbly; surrender them willingly.

34

Imagine a severed hand or foot or head lying on the ground separate from its body. A man makes himself exactly like a detached body part when he does all he can

to cut himself out of the universe by rejecting something that has happened to him;

to act against the common interest.

Say you’re in self-exile from the cosmic unity. You were born to be a part of it, but you have cut yourself out of it, anyway. The remarkable thing is that you can rejoin the universe at any time. God has bestowed the power of cosmic reattachment exclusively on the human components of the universe. Stop and consider what this gift of his to humankind reveals about his goodness. We have the power both

not to sever ourselves from the conglomerate universe in the first place

and to return to our places and resume our former roles if we ever do cut ourselves out of the whole.

35

Nature has given us rational animals other abilities as well, including this one:

In just the same way that Nature accommodates obstructions and adverse situations by making them parts of itself and assigning them purposes, so each of us rational animals can make every impediment a medium we work in. We can use what is there blocking us in the way it is meant to be used.

36

Don’t overwhelm yourself by picturing your life all at once. Don’t even think about all the sorts of troubles that have arisen for you in the past and will no doubt recur in the future. Rather, as you encounter individual difficulties one by one here in the present moment, ask yourself

“What in this is insufferable or unworkable?”

To have to admit that you can’t handle it would be embarrassing.

Remind yourself that neither the future nor the past is oppressing you. Discomfort is only ever in the present moment. And you can reduce it to next to nothing if you zone it off and shame your mind for having trouble holding out against something you have stripped down to its essentials.

37

Are Panthea and Pergamus still holding a vigil over Verus’ tomb? Are Chabrias and Diotimus still holding a vigil over Hadrian’s tomb? It would be absurd if they were.

Suppose they are still there, all the same. How could the dead be in any way aware of their presence? And even if the dead could be aware of their presence, why would they be happy about it? And if they were happy about it, would their mourners live forever? No, they have all been destined since birth to grow into old women and men and then die, too. And what would the dead do when the mourners who had been making them happy were gone?

That’s all just the reek of decay from sacks of guts, anyway.

38

If you’ve got sharp vision, use it! Just be sure “to add wise judgment,” like the poet says.

39

When I look at the virtues that can arise in a rational animal, I don’t see a single one that stands opposite justice. I do see one that stands opposite indulgence: self-control.

40

If you can cast out the assumptions behind what says “pain” to you, you will be fully fortified.

Who is there speaking?

Your personal logos.

But I don’t belong to the Logos!

Clearly.

And then your logos can go on not feeling any pain. Whenever some other part of you feels something is amiss, you can just leave it to its own assumptions.

41

Obstructions to an animal’s sense perceptions and urges are detrimental according to animal nature. There are also obstructions that are detrimental given the way plants are designed. Along the same lines, obstructions to rationality are detrimental to a rational nature.

Now apply what all that entails to yourself:

Is pain or pleasure gripping you?

Let your senses see to that.

Is something in the way of what an intention of yours is after?

If you look at that intention unconditionally, yes, the obstruction of it is a bad thing for a rational being. But if you take into account what obstructions usually amount to, you will recognize that you haven’t been harmed or even impeded.

No one can thwart the operations of your mind. Fire, iron, tyranny, slander, and everything else can’t even touch it. Once it has Empedocles’ “perfectly round sphere” around it, that sphere stays round.

42

I don’t deserve to keep causing pain in myself because I have never intentionally caused pain in another.

43

Different people enjoy different things. I enjoy keeping my ruling power healthy, and that means I

must never turn my back on any human or on any of the things that can happen to humans;

must look on everything with kindly eyes;

must accept everything and use it as it deserves to be used.

44

Gift this present moment to yourself. The ones out there chasing eternal fame don’t get that people in the future will be just the same as the contemporaries they find so unappreciative. And they will all end up dying eventually, anyway. What’s it to you if people’s voices echo your name or if they’ve made such and such assumptions about you?

45

Whisk me away and drop me wherever you want. I will be right there still keeping the divinity in me happy. That power remains content so long as its current state and sequential actions accord with its design.

Is anything here worth my soul’s lapse into badness and a degradation characterized by groveling, grasping, cringing, and rattling imagined chains? What in the world could be worth such reactions?

46

Nothing can happen to a human being that isn’t meant for a human being. Nothing can happen to an ox that isn’t meant for an ox. Nothing can happen to a grapevine that isn’t meant for a grapevine. Nothing can happen to a stone that isn’t meant for a stone.

What is happening to things in the world can only be customary and natural, so why would you ever get upset about any of it? Nature never burdens you with more than what you are built to endure.

47

If you think some external object is distressing you, it isn’t. Your appraisal of it is. Whether or not you get rid of the distress is up to you. If what’s distressing you is inside of you, who’s stopping you from correcting your opinion about it? If what’s distressing you is your failure thus far to complete a rationally justified action, why not just get back to work on it instead of wasting time being distressed?

But what if something stronger than I am is in the way?

Still, don’t get distressed. It’s not your fault that you can’t do that deed.

But what if I can’t go on living without completing the task?

Then you should leave this life. You should die as happily as someone who dies a success. And you should be grateful for the obstacles, too.

48

Remember that your ruling power is invincible once it has retreated into itself and found contentment there. It does nothing but what it wants to do, even when operating on a nonrational basis. Just think what it will be when it starts using reason and circumspection to assess everything.

A mind emancipated from the passions is a mountaintop citadel. There’s no stronger position for a man, no securer bastion to which he can retreat for the remainder of his life. A man who isn’t even aware that this impregnable mental fortress exists is merely ignorant. The man who does know about it but still doesn’t retreat into it—there’s no saving him.

49

Once initial impressions have given you their report, don’t comment on it afterward in your mind. Say it’s been reported that a certain person is disparaging you. What hasn’t been reported is that his disparagement is not harmful to you in any way. Say you can see a child of yours is ill. Go ahead and see that, but don’t see the risk of losing him.

Stick always with initial impressions. Refrain from commenting on them in your mind, and there will be no negative consequences in you. If you must add commentary, make sure you do it as someone who is well-acquainted with the many things that can happen in the universe.

50

This cucumber tastes bitter.

Throw it out.

This road has thistles on it.

Try to avoid them.

That’s it. Don’t go on to ask, “But why are such things even in this universe?” The people out there who know Nature would laugh in your face if they heard you ask that question. It’d be like you were in a carpenter’s or a shoemaker’s workshop and were complaining about having to see wood shavings or leather trimmings on the floor. The difference is that, whereas carpenters and shoemakers can throw their scraps out, there is no outside Nature.

Here’s what’s most fascinating about the cosmic art: Nature, a self-contained entity, takes all the things that are aging, decaying, and obsolescing and turns them into Nature. It uses all that as material to make new things, so it needs no external donor of substances and no internal receptacle for the disposal of decaying matter. Nature is fully self-fulfilled in its own space, in its own materials, and in its own art.

51

Don’t be a straggler in action, a babbler in conversation, or a wanderer in what you are imagining. And make sure your soul doesn’t cringe or strain itself. And don’t let yourself get so busy in life you never take a break.

Say they are hacking you, killing you, cursing your name. For all that, they’ve got nothing that can stop your mind from being chaste, reasonable, self-controlled, and just. Now picture a man cursing the sweet waters rising from a clear spring beside him. It would just keep bubbling out its little river all the same. And if he throws mud and manure into it, it will break them down in no time, wash them away, and not be in any way tainted. How will you, then, come to have your own resilient fountain instead of a stagnant pool?

By staying true to your own independence every hour of the day and living with kindness, simplicity, and self-control.

52

A person who doesn’t know what the universe is doesn’t know where he is. A person who doesn’t know why the universe exists doesn’t know who he is and what the universe is. A man ignorant of either the what or the why of the universe can’t even say why he himself was created.

Now think of a man who courts (or evades) the acclaim of a claque of people who don’t even know who or where they are. What does he seem like to you?

53

Do you want the accolades of someone who curses himself three times an hour? Can you be satisfied with someone who isn’t even satisfied with himself? Can a man who can’t stop regretting nearly everything he does be satisfied with himself?

54

Don’t just be there breathing the air that encompasses you. From now on take your thoughts from the intelligence that encompasses all there is. That intelligence suffuses everything and travels through the man who can absorb it just as air does through all those who can inhale it.

55

Wickedness, as a general rule, doesn’t do any harm to the universe. To focus on humans in particular, a person who does a wicked deed harms no one but himself, and he can extricate himself from that harm the moment he decides to do so.

56

To my free will my neighbor’s free will is as much a matter of indifference as his bit of breathin-flesh. Yes, we humans were all made to serve each other, but each of our ruling powers has its own separate dominion. If this weren’t the case, my neighbor’s wickedness would be able to harm me.

By divine decree, my misfortunes depend on no one but myself.

57

Sunlight seems to flow from its source and saturate everything without ever weakening. This saturation is also outreach on its part, and that’s why sunbeams are called “shafts” of light—because they extend so far. You can grasp what sort of thing a shaft of light is if you see it passing through a narrow aperture into a darkened room. It flies in a straight line and “fixes,” so to speak, on any solid body that intercepts its reach toward the air beyond. And there it stays fixed. It never sheers or drops.

Understanding, like sunlight, should flow out and saturate things. It shouldn’t weaken as it extends itself but also shouldn’t collide with obstacles in an aggressive or violent manner. Instead of sheering, it should stay true and enlighten what receives it. Things that won’t let understanding in are missing out on enlightenment.

58

The people who dread death fear either the absence of all sensory perception or some strange new sort of perception. If you end up not perceiving anything at all through your five senses anymore, you certainly won’t experience anything bad. If you end up perceiving things in new ways, yes, you will be a different sort of being, but you will have gone on living as well.

59

Human beings are designed to help each other. If you can’t teach them, tolerate them.

60

An arrow flies in one manner; your mind in another. Even when proceeding with caution or circling an object of investigation, your mind is flying straight toward its target.

61

Step inside of others’ ruling powers, and let others step inside of yours.

Book 9

1

Everyone who acts in an unjust way is committing sacrilege. Nature has designed humans to help other humans, each according to his need. It has by no means designed us to do harm to each other. So, yes, the man who breaks with Nature’s intention for him by transgressing against another is committing blatant sacrilege against that most venerable deity.

Everyone who speaks untruth is also committing sacrilege. Nature consists of all the things that truly exist, and they share a natural connection with what is in utero. Nature, also known as Truth itself, is the source of all true things in the universe. The man who knowingly speaks falsehood about them can only be committing sacrilege: His intentional dissemination of untruth is an unjust act. The man who speaks untruth unwittingly, however—he, too, is committing sacrilege. He is causing dissonance inside of Nature. It’s like he, with his wrongness, is warring on Nature itself. And the clash is of his own making because he chose to go over to what isn’t true. Nature endowed him with the power to know truth, and he is the one who neglected that power. And now he can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood.

Everyone who hunts delights and shuns discomforts on the assumption they are respectively good and bad is committing sacrilege. The pleasure seeker will inevitably end up finding fault with Nature whenever it strikes him as having given good and bad people pains and pleasures they don’t deserve. His resentment can only be frequent because bad people have more delights on hand and readier means of procuring them, whereas good people live in discomfort with things that cause discomfort. What’s worse, because he dreads even the least displeasure, he will inevitably end up dreading the future. That, too, is sacrilege. And so it is that pleasure seekers act in unjust ways, all of them sacrilege.

Pleasure and pain belong among the things that are matters of indifference to Nature. It wouldn’t be generating both of them if it weren’t equally indifferent to each. Nature’s devotees need to look on them with the same indifference in order to be in harmony with Nature. Pleasure and pain, life and death, fame and infamy—these are all matters of indifference to it, and everyone who doesn’t share its indifference to them is committing sacrilege.

When I say such things are “matters of indifference,” I mean that they happen indiscriminately in the chain of causation to members of the successive human generations as a consequence of Providence’s originary dispensation. There was a point when Providence conceived of things-to-be and the reasons for them. It also set up powers generative of the various sorts of being, change, and continuity. It then initiated what has gone on to be everything now in existence.

2

The most agreeable way to go would be to exit the human race without ever having tasted lies, melodrama, luxuries, and self-importance. The next best way is to breathe your last after having become sick of such things. Do you want to keep consorting with vice? Has past experience still not convinced you to avoid afflictions like that?

The ruination of one’s intellect is a far greater plague than any pestilence in the air around us. External plagues are a threat to various kinds of living beings only insomuch as they are animals that have breath and can inhale them. Mental miasma, though—that exclusively afflicts us human beings in our separate human category.

3

Don’t spurn death. It’s part of Nature’s plan. You should welcome it. There’s no difference between disintegrating and being young, getting old, growing bigger, and reaching one’s full size, teething, sprouting a beard, graying, having sex, getting pregnant, giving birth, and all the other things in life. The rational man should be neither cavalier nor reckless in his approach to death. He shouldn’t snub it, either. He would expect it because it’s one of Nature’s processes. In just the same way as you might wait for the fetus to emerge from your wife’s womb, you should be ready for the hour when your wisp of soul will escape its vessel.

But if you need, in addition, specific, bracing advice for living, you will be more cheerful in the face of death if you stop to contemplate

the sorts of things you will be leaving behind;

the various kinds of human folly with which your soul will no longer be entangled.

You shouldn’t clash with your fellow humans, though. Your duty is to care for them and patiently endure them. Still, bear in mind that, at your death, you will be leaving people who do not live by the same principles as you.

If anything could pull you back and keep you in this world, it would be the freedom to spend time with people who share your views. You know all too well how wearying the dissonance is between human beings. It makes you say, “Death, come quick, or I will forget myself among them.”

4

A wrongdoer only wrongs himself. That is: The injustice in an act only affects its perpetrator because the only real damage he is doing is to himself.

5

You don’t have to do something in order to commit an injustice. Not doing something is frequently an unjust act as well.

6

If you currently have the following—

an accurate assessment of the object in front of you,

a task to perform in service of our shared human purpose,

and contentedness with everything caused by something other than yourself,

that’s all you need.

7

Obliterate your visualizations. Halt your urges. Stamp out your appetites. Your ruling power must always be autonomous.

8

Nonrational animals each have been granted their own portion of a greater nonrational soul. We animals with intellect, in contrast, each have been given a share of a greater rational soul. It’s like the one Earth for all that is earthly, and the one light and one air for all who see and breathe.

9

Things that have something in common want to be together. What’s earthbound falls to the earth, and what’s liquid merges with liquid. The things made for air gather in the same way. Separating them from each other can take a lot of effort.

A fire rises because the elemental fire is in the firmament above it. But that same fire is eager to co-combust with fellow fires down here. When that happens, all that has gotten a bit too dry ignites because it has too little resistance to the gathering conflagration.

We humans all have intelligence in common. It’s our nature. Just like the fires, we reach out toward what’s kindred to us. Our urge to connect, though, is even stronger. The superior degree to which our intelligences strive to mix and merge with one another is commensurate with our species’ superiority to the rest.

If you look at the nonrational animals, you will find bees in swarms, cattle in herds, birds in nests, and other species held together by a kind of love. They have souls, just like we do. As higher forms of life, they cleave to one another more tightly than one finds among plants, minerals, and timber.

For us rational animals, there are political bodies, friendships, family life, public gatherings, and, in war, alliances and treaties. The forms of existence superior to ours get to enjoy a kind of unity even when they are separate. They’re like the stars. The higher you go in the hierarchy, the more intensely individual existences in it feel a sympathetic connection with kindred existences, even when they aren’t touching.

But just look at what is happening now. We animals with intelligence have started forgetting our joint cause and accord. Confluences as of rivers are nowhere to be found among us. Yet, however much human beings might try to avoid mixing with their fellows, they are compelled to do so, anyway. Their nature is too strong in them. Look closely, and you will see that what I say is true. You will sooner find an earthbound object unfastened from other earthbound things than a human being wholly detached from the rest of his race.

10

Humanity, God, and the universe all bear fruit, and they do so when the time is ripe. Yes, normal usage says the word “fruit” properly applies only to what comes from grapevines and other fructiferous species, but that doesn’t matter. The Logos bears fruit, too, both for the world at large and for itself. What grows out of it is akin to its very nature.

11

Show them where they went wrong if you can. If you can’t, remember that kindness was given to you for just such situations. The gods are kind to the wrong. They are so very benevolent that they even help them attain health, wealth, and glory. You could be like the gods in this.

What’s stopping you?

12

Don’t suffer through your work. Don’t expect to be pitied or admired for it, either. You should want one thing only—to stir or stop yourself at the behest of our shared social logos.

13

Today I escaped from all “situations.” Or, rather, I cast them out. They weren’t outside of me, but down in my assumptions.

14

Everything’s always the same—redundant experiences, fleeting lifespans, and sordid materials. It’s all just as it was in the days of those we have buried.

15

The objects beyond your gates are sitting out there, each in its own space. They do not know they exist. They have nothing to report about themselves. What does have something to say about them? Your ruling power.

16

For animals like ourselves, the ones beholden to the human logos, good and bad arise from action, not our feelings. And it’s from action, not our feelings, that virtue and vice, in turn, arise.

17

When a rock is thrown, there’s nothing wrong with it hitting the ground and nothing right about it rising into the air.

18

Burrow deeper and deeper into the ruling powers of others. That way you can see what sort of people your dreaded critics are and what sort of critics they are of themselves.

19

Everything never stops changing. You are perpetually becoming other than you were and, in a sense, deteriorating. And so is the universe as a whole.

20

Leave other people’s misdeeds behind for them to redress.

21

The cessation of an action and the discontinuance of an intention or belief are, like death, not bad in any way. Now look at your life—boyhood, then youth, adulthood, and senescence. Every change from one age to another was a death. Where’s the horror in that?

Now focus on your life under your grandfather, then under your mother, then under your father. When you have discerned the declines, cessations, and transformations that were there, ask yourself, “Where’s the horror in that?”

Now see that the cessation, discontinuance, and transformation of the whole life you have lived will operate in exactly the same way.

22

You should be running to study three ruling powers:

your own, to make sure your mind hews to justice;

the universe’s, to remember what you are a part of;

and your neighbor’s, to find out whether ignorance or knowledge reigns there and learn how much you have in common with him.

23

You serve as a part of a social system. Your actions should accordingly serve society. Everything you do that has no connection, either closely or loosely, to the greater human cause rips at your life until it can’t be whole. You become a faction of one, as when a lone assemblyman in the hall separates himself from consensus on the other side.

24

Children squabbling while playing and puffs of soul dragging their corpses around—that’s what people here are like. The shades of the Underworld should be more vivid in your eyes than they are.

25

First look for an object’s “make.” That’s what causes its shape. Then, once you have mentally separated it from its material, take the measure of it. That way you can appraise how long, on the outside, an object with that specific make is meant to last.

26

You’ve had to suffer in ten thousand different ways because you won’t leave your ruling power alone to do what it is designed to do. Stop interfering.

27

When someone is faulting you or reviling you or when people in general are calling you out, delve into their souls and keep burrowing until you find out what sort of people they are. You’ll learn that it’s not worth contorting yourself to get them to hold a higher opinion of you. Still, you must feel goodwill toward them. They are friends and family insomuch as you all share the same human nature. The gods themselves, in fact, are using various means, including dream omens and prophecies, to help those people achieve their heart’s desire.

28

The things that fluctuate through peaks and valleys in the cycles of the universe are the same from one age to another. If the cosmic intelligence is causing every single thing that happens, embrace what it is causing. That intelligence, however, could also have acted as cause only once, and everything else has resulted from that act in a chain of causes and effects. What in those alternatives could be troubling to you?

If the universe as a whole is operating as a divinity, all is well.

If the universe lacks purpose because it consists of random atoms or molecules, that’s no reason for you to lack purpose, too.

There will be earth above each of our heads in no time. That earth will then start undergoing change itself. The consequences of that change will go on changing, and the consequences of that change will, in turn, go on changing forever. If a man meditates on the crests and troughs in these transitions and fluctuations and the speed with which they recur, he will learn to scorn all that must die.

29

The universal catalyst sends out a torrential spate that carries everything along with it. What does that mean for you as a human? It means you should be doing, right now, exactly what your nature demands. Get started, then, if you can, and don’t stop to look around you in the hope of finding admirers of your efforts. Don’t expect to live in Plato’s republic, either. Be satisfied if you make even the slightest progress. Don’t dismiss that accomplishment as inconsequential.

How cheap are all the people out there dabbling in public affairs, the ones that think they’re political philosophers. Snot-nosed children, all of them! Could anyone ever get them to change the way they think? If they don’t change it, they end up being nothing more than disgruntled slaves who merely “perform” obedience.

But you: Go on and tell me of Alexander the Great, Philip of Macedon, and Demetrius of Phalerum. If they came to recognize what our shared nature wants and trained themselves to do it, they should be admired. If they were, instead, mere actors in their own tragedies, I have not been sentenced to emulate them. The real work of philosophy is straightforward and self-effacing. Don’t try to drag me into attention-seeking grandiosity.

30

Look down from above at the thousands of herds of humans and their thousands of religious rites and all their voyages through calm and storm and the many differences among those who are being born, coexisting, and dying. Then think of all the lives lived in the past and the lives to be lived after your demise. Think of the lives being lived right now in the barbarian tribes. So many have never heard your name. So many, in a very short time, will forget it for good. So many of your current supporters will, in no time, end up denigrating you.

Posthumous fame, celebrity, and anything else having to do with notoriety don’t even deserve to be mentioned.

31

You should be all serenity when facing things that arise from causes outside of you. You should be all justice when performing deeds prompted by the cause inside of you. Just action happens when the initial impetus and the effort itself culminate in a deed that serves humanity. That’s the work your nature requires.

32

You can extract many of the superfluous things that are annoying you. They’re down in your assumptions. If you remove them, you will give yourself room to grasp, all at the same time, the entirety of the universe and the eternity of time. You will know

how rapidly every part of every body is changing,

how tight a space there is between birth and dissolution,

how the infinite abyss of the past is matched by the infinite abyss of the future.

33

In the blink of an eye, all you can see before you will have perished. In the blink of an eye, all those who watched it perish will have perished themselves. A person who dies at a ripe old age ends up no different than one who died young.

34

What do those people have for ruling powers? What are the things they get excited about? What are the reasons why they hold certain things dear and think highly of them? Imagine you are looking upon their naked souls. They really do think they can harm people with denunciations and help them with homages. What a thought.

35

When you lose something, you lose it to change. And change is a delight to Nature. It’s because of Nature that

all is well with what is happening right now;

all was well likewise with what happened in the past;

all will be well with what will happen infinitely into the future.

Why won’t you stop saying that

everything always has been and always will be bad?

not one of the gods, it would seem, has the power to make things right?

the universe is doomed to be prey to relentless tribulations?

36

There is decay in everything: fluid, filth, bone, and stench. Marble is a callus on the earth’s skin. Silver and gold are dross. Clothing is animal hair, and imperial purple, rock snail blood. Everything else comes down to the same kinds of things. Even your puff of breath is like that, as it goes about changing from one thing to another.

37

That’s enough of the wretched way you are living your life, enough bellyaching and apelike behavior. Why are you troubled? What new thing has caused that feeling? What in it is driving you crazy? Did its design cause the feeling? Study it closely. Did its material cause the feeling? Study that closely as well. There’s nothing to consider beyond design and material.

By the gods, you are overdue to grow into a more forthright and conscientious person—especially since there’s no difference between studying such matters for three years or a hundred.

38

If a person does wrong, the harm of it remains in him alone. But maybe he hasn’t, in fact, done wrong.

39

Either all things come from one intelligent source and cohere as if in a single body (which would mean a constituent part like yourself shouldn’t be finding fault with what’s occurring to further the whole),

or there are only atoms, and all they can do is gather or scatter.

What is there in those options that disturbs you?

Go ask your ruling power whether you are dead and disintegrating, or a wild beast, or a mere actor performing your life, or just another ruminant in the herd grazing with the rest of them.

40

The gods either have the power to act or they don’t. If they don’t, why bother praying to them? If they do, why don’t you entreat them in prayer to grant you the ability to be fearless in the face of your fears, passionless in the face of your desires, and insensate when you meet with what can be painful? That’s better than praying for wanted things to come to you or unwanted things to stay away from you. If the gods can help us humans, they surely can help us acquire abilities.

You will perhaps object:

But the gods put the acquisition of those abilities wholly in my own power.

Fine. Wouldn’t it better then if you got to work on what’s in your power like a free man instead of grasping at what’s beyond it like a degenerate slave? Besides, who told you that the gods don’t assist us with what’s in our power? Start praying for that assistance, and you’ll see what comes of it.

One man might ask the gods to help him sleep with a woman.

You should pray that you stop desiring her.

A second man might ask the gods to help him get rid of someone.

You should pray that you no longer feel the need to get rid of him.

A third man might ask the gods to prevent the early death of his child.

You should pray that you move beyond fearing that loss.

In sum, redirect your prayers in this way, and then just wait and see what arises from them.

41

Epicurus says:

“When I was ill, I didn’t even mention the tribulations of my poor little body. Instead of wasting my visitors’ time with prattle like that, I just went on using science to investigate the fundamentals of the universe. The thrust of our discussion was the mind’s power to be serene and do the good it should be doing despite its awareness of bodily agitations.”

He adds:

“I never gave the doctors the chance to strut around like they were doing something of great consequence. Everything went on being as right and well in my life as it had been before.”

You should act in just the same way as Epicurus did when you are ill and in every other situation. Every member of every philosophical school agrees that

you shouldn’t desert philosophy no matter what might be happening;

you shouldn’t waste time shooting the breeze with ignorant people and those who live outside of Nature.

You should focus exclusively on the action you are currently doing and the tools you need to complete it.

42

When you find someone’s lack of self-control repellent, stop and ask yourself whether it’s even possible that there be no shameless people in the world. It isn’t. You must stop demanding the impossible. The man in question is just one of many like himself the world necessarily contains. You should apply the same reasoning when you are dealing with a troublemaker, a traitor, or anyone else who has gone astray in some way. If you keep reminding yourself that it is impossible that such people not exist, you will become more accepting of them as individuals.

It’s also useful to take into account the virtues that Nature has given us to help us deal with others’ transgressions the moment they arise. It has given us forbearance, for example, as an antidote to be used when we are faced with the ignorant and other virtues to be used when we encounter other sorts of people.

In most cases, you can set the errant individual right. There’s always a goal that a person deviates from when he goes astray. And how exactly has he “harmed” you, anyway? Look, and you will find that none of the people who so offend you has done a single thing that has damaged your mind. No, what’s wrong and harmful to you has its foundations in your own mind alone.

What’s bad or strange, anyway, about an ignorant person acting ignorantly? You should rather be inquiring whether you’re to blame for failing to anticipate his error. Your logos gave you the ability to know how likely it was he would err. You are the one who neglected that ability. And now you are surprised that he has gone astray.

The most important thing is that, when you find yourself blaming an oath breaker or ingrate for something, you focus your attention on yourself. What seems his error will be very clearly your own. You did trust that the one, despite his character, would be true to his word. You did do the other a favor without accepting, unconditionally, the act itself as the whole fruit of your labor.

What more do you want to get out of doing someone a good turn? Isn’t it enough that you have acted in accordance with your nature? Do you need a reward for that deed? That would be like your eyes requiring compensation for seeing or your feet demanding wages for walking. As your eyes and feet come into their own by serving the specific purposes for which they were designed, so a man comes into his own when he acts in accordance with his nature by doing something that advances or otherwise serves shared human interests.

Book 10

1

Oh soul, will you ever

become good and uncomplicated and unified and naked?

be more vivid to me than the body that surrounds you?

taste the sweetness of having a loving and affectionate disposition?

be brimming and independent?

stop craving (or even wanting) anything at all, animate or inanimate, for use as pleasure?

stop demanding more time and a specific spot in a specific district with exactly the right weather and company to take your pleasure in?

be content with your current situation and happy with all that is around you?

Will you ever convince yourself

that everything you have you have because of the gods?

that all of what it pleases the gods to do is right for you at this moment, and the same will be true of the future?

that all the gods provide for you works toward the maintenance of a perfected living thing, the good, just, and beautiful universe which generates and integrates all there is?

that this universe doesn’t just include but embraces even the disintegrating existences, whose remains it uses to nourish new things of the same sorts?

Will there ever come a day when, in your interactions with human beings and the gods, you neither take offense over anything nor give offense to anyone?

2

Start by discerning what your nature requires of you only in so much as it is inside a physical body. You should accept those duties and fulfill them so long as they don’t damage your nature as an animal. Next, distinguish what that animal nature requires. You should be doing all of that, too, so long as none of it conflicts with your nature as a rational animal. Finally, you should fulfill your duty as a rational animal to serve your fellow rational animals.

Now put these rules to use and stop wasting time worrying about such matters.

3

Nature has either endowed you with the ability to bear everything that can happen to you or it hasn’t. If it turns out you do have that ability, there’s no reason to complain about anything. Just go on bearing what is happening. That’s what your nature intended. If it turns out you don’t have the ability, there also won’t be any complaining because what is unbearable will eventually finish you off.

The important thing to remember is: Nature has endowed you with the ability to bear everything that you yourself, by controlling your assumptions, can make bearable and tolerable. All you have to do is conceive of an act of endurance as beneficial or obligatory to yourself.

4

When someone has gone astray, kindly teach him how by pointing out where he made his oversight. If you can’t show him where, that’s your fault. Or it isn’t.

5

Whatever happens to you has been preordained since time immemorial. The thread of your whole life, including both your underlying existence and what it experiences, is spooling from the bobbin of causes out of eternity.

6

Regardless of whether it’s atoms or Nature making things happen, my fundamental assumptions must be

that I am a part of a whole, and that whole is governed by Nature;

that I have a kindred relationship with existences of the same sort as myself.

If I keep remembering I’m just a part, I won’t be displeased with anything portioned out to me from the whole. What advances the whole cannot be harmful to any of its parts.

That whole, Nature, consists exclusively of what serves its purposes. All the lesser natures work the same way. Nature itself, however, is special in that there is nothing outside of it, so nothing can compel it to generate anything harmful to itself.

If I can just keep remembering I am a part of such a whole,

I will be pleased with everything that happens to me;

I will do nothing detrimental to the human commonwealth because of the bond I share with my kindred members of the universe;

I will focus my intentions on my fellow human parts of the whole;

I will direct my energies toward what helps them and away from what doesn’t.

If I achieve all of those goals, my life can only sail along smoothly, like the life of a citizen does when he is performing actions beneficial to his fellow citizens and welcoming whatever duties his government assigns him.

7

Everything that serves as a part of the whole and naturally belongs inside the universe must eventually perish. But “perish” should be taken to mean “become something else.” If perishing were bad as well as inevitable, the universe would not be well-governed because its component parts are constantly undergoing change and so constituted as to perish in different ways. That would mean that

Nature wittingly subjects its constituent parts to harm (that is, that it has designed them to be susceptible to harm and prone, inevitably, to fall into it)

or Nature is unaware it is doing such harm.

Both hypotheses are beyond belief.

Say we set Nature itself aside and consider only that the specific natures of things are responsible for the change that is death. It would be absurd if you both believed things naturally change and still felt surprise or resentment when change happened. Those reactions are especially irrational because disintegrating bodies provide material that goes into other things in the universe.

There will be either a dispersal of the elements that comprise a given thing or a transformation from solid to earthly and from soul to air. Either way, the materials in me will return to the Logos as it operates a universe that is either perpetually refreshed or periodically renewed by fire.

Don’t assume that your lump of body and puff of soul are the same as they were at the moment of your birth. It was just yesterday or the day before that you started sustaining your existence by taking in food and air. It’s only what has developed during your life that can undergo change. What your mother birthed—that stays the same.

One might object that what develops over time in someone is important because it makes him a unique individual, but that objection, as I see it, has no bearing on what I’ve been arguing here.

8

You may end up giving yourself the titles “the Good,” “the Modest,” “the True,” “the Mindful,” “the Welcoming,” and “the Lofty.” If you do, make sure you don’t start using those words with any other meanings than their real ones. When you catch yourself departing from those meanings, return to them as soon as possible.

Here’s what you should remember:

“mindful” denotes a conscious attention to all that’s out there (it’s the complete lack of inattention);

“welcoming” means the eager acceptance of what is allotted to you by Nature;

“lofty” refers to the superiority of your intellectual part to the tensions and releases of the flesh, desire for fame, dread of death, and all those sorts of things.

If you continue to merit those titles (without needing others to call you by them), you will be a different person. You will have embarked on another life.

Anyone who would prefer to continue being stained and shredded by life would have to be very stupid and overfond of breathing. He would be acting just like a half-devoured gladiator after a fight with a wild beast in the arena. All wounds and gore, he still begs to be locked up again alive so that he can fight again the next day despite the fact that he would be exposing himself to the same bites and scratches.

Direct yourself instead to the words for those few virtues. If you abide by the meanings of them, you will have emigrated to the Isles of the Blessed. If you find that you keep falling short and don’t have the strength to live by them, retreat to some remote corner and gather the necessary strength. You could also leave your life for good. Just make sure that, if you do it, you do it without grievance and in an unaffected, self-controlled, and wholly self-initiated manner. By dying like that you will have achieved at least one thing in life.

When you’re trying to keep clear in your mind what the words for the virtues mean, it’s helpful to think of the gods as well. They have no interest in being flattered by us. What they want is for rational beings like yourself to become like they are. In the same way as they want fig trees to do the work of fig trees, dogs the work of dogs, and bees the work of bees, they want human beings to be busy about their proper human work.

9

Daily travesty, war, terror, apathy, and servitude will wipe out all the sacrosanct principles of yours that aren’t rationally held and applied in a methodical way. It’s your responsibility to perceive everything and do everything in such a way that, all at the same time, you are

achieving the goals of your practical faculty,

exercising your theoretical faculty,

and neither flaunting nor disguising your confident knowledge of each salient thing.

How long before you start enjoying simplicity and dignity? How long before you have the pleasure of knowing, for each and every thing,

what it is in its essence,

what its place is in the universe,

what its natural lifespan is,

what makes it up,

who can possess it,

and who can bestow it and take it away?

10

As a spider exults in catching a fly, so people gloat over bagging a hare or a fish or killing boars, bears, or Sarmatian tribesmen. Aren’t the people who act that way all just brigands, if you look at their beliefs?

11

Make a systematic study of the way that all things change into other things. Keep focusing your mind on change and doing training exercises related to it. That’s the tried-and-true way to become high-minded. One so trained stops wearing the clothing that is his body. He knows that, in no time, he will be leaving behind all that has to do with the world of men. And so he wholly devotes himself to justice, the guide for his actions, and Nature, his guide for everything else.

What people are saying and assuming about him and what they are doing to thwart him—all of that never even enters his mind. He rests content with these two pursuits: just action in the present moment and affection for what he is currently experiencing. Casting aside all other concerns and pursuits, he focuses wholly on his desire to travel the straight path that runs through the law. By traveling that path, he will be following God.

12

There is no need for conjecture when you can figure out exactly what must be done. When you do discern the way forward, push on cheerfully with never a backward glance. If you can’t make it out, hold off until you have consulted the most knowledgeable authorities. If some further obstruction rules that option out, proceed anyway using the resources you have on hand. You should always be hewing to whatever strikes your intelligence as just. A just deed is the best possible outcome. If you are going to fail, let it be while you are attempting to act with justice.

A man who is fully following the Logos is eager yet unrushed and joyous yet collected.

13

The moment you wake up in the morning ask yourself whether you care about others’ condemnations of just and successful actions of yours. You shouldn’t.

You haven’t forgotten, have you, what sort of people they are who bray their praise and critiques of others? Can you call to mind what they are like in their bedrooms? While dining? What about the sorts of things they do and pursue and evade? The sorts of things they filch and plunder? How they don’t use their hands and feet for their predations but their most precious faculty which, when a man so resolves, leads to trustworthiness, self-control, truth, law, and the spirit of goodness in him?

14

Nature both gives everything and takes it away. The trained and self-controlled man says to it, “Give me whatever you want and take from me whatever you want.” And the way he says it isn’t insolent but acquiescent because he has nothing but affection for Nature.

15

Only a little life is left for you now. Live it as if on a mountaintop. A man’s physical location doesn’t matter since he, wherever he might be, is in the community that is the universe. Let other people see and understand just what a man is when he is truly living in accordance with Nature. If they can’t stand him, let them kill him. That would be better than living like they do.

16

Stop talking about what a good person ought to be and become one.

17

Keep making yourself visualize all time as a whole and all matter as a whole. See that each individual thing, in relation to matter as a whole, is no bigger than a fig seed and, in relation to time as a whole, lasts no longer than one twist of a hand drill.

18

Look at everything in existence item by item. See that each thing is already deteriorating—that is, undergoing change. The deterioration comes down to rot or disintegration, depending on how Nature designed a given thing to die.

19

Conceive of what people are like when they are eating, sleeping, having sex, defecating, and so forth. There are those of them who assume lordly airs and exult in themselves. There are those who rage and sneer as if from lofty eminences. Mere moments ago they were slavishly serving masters, and in pursuit of what? Such people will soon end up slaves all over again.

20

What Nature gives each thing is helpful to that thing. And it is helpful right then at the moment when Nature gives it.

21

“The earth loves rain,

and the reverend heavens

love to send rain down,”

and the universe loves making what’s about to happen happen. That’s why I say to the universe, “I share your love.” There is an apt idiom for this kind of fondness: to “love” to do something.

22

You are either continuing to live in this world in your accustomed way or removing yourself from life by your own choice or dying of natural causes after your work to benefit others.

These are the only options, and each is a reason to be cheerful.

23

You should always keep it clear in your mind that no piece of ground is different from any other. Everything where you are now is the same as it would be on a mountaintop or seashore or wherever else. You will find that Plato’s words are dead-on: You are “penned in a sheepfold up in the mountains milking your bleating ewes.”

24

What state is my ruling power currently in? What am I currently using it to do? For what purpose am I using it? Is it devoid of reason? Is it untethered from and outside of the human commonwealth? Is it so stuck to and fused with my bit of flesh that the two of them move as one?

25

A man who flees from his master is a runaway slave. The law is our master, so anyone who breaks it is no better than a runaway slave. Consider also people who are angry, aggrieved, or frightened. They feel that way because they have rejected something that the power in charge of the universe has allotted, is now allotting, or will allot to them. That power is the law. It gives each of us our due. So, yes, everyone who is angry, aggrieved, or frightened is also a runaway slave.

26

A man casts his seed into a womb and then departs, and another cause takes over and shapes and eventually completes an infant. It’s astounding that such an outcome arises from an inception like that! Then, in turn, nourishment is tossed down the infant’s throat, and a different cause starts working in it to generate perception and impulse and, more generally, vitality, strength, and other such wonders.

Picture to yourself all the things that develop in concealment, and you will identify the power that is behind them, just as you can recognize the power that makes some things go up and others down. We are eyewitnesses to none of these powers, but they are conspicuous all the same.

27

Be constantly recognizing that things as they are now are the same as they were in the past and will be in the future. Call up before your eyes all the real-world dramas you are aware of, along with their related settings. Some you experienced firsthand; others came to you out of history. Think of the court of Hadrian, for example, then of Antoninus, and the court of Philip of Macedon, then of Alexander the Great, and finally the court of King Croesus. The roles those people played were of exactly the same sort, only with different actors.

28

Think of the people who recoil from or resent what happens to them. Then imagine each is a pig kicking and squealing while being sacrificed on an altar. Anyone who lies in bed lamenting, mentally, his various entanglements is also a squealing pig. Though all beings must submit to what happens to them, we rational animals are the only ones allowed to do so of our own free will.

29

As you go about performing each deed, pause to ask yourself whether death, by stopping you from doing it, would be so very terrible a thing.

30

When someone’s wrongness offends you, retreat into yourself right away and find some similar wrong that you have done. Have you ever thought, say, money is a good thing? Pleasure? Celebrity? Anything else like that? Once you find that wrong of yours, you will instantly forget your anger. What’s more, that person had to commit that act. He couldn’t have done otherwise. You could also do what you can to try to extract the compulsion from him.

31

When you see Satyrion, Eutyches, or Hymen, see long-dead members of Socrates’ circle in front of you. When you see Eutychion or Silvanus, see the dead Euphrates. When you see Acliphron, see the dead Tropaeophorus. When you see Severus, see the dead Crito or Xenophon. Then, when you look at yourself, see any one of the now-dead Caesars who reigned before you. Reduce everyone you meet to a dead person in just the same way. Your next thought should be: And where are they now? They all wound up either nowhere or nowhere we know about.

If you keep up with this practice, you will recognize that human affairs are mere fumes. There’s nothing there. You will all the more readily recognize this truth if you acknowledge that every specific existing thing, the instant it undergoes a change, will forever into the future never be the same as it had been. What in that is distressing you? Why aren’t you content to pass through your moment in an orderly way?

Think of all the materials and opportunities you let slip by. The things you can do out there are nothing other than training exercises for your personal logos to perform once it has systematically assessed everything that goes into a life. Keep studying all that’s out there, then, until you have made it your own. Be just the same as a strong stomach that makes all sorts of food its own and a blazing fire that makes flame and light out of whatever you throw into it.

32

Make sure no one can say, truthfully, that you are lacking in simplicity and goodness. Everyone who says bad things about you should be a liar. It’s entirely in your power to achieve that goal. Where is the person who can keep you from achieving simplicity and goodness?

You should go on living only if you have those virtues. The Logos doesn’t want you to stay alive if you don’t.

33

What is the soundest thing you can do or say given the materials you have to work with? It’s up to you whether you do or say it. Don’t cite “obstacles” as an excuse. If you stop whining, you’ll find as much delight in using the materials that choice or chance has given you as a pleasure seeker finds in sensory indulgence. The actions you perform in accordance with your nature should be what are causing pleasure in you. And you can perform those actions anywhere.

A wheel has not been granted the power to move wherever it wants at its own instigation. Neither have water and fire. It’s the same way with the other existences that are managed by Nature or a nonrational soul. The number of things that can halt and restrain them is legion.

Your mind and the Logos, in contrast, have the power to pass through everything that stands in their way. They are designed to be able to do this whenever they so choose. Make sure you don’t forget how easily the Logos can penetrate things. It does it as naturally as fire rises, and stones fall, and a wheel rolls down a hill. There’s no need for further inquiry into the matter.

Obstacles affect only your corpse of a body. They only abrade or otherwise damage us ourselves if our mind accepts them and the Logos in us gives consent. If adversity could truly harm us, anyone who ran into it would instantly become a worse person. It’s different, though, for all the other existences that have a set design. Whenever a part of them suffers harm, it does become worse. Human beings, however, become better, more commendable, when they make proper use of what stands in their way.

Bear in mind more generally that nothing can harm a citizen without also harming the state to which he belongs. What’s more, nothing can harm a state without also harming its laws. None of the obstacles that people call “hardships” can harm laws. Because they can’t harm laws, they can’t harm the state and the citizens in it.

34

The man smitten with true doctrine requires only the briefest and most commonplace reminder that he should remain pain-free and fearless. For instance,

“like the leaves a wind

pours out onto the ground,

the human generations end.”

Your children, too, are leaves. And all those who extol and celebrate you like they are credible authorities are mere leaves, as are those who, in turn, call down curses on you and trash-talk you and mock you behind your back. And those who, one after another, will relay your posthumous fame, nothing but leaves. All of them “sprout in the spring.” Then the wind casts them down, and other verdure takes their place.

All that exists is alike in its short lifespan, and you, you keep pursuing and avoiding things like they will last forever. Your eyes will be closed for you any moment now, and whoever sees to your funeral will swiftly become someone else’s lament.

35

A healthy eye should perceive everything that is visible. If it says, “I can only take soft light,” it may well have conjunctivitis. Your senses of hearing and smell, if they are healthy, should likewise be prepared to take in the full range of sounds and aromas. And a healthy stomach should be able to break down all sorts of food, just as a mill reduces to flour all it was built to grind.

Accordingly, a healthy mind should be ready for any eventuality. A mind that says things like “May my children survive!” and “May everyone praise whatever I do!” is an eye that can only take soft light and teeth that can only chew soft food.

36

No one is so fortunate that there won’t be some people gathered around his deathbed who are eager for his “dreaded end.” Say he is wise and virtuous. Someone there at the end will still be saying to himself:

“That curmudgeon’s death will be a breath of fresh air. He was never hard on anyone, but you could just sense his unspoken disapproval.”

That’s what a virtuous man would get. And then there’s your own situation. How many more reasons are there for multitudes to want to be rid of you?

You should bear all that in mind, then, as you are dying. And you will depart with all the more contentment if you reason thus with yourself:

“I am departing from a life in which even the people closest to me, the ones for whom I toiled, prayed, and cared, want me gone because they hope to get an easy windfall out of my death.”

Why would anyone fight for more time alive here after realizing that?

Still, don’t take your leave with any less kindness toward them. Your character should remain loving, benevolent, and gracious. It shouldn’t be like you’re being dragged away, though, either. Your departure from them should be as quiet as that of a man whose soul glides smoothly out of his body. It was Nature that associated and integrated those people with you, and now it is cutting the knot:

All my relations with family and friends are being dissolved, and I am neither resisting nor giving way.

That separation is just one of the things that happens in Nature.

37

Make this your habit as much as you can: Whenever someone is doing an action, inquire internally: “What purpose is he serving by doing it?” The trick, though, is to start with yourself. Scrutinize yourself first.

38

Remember that there’s a ruling power hidden away inside you, pulling your strings. It is the source of your actions, your whole life. It “makes the man,” as they say.

When you contemplate what you are, you should stop including your fleshly receptacle and the appendages stuck to it. Each one of those growths is a tool, differing from, say, an ax only in that we are born with it attached. Without a purpose to move and restrain it, each of them is of no more use than a shuttle without a weaver, a reed pen without a writer, and a whip without a charioteer.

Book 11

1

The properties of a soul that is full of the Logos:

It can look at itself.

It can describe itself.

It can make itself what it wants to be.

It can harvest the fruit it bears for itself. (The fruit of flora and the analogous “fruit” of fauna are different in that they are harvested by others.)

It has to meet its specific end at whatever hour its lifetime draws to a close.

It leaves every part of what’s before it full and complete when it is forced to quit working, unlike a play or a dance that would be incomplete if someone interrupted it.

A soul that possesses these properties can say, “I have come into my own.”

What’s more, your soul

can travel the entire universe and survey the shape of it and the surrounding void.

can stretch itself out to the full length of infinite futurity and not just grasp but embrace the periodic rebirth of the parts that comprise the whole.

can understand that future generations won’t witness anything new and that past ones didn’t encounter anything more than we do now.

can know that a forty-year-old, if endowed with any mental awareness whatsoever, has, in a sense, seen all that was and will be because of the uniformity of things.

Here are a few more capacities particular to a soul ruled by the Logos:

loving one’s neighbor,

being honest,

being self-controlled,

ranking what is particular to itself above all other things.

The law ranks as most important, too. There is, in fact, no difference between the logos that fosters justice and a properly employed personal logos.

2

You will be able to disdain the pleasures of singing, dancing, and wrestling if you first reduce, say, a vocal melody to its individual pitches. The next step is to inquire internally, “Is that sound something that can overpower me?” You will recoil from making that admission. You can use the same technique to reduce a dance to its individual movements and poses. The same holds for wrestling. When it comes to anything other than virtue and acts of virtue, you need to remember to break it down into its components. Analysis will promote disdain for it.

Apply this method to your entire life.

3

One must admire a soul that is ready to be separated from its body at any moment, regardless of whether that means obliteration, dispersal, or an afterlife. The readiness to die should come not from mere defiance (as with the Christians) but from a personal decision. A death shouldn’t be irrational, frivolous, or as theatrical as a death scene meant to be convincing to the audience of a tragedy.

4

“Has a deed of mine served the human commonwealth? Then I already have my reward.”

Now keep thinking that way and never stop doing such deeds.

5

What is your art?

“The art of being a good person.”

The only way to achieve mastery in that is through rules based in Nature as a whole and other more specific rules that pertain to your built-in human purpose.

6

In the beginning tragedies were produced to remind people of things that can happen to them and to show that Nature made those things happen. They teach as well that what enchants you on stage shouldn’t distress you on the greater stage of life. The events in both can’t turn out other than they do. Finally, tragedies drive home that even those who cry out with the “Oh, Cithaeron!” of Oedipus must endure what befalls them.

The tragedians express many things in a useful way. Take the following quotes as examples:

“If the gods no longer see

to my two sons and me,

their disconsideration

surely has a reason.”

“How pointlessly we rage and rail

at things that can’t care how we feel.”

“There is a reaping of lives

like that of teeming wheat.”

The tragedies contain many more lines like those.

Introduced after tragedy, Old Comedy teaches the power of free speech. Its outspoken nature is particularly good at warning people against arrogance. That’s why Diogenes the Cynic used to quote from it.

Next consider what Middle Comedy was like, why New Comedy evolved and how it gradually declined into a merely imitative art. Everyone agrees that some quotes from the playwrights of New Comedy are useful. Still, given the whole impetus behind it, what were the poetry in it and the stagecraft behind it really trying to achieve?

7

It is so very clear that no other role in life would have been as conducive to the practice of philosophy as the one you now happen to be in.

8

A branch sawed off a thicker limb is sawed off the whole tree as well. In just the same way a man sundered from a fellow human being is no longer a member of the human commonwealth. The difference is that, whereas an entirely separate person saws a branch off a tree, it is a man himself who severs himself from his neighbor by hating and spurning him. He doesn’t even know that he has cut himself out of the human commonwealth.

But Zeus, the creator of that commonwealth, has bestowed this boon upon us: By associating with whoever is nearest, we can be grafted back onto it and again become a part that serves the whole.

The more often the separation happens, however, the more difficult it is for someone to reattach himself and become part of society again. As a general rule, the branch that has always been one with a tree and breathed one breath with it is more secure than a branch that, after being cut off, is grafted back on again. And this is true whatever the gardeners might say. Still, though you grow on the same tree as your fellow humans, you don’t have to share their beliefs.

9

When you are proceeding with right reason, you shouldn’t let people standing in your way drive you out of a healthy action. In the same way you shouldn’t let them drive you out of kindness toward them.

Both of these behaviors are of equal importance:

consistency of judgment and action,

gentleness toward people who try to thwart or otherwise harass you.

Getting angry with others is just as much a weakness as straying from your course of action and giving up out of trepidation. The man who retreats in fright and the man who becomes alienated from a fellow human and friend—both are guilty of desertion.

10

“The various natures are each superior to art.”

Those natures are, in fact, what art imitates. Since this is so, the most perfect and comprehensive of the natures, Nature itself, cannot fall short of even virtuosic artistry. The arts use what’s inferior in service of what’s superior, and Nature clearly does the same. That’s what justice arises from, and justice is the basis for all the other virtues. If we get caught up in matters of indifferent importance or are gullible, reckless, and volatile, we certainly aren’t staying focused on justice.

11

Various things you are pursuing and avoiding are causing distress in you. None of them enters you on its own. You have to “go out” to them, so to speak. If you could just get your mind to hold no opinion about such objects, it would be serene, and they would be at rest. Then no one would catch you chasing or evading them.

12

The sphere of the soul stays true to itself when it is neither convexly straining for something external nor concavely collapsing. Rather than inflating or deflating, it should be emanating the light it uses to see both Truth itself and the truth behind everything in the universe.

13

So what if someone despises me? That’s his problem, not mine. I will instead be making sure that I don’t do anything that merits others’ despite. If someone hates me, again, that’s on him. I will maintain my kindness and be well-disposed toward everyone. What’s more, I will be ready to teach the hateful one the error of his ways, but not in a scolding manner or to show off how patient I am. I will do it in a genuinely helpful spirit, like the Athenian general Phocion did (if he meant his last words).

Your internal disposition should be like that. The gods should never find you peevish or querulous. Besides, if you, a man exerting himself to serve humankind by some means, are currently doing what your nature requires and are accepting what Nature as a whole has found to be advantageous, what “wrong” could there be for you?

14

They despise each other, and so they flatter each other. They want to outdo each other, and so they grovel before each other.

15

How putridly underhanded is everyone who says, “I have decided to deal with you in an honest way.” What are you up to, man? You shouldn’t need to make that disclaimer. It will soon become quite clear how honest you are. It should be written on your forehead. Right from the start, it should resonate from your voice and shine from your eyes. Your honesty should be as obvious as what a much-loved person reads in his lovers’ eyes.

A good and straightforward person should resemble a man who smells like goat. Those who approach him should know his character instantly, whether they want to or not. Affected straightforwardness is, in contrast, a dagger. Nothing is uglier than friends who act like wolves. Shun such people before all others. You should be able to see goodness, forthrightness, and kindness in a person’s eyes. They should be impossible to miss.

16

Whether or not you live a superlatively fine life comes down to whether or not your soul feels indifference toward matters of indifferent importance. It will do so if it examines them not just as separate wholes but as amalgamations of constituent parts as well. You need to remember also that things of indifferent value can’t create opinions in us or even be inside of us.

Things of indifferent value also can’t unsettle us. We do it to ourselves with our reactionary judgments about them. We etch such things, like writing, on our minds, when we very well could choose not to. It’s also in our power to scratch them out if they do accidentally wind up inside of us. Besides, you will only have to deal with them for a short time, and then your life will be over.

Why are they so troublesome to you? If they are a part of Nature’s plan, rejoice in them. Let them be easy to deal with. If they are at odds with Nature, seek out only what is in accordance with your specific human nature. Zealously pursue that instead, even if you win no renown for doing it. Everyone can achieve a reprieve from matters of indifference by pursuing his own personal good.

17

Contemplate

what each thing comes from,

what it is made of,

what it will change into,

what it will be like once it has changed,

the fact that change will not harm it.

18

First, consider the relationship you have with your fellow humans. We are made to serve each other. But, from a different perspective, you were singled out to preside over them as the ram does over his flock and the bull over his herd.

Go back to the beginning and start with this: If everything is not mere atoms, there is Nature, and it is in control of all of its constituent parts. If that’s true, inferior things are designed to serve superior things, and we superior things are designed to serve each other.

Second, look at the ways people behave at dinner, in their bedrooms, etcetera. The most important thing to remember is that the opinions they hold compel them to behave like that. You should also observe how deluded they are in their actions.

Third, bear in mind that there’s no reason to be unhappy with people so long as they’re performing right actions. If they aren’t, it should be immediately clear to you that they’re acting in ignorance and under compulsion. Just as no soul wants to be deprived of the truth, no soul wants to lack the capacity to treat every person according to his worth. People, in fact, feel distressed when they hear themselves called unjust, heartless, greedy, and, in a word, wrong in their relations with their neighbors.

Fourth, you yourself are often at fault in your relations with others. You’re no better than they are. Even if you do hold yourself back from transgressing against them, you still have the proclivity to do so. You only restrain yourself out of cowardice or concern for your reputation or because of some other contemptible motive.

Fifth, you don’t even know for certain when people have gone astray. Many things are done as a part of a larger plan. In sum: You have to learn a great deal before other people’s actions become blatantly right or wrong to you.

Sixth, whenever you become exceedingly irritated or impatient with someone, remember that a human life is only a twinkling in time. We will each quite soon be laid out in a parlor.

Seventh, it isn’t other people’s actions that are making you upset. (Their actions are the business of their own ruling powers.) No, what’s upsetting you is your wrong opinions about those actions. Get rid of them and refuse to accept any appraisal of yours that says some act is an outrage against you, and your anger will cease.

But how does one get rid of them?

By realizing that others’ misdeeds aren’t your disgraces. If a misdeed of yours were anything more than merely disgraceful to you, you yourself would be guilty of having caused much harm. You’d be a bandit and rogue in general.

Eighth, remember that anger and grief cause more pain in you than the act that occasioned your anger and grief.

Ninth, your kindness to others is invincible so long as it is sincere and not all grins and histrionics. What can even the most egregious perpetrator do if you go on being perfectly kind to him? If the opportunity should arise while he is attempting to wrong you, you should gently admonish and calmly correct him thus:

“No, my young friend. Nature has intended us for other things. You wouldn’t be harming me by this action, only yourself.”

Then, proceeding from general principles, prove to him, delicately, that what you have said is true—that is, that bees and other gregarious animals would never act the way that he does. Make sure you don’t censure him sarcastically or reproachfully, but affectionately and without any animosity. Instead of being pedantic and showing off for bystanders, you should speak to him as if just you two were there.

Cherish these nine rules in your memory as if they had been bestowed on you by the Muses. If you do, you will at last have started to be a human being while you still can. Just remember as well that you should never flatter or vilify people. Both of those extremes contravene the human commonwealth and do social damage.

Keep this truth on hand for when you fly into a rage: Surrendering to passion isn’t manly. It’s gentleness and civility that are more manly, as well as more human. The man who exhibits them has fortitude, nerve, and valor. The man who yields to indignation and fury does not. The closer your mind comes to dispassion, the closer it comes to strength. In the same way that feeling pain belongs to weakness, so does feeling anger. Both pain and anger surrender to whatever has struck a blow.

Accept, if you will, a tenth gift, this one from Apollo, leader of the Muses: Thinking that bad people will do no wrong is madness. Don’t expect the impossible. But also don’t allow bad people to do others wrong while you keep insisting that they not do the same to you—that would be callous and tyrannical.

19

You should be on constant guard against four corrupt conditions your ruling power can fall into. The moment you detect one of them, blot it out by saying:

“This visualization is unnecessary.”

“This thought is corrosive to the human commonwealth.”

“These words I am about to utter wouldn’t be from my heart.” (Insincere speech should be among the vices most repellent to you.)

The fourth condition for self-reproach arises when your divinely bestowed ruling power has been defeated and suppressed by the worthless, mortal part of you: the flesh with its tumultuous and titillating motions.

20

Yes, the airy and fiery components mingled within you do naturally want to move upward, but they are heeding a command from the universe and have submitted to the needs of your bodily compound. Likewise, the earthly and watery parts of you, though they want to move downward, let themselves be held aloft and remain in a position not naturally their own. In this way even the four elements obey Nature. Once they have been compelled to take up a post, they occupy it until the signal heralding their dissolution releases them.

Isn’t it strange, then, that your intellectual part is the only part of you that disobeys the universe and takes issue with the post assigned to it? It doesn’t suffer under any external constraint on it. It experiences only what is natural to it. But it still just keeps insisting on moving in a direction opposite the one it should be moving in. Any intelligence that moves toward injustice, licentiousness, anger, pain, or fear is nothing other than an apostate from Nature.

It’s bad as well when your ruling power deserts its post because it has started resenting something that has happened to you. It is designed to show justice to human beings and reverence and devotion to the gods. Those latter two qualities, in fact, promote harmony in the greater cosmic community and are even more distinguished than just action.

21

“The man who hasn’t always had the same objective in his life can’t have been the same throughout his life.”

But there’s more to be said here. One should ask:

“What should his objective be?”

Though people don’t always agree on what they see as good, they do all agree that actions that serve their shared interests are good. We should accordingly take as our objective what serves both the greater human commonwealth and the particular state we’re in. When a man directs his every impulse toward that goal, he performs deeds all alike in their rightness, and he himself is always the same.

22

Think about the hillside mouse and the household mouse. Remember how much trepidation and terror the household mouse has to live with.

23

Socrates used to call popular opinions mere “lamias,” monsters invoked to frighten children.

24

When the Spartans held festivals, they used to set the seats for foreigners in the shade, while they themselves sat down on whatever seat happened to be closest.

25

Remember the reason Socrates cited when he declined to live in King Perdiccas’ court: “I don’t want to suffer that most shameful of ends: dying without being able to return someone’s favor to me.”

26

The Epicureans recommend in their writings that one should be constantly calling to mind one of the ancient sages who practiced virtue.

27

The Pythagoreans exhort us to study, on waking, the predawn sky so that we can be reminded of bodies that repeatedly do the same things in obedience to the same laws in the same ways with the same orderliness, straightforwardness, and nakedness. Stars don’t wear veils.

28

Think of just what sort of man Socrates was when he went out wearing only an animal-skin loincloth because his wife, Xanthippe, had left the house wearing his cloak. Think of the things he said to those of his friends who recoiled in embarrassment from him when they saw him dressed that way.

29

When it comes to reading and writing, you can’t teach the rules until you have first learned to heed them. This is even more true when it comes to the rules of life.

30

“Because you are a slave,

free speech is something you don’t have.”

31

“and the heart inside of me

was cackling with glee.”

32

“They would denounce” virtue itself “with speeches

full of reproaches.”

33

Only a crazy person would go out to pick figs in the wintertime. That’s how crazy a father is who longs to see a child that has been taken from him.

34

Epictetus used to say that, when you kiss a child of yours goodnight, you should add, silently to yourself, “Tomorrow you may die.” If someone protested, “Those are words of ill omen,” he would say:

“No words are ill-omened that describe what Nature brings to pass. If those words were, in fact, unlucky, then it would be unlucky to describe wheat being reaped.”

35

Unripe grapes, ripe grapes, and raisins—they have all gone through changes. They don’t turn into nothing, but into what is yet to be.

36

Epictetus says, “No one can steal free will.”

37

He also says that “We need to master the art of assent. We need to make sure our every impulse accepts circumstances and initiates actions in service of the human commonwealth with due consideration for their relative importance. We should keep wholly away from immoderate desire and not recoil from anything that is beyond our control.”

38

“What we’re contesting here,” says Epictetus, “isn’t something trivial, but whether or not we’re insane.”

39

A Socratic dialogue:

“Which do you want to have? A rational or a nonrational soul?”

“Rational.”

“What sort of rational soul? A healthy one or a depraved one.”

“Healthy.”

“Then why aren’t you trying to obtain a healthy rational soul.”

“Because we each already have one.”

“If that’s the case, then why are you clashing and bickering?”

Book 12

1

Think of the things you expect to attain by traveling a long and winding road. You can have them right now if you just stop begrudging them to yourself. That means

leaving behind everything that happened in the past,

entrusting the future to Providence,

and directing what you have in the present moment toward reverence and justice.

By focusing on reverence you learn to love your lot. Nature made it for you and you for it. By focusing on justice you come to speak the truth with freedom and straightforwardness and perform lawful actions with due regard for their relative importance.

You would then remain unimpeded by others’ wickedness, prejudice, and speech in general and by sensations in the bit of flesh congealed around you. You would leave the impressionable part of you to deal with them.

As the time for your exit approaches, leave behind everything but your ruling power and the divinity inside you. You shouldn’t be afraid of no longer being alive but of never having lived in accordance with Nature. That’s how you could finally become worthy of the universe that created you. You would at last have stopped being surprised by everyday happenings as if you were a stranger in your native land. You would also have stopped being dependent on this or that thing.

2

When God sees our ruling powers, he sees them stripped bare of their material clothing and rinds and imperfections. He uses his mind alone to touch only what has flowed from and channeled itself back into himself. If you could just make a habit of looking at things the way he does, you’d stop wasting your time running around in circles. If a man scorns the husk of meat that surrounds him, he surely won’t be spending his time admiring fancy houses and clothing or seeking fame and other such superficial and ostentatious things.

3

You are made up of three things: a bit of flesh, a whisper of breath, and mind. The first two are yours in the sense that you have to take care of them. The third is the only one that’s authoritatively your own. If you remove from yourself (that is, from your mind)

what other people are doing and saying,

what you yourself have done and said,

what is disturbing you about the future,

what is happening, without your consent, to your bodily receptacle and the soul that came with it,

and what the whirlwind of external events sends hurtling toward you,

the intelligent part of you will then escape the burden of fate and live in purity and independence. It will be performing just actions only, accepting everything that happens to you, and speaking the truth.

If you cut your ruling power free of all that has attached to it from the senses and from past and future time, it will become Empedocles’ sphere: “perfectly round and rejoicing in its all-inclusive oneness.” You will then be living only what’s properly your own life—that is, the present moment. And you will spend what remains of that life in tranquility, goodwill, and gratitude to your guiding spirit.

4

I have often marveled at the fact that, though every man loves himself more than all the rest, he sets more store on the image he presents to others than on the image he presents to himself. Say a god or great sage were right there before him demanding that he immediately divulge out loud everything he is thinking and intending as soon as it comes into his head. He couldn’t stand to do that for a single day. That’s how much more shame we feel before others than before ourselves.

5

The gods have arranged everything in a way that is good for and beneficial to humankind. How then could they have failed to bring to pass the resurrection, instead of the complete extinguishment, of certain special men, very good men, who had the most commerce, so to speak, with divinity and became most intimate with it through devotional rites and observances?

Well, if it’s even true that such men are extinguished, you can be sure that it is so because the gods didn’t feel the need for it to be otherwise. If it were just for those men to return, it would be possible for them to do so. If it were in accordance with Nature, Nature would have brought them back. From the fact that they have been extinguished (if they even have been), you can rest assured that it had to be so.

You should be able to see for yourself that, by asking that presumptuous question, you have leveled a charge against the gods. We would not be asking them to justify themselves if we did not expect them to be fully good and just. Since they are, they would never unjustly and irrationally neglect something by leaving it out of their arrangement of the universe.

6

Make it your practice to keep attempting things you don’t think you can do. Think of your left hand. It’s clumsy when it tries to do most things because it hasn’t been exercised in them. It does, however, after years of practice, hold a horse’s reins better than your right hand.

7

Conceive of the sort of person you should be in body and soul when death overtakes you. Remember that your life is brief and that infinite abysses of past and future time stand on either side of it. Think of the flimsiness of all material things.

8

Strip things bare of their husks and look at what gives them shape and what purposes they serve. Contemplate what pain is and pleasure and death and fame. Observe also the people who are the causes of their own disturbance. Remember that no one can be hindered by anyone else and that “nothing is anything but thinking makes it so.”

9

When it comes to applying your principles, you should be like a boxer rather than a gladiator. The latter picks up and lays aside the sword he uses. A boxer, however, always has his hands. All he has to do is clench them into fists.

10

See things as they truly are by breaking them down into what makes them up, what gives them shape, and how they relate to the whole.

11

Every human being has the capacity to do nothing other than what God would commend and to welcome everything God allots to him sequentially out of Nature.

12

If a trying situation arises for us that is in accordance with Nature, we shouldn’t blame the gods for it, because they do no wrong either intentionally or unintentionally. We shouldn’t blame humans, either, because they only do wrong unintentionally. We shouldn’t blame anything at all.

13

How preposterous and outlandish is anyone who sees anything that happens in his life as surprising.

14

The three options are

an unalterable order involving predestined events,

an appeasable Providence,

or an ungoverned jumble without a purpose.

If there are unalterable necessary events, why do you bother resisting them? If there is a Providence that heeds our appeals, make yourself worthy of its divine assistance. If there is only an anarchic jumble, be grateful that you have your intelligence to guide through the waves raised by that storm. Go ahead and let the storm carry you off. Let it carry off your body, your breath, and whatever else. It can’t carry off your intelligence.

15

A lamp shines without losing brightness all the way through until it is extinguished. Will the truth, justice, and temperance that are in you be extinguished before your time arrives?

16

When a man gives the appearance of doing wrong, ask yourself:

“How do I know for certain that his action is wrong?”

If it is, how do you know that he hasn’t already passed judgment on himself for it, like a man who has scratched his own face?

A person who expects bad people not to go astray may as well be expecting a fig tree not to produce sap, a baby not to cry, a horse not to neigh, and other such impossibilities. Think of how much a wrongdoer must suffer because of his wrong opinion. If you are up to the task, try curing it.

17

If it isn’t right, don’t do it. If it isn’t true, don’t say it. Controlling your impulses is on you.

18

Regarding everything you encounter: Focus on what it is that is producing an image of itself in you. Then divide it up by breaking it down into what gives it shape, what makes it up, how it relates to the whole, and how long it will last.

19

Recognize at last that you have something in you that is more powerful and divine than the sundry things eliciting reactions from you by “pulling your strings,” as it were. Ask yourself, “What’s in my mind right now? Is it fear? Suspicion? Covetousness? Anything of that sort?”

20

First, don’t do anything recklessly and without purpose. Second, make sure all your actions serve the interests of the human commonwealth.

21

Know that in a short time you will be no one nowhere, and none of the things you now see before you and none of the people now alive will exist. Nature has designed all things to alter, deteriorate, and perish so that other things can succeed them.

22

You have assumptions about everything, but they are under your control. When you so choose to pluck one out, you will be like a helmsman who, after rounding a cape, finds the weather settled and serene in an unruffled bay.

23

An individual action (whatever it might be) that ceases at the proper time suffers no harm from its cessation. The person who performed the action also suffers no harm because it has ended. In the same way, when the concatenation of actions that make up a life ends at the right time, the decedent suffers no harm from its termination. Finally, the person who brings the whole series to an end at the right time also suffers nothing bad.

Nature appoints, as limits, the proper times for things to perish. Sometimes it’s one’s personal nature that makes the decision, as can happen in old age, but Nature the aggregate is always there keeping the whole universe youthful and refreshed by transforming its constituent parts into other things.

All the changes Nature makes to achieve its aims can only be opportune and good. And so it is that, for everybody, the termination of a lifespan isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t disgraceful, because we don’t elect to undergo it and because it doesn’t do any damage to the human commonwealth. A death can only be good: It happens at a time deemed right by Nature as a part of a mutually beneficial exchange. A man can truly be called “divinely inspired” when he travels the same path as God and directs his mind toward the same ends.

24

Keep these three sets of instructions at the ready:

First, when it comes to your own actions, don’t do anything haphazardly or in any other way than justice itself would have you act. As for what befalls you from outside yourself, either chance or Providence is the cause. One should never fault the former or impeach the latter.

Second, contemplate what a being is from conception until it acquires breath and then from that time until it surrenders its breath. Know also what each thing is compounded of and into what it will dissolve.

Third, look down on the vast variety of human affairs as if you were suddenly lifted high up into the air. How much contempt you would feel while taking everything in with a glance, even the entities dwelling in the air around you and in the ether above it. Consider also that, however many times you were lifted up like that, you would always see the same things below you, of the same sorts, and all with a short lifespan.

And you take pride in possessing objects like those!

25

You will save yourself if you cast out your assumptions. And nothing out there can stop you from doing it.

26

Whenever you become upset about something, you have forgotten

that everything that comes to pass is in accordance with Nature;

that another man’s misdeed is his concern, not yours;

that all that has happened has always happened and always will happen just as it is happening everywhere right now;

or that there is a strong bond between an individual human being and the rest of the human race, and it is intellect, not blood or seed, that holds the human commonwealth together.

You have also forgotten

that every person’s mind is a divinity that has flowed out of the divine;

that nothing is a man’s own—his children, his body, and his soul have all come to him from that source;

that everything depends on your assumptions;

or that everyone lives in and loses only the present moment.

27

Constantly review in your mind those who made an extravagant display of their frustration, men of great fame, affliction, hatred, or whatever other extreme. Then ask yourself: “Where are they now?” They are smoke, ash, and legend, if even that.

Keep in mind also all those who acted like Fabius Catullius did when it came to his country estate, Lucius Lupus when it came to his gardens, Stertinius about Baiae, Tiberius about Capri, Rufus about Velia, and, in general, anyone caught up in obsession and vanity. Contemplate how cheap everything is that such people strain to acquire. Then think of how much more philosophical it is for a man to prove himself to be, with perfect forthrightness, self-controlled, reverent to the gods, and just in relation to whatever material he might be given to work with.

Just remember that the pride we take in humility is the worst pride of them all.

28

Some people ask,

“Where have you ever seen your gods? You go on worshipping them, but how do you know that they exist?”

My first answer is that the gods’ existence is obvious in what we see. My second, that I haven’t ever seen my soul, either, but I go on honoring it all the same. I do the same with the gods. I experience their power in everything. That’s what makes me certain they exist. That’s what makes me stand humbly before them.

29

A sound life comes down to

examining what each thing is in itself, what makes it up, and what gives it shape;

using your whole soul to do just deeds and speak the truth.

Do both of those things, and you will spend the rest of your life in the joy of linking good things together one after another in such a way that there is not even the narrowest gap between them.

30

There is one sun, though its light falls dividedly on partitions, mountain slopes, and other surfaces. There is one material substance, though it goes into countless different bodies. There is one soul, though it is distributed among the many natures, each with its distinctive purview. There is one intelligent soul, however much it might seem to be broken up.

Most of the things listed above are insensate and nonsocial. The universal intelligence, though, is still there to unite them, and they gravitate toward each other on their own. Individual intellects, however, feel a special attraction to other intellects, and they can intermingle. That’s why our shared sense of community doesn’t end up breaking down.

31

What are you after? Do you want to keep breathing? To keep perceiving? To keep feeling urges? To increase your bulk? To stop expanding? To go on using your voice? To go on thinking? Does any of that strike you as truly worth wanting?

Such things are easily dismissed. Now take the final step and serve God and the Logos. Know that you are clashing with both of them if you value any of those things listed above and resent the fact that death will deprive you of them.

32

How very minute a moment each of our lives lasts in the endless expanse of time. How fleetingly that moment goes by, and then we vanish into eternity. What minuscule fractions of the greater matter we are. What minuscule fractions of the greater soul are ours. And the patch of earth we walk on is so very small compared to Earth itself.

If you take all that to heart, you will realize that the only things you can do of any importance are

perform the deeds your personal nature proposes

and bear with whatever Nature makes happen for you.

33

It all comes down to this question: How does your ruling power conduct itself? Everything else is carrion and fumes, regardless of whether you can do anything about it.

34

What should most rouse us to scorn death is the fact that even the people who call pleasure “good” and pain “bad,” scorn it.

35

To a person who

sees everything that arrives in its due season as good,

doesn’t fret about the exact number of deeds he has done in accordance with the Logos,

and doesn’t care how long he gets to be here looking at the universe,

death is not a big deal.

36

You, a human being, have gotten to be a citizen in the greatest state of them all. If you’re in it for five years or a hundred, what’s the difference? We are all equal under the laws. It won’t be some tyrant or crooked judge that exiles you from here, but Nature, who first enfranchised you. What could be terrible about that?

It will be like a director dismissing an actor in the middle of his performance.

“But I have delivered my lines for only three acts. There are two more.”

Well said! Life, though, sometimes is only three acts long. What in the past was the cause of your creation now is the cause of your dissolution. It decides how long lives last, and you do not. Leave life contentedly. What is releasing you is itself content.

Notes

Book 1

my grandfather Verus: Marcus’ paternal grandfather, Marcus Annius Verus, was a friend of the emperor Hadrian and a prominent politician who attained the rank of consul. His family was of Spanish extraction and produced olive oil, a high-demand product in the classical world, near modern Córdoba. He raised his grandson, the future emperor, when his own son, Marcus’ father (see note 1.2), died young. He died at age eighty-eight when Marcus was seventeen.

a resistance to anger: Marcus elsewhere acknowledges that anger is an issue for him (1.17, 8.4, and 11.18).

my father: Marcus’ father was named Marcus Annius Verus as was his grandfather. A prominent Roman politician, he died in 124 AD when Marcus was three. The “modesty and manfulness” Marcus remembers his father possessing must have come from very early memories. Marcus’ paternal aunt Faustina the Elder was married to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius.

my mother: Marcus’ mother, Domitia Lucilla, belonged to a patrician family. She inherited, from her mother, a vast fortune that included a factory that had supplied bricks for such buildings as the Coliseum and the Pantheon. Marcus inherited that factory at her death when he was in his late thirties. She raised Marcus with the assistance of his grandfather Marcus Annius Verus (see 1.1). Marcus here praises her for having lived without extravagance despite being superrich.

my great-grandfather: Marcus’ maternal step great-grandfather, Lucius Catilius Severus, twice served as consul, once with the future emperor Antoninus Pius.

my boyhood tutor: The first of Marcus’ teachers to be praised, this unnamed tutor was likely an educated slave.

To root for no chariot racers: Chariot races were very popular in the Rome of Marcus’ day. Romans rooted for their preferred teams (distinguished by the color of their attire) as avidly as Americans can root for football teams. Gladiators were rated “heavy” or “light” based on the armor and weapons they used. Marcus finds such spectacles “sickening” (6.46).

Diognetus: He was Marcus’ painting instructor but is otherwise unknown.

Baccheius . . . and Marcianus: These three figures are unknown.

a plank as a mattress: An anecdote informs us that Marcus assumed the ascetic habits of traditional Greek philosophical training at twelve years old (Historia Augusta, “Marcus Aurelius,” 1.2.6). The training encouraged sleeping on the ground and wearing animal hide. Diogenes the Cynic (c. 410–323 BC) is the original model for a philosophical life that scorns societal norms.

Rusticus: Quintus Junius Rusticus (c. 100–170 AD) was a Stoic Roman politician as well as a teacher. He was greatly influential on Marcus while the latter was in his twenties.

Sinuessa: City from which Rusticus sent a letter to Marcus’ mother, Domitia Lucilla. It was located on the Tyrrhenian Sea, north of Naples and six miles from the mouth of the Volturno River.

Epictetus’ Discourses: Epictetus (c. 50–135 AD) was born a slave in Hieropolis, present-day Pamukkale in western Turkey. After his emancipation, he taught Stoic philosophy in Rome and then in Nicopolis in Greece. Marcus regularly refers to his major work the Discourses. Four of its original eight books have come down to us.

Apollonius: Apollonius of Chalcedon was a Stoic philosopher and teacher of rhetoric. The emperor Antoninus summoned him to Rome to tutor Marcus and Marcus’ adoptive brother, Lucius Verus. Though other sources portray Apollonius as pretentious, Marcus here describes him as a sort of sage.

Sextus: Sextus of Chaeronea (c. 95–185) was a philosopher and teacher. Sources identify him as either a Platonist or a Pyrrhonist (radical skeptic) philosopher. An anecdote claims that Marcus was still studying with Sextus in his late forties (Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 2.9).

paterfamilias: A male head of household in a multigenerational home, which in Roman culture often included slaves.

Alexander: Alexander of Cotiaeum (c. 70–80–150) was a Greek grammarian and authority on the works of Homer.

Fronto: The emperor Antoninus Pius hired the grammarian and rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto (c. 95–166) to be the tutor to his adoptive sons, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Marcus and Fronto became lifelong friends, and extensive correspondence between them has come down to us.

Alexander the Platonist: Nicknamed Peloplaton (“The Clay-Plato”), he was a philosopher and rhetorician from Seleucia, near what is present-day Baghdad, Iraq. He became Marcus’ secretary for Greek-language correspondence sometime in the mid-170s AD.

Catulus: Cinna Catulus was a Stoic philosopher whose lectures Marcus may have attended. We know nothing more about him.

the Domitius and Athenodotus story: This story has not come down to us. The former may have been Gnaeus Domitius Afer, who taught the orator Quintilian (35–c. 96) and possibly Athenodotus as well, who was a teacher of Fronto. The Historia Augusta portrays Marcus as doting on his tutors and heaping them with honors (“Marcus Aurelius,” 3.5–6).

Severus: Most likely the Roman politician and philosopher Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus, who served as consul in 167 AD. His son married one of Marcus’ daughters.

Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dio, and Brutus: The five men to whom Severus introduced Marcus are Stoic “martyrs” and Republican-Roman heroes who stood up to tyrannical oppression. It is remarkable that Marcus, a Roman emperor, holds these five opponents of absolute rule and autocratic abuse in high regard. Under the emperor Nero, Publius Claudius Thrasea Paetus was compelled to commit suicide in 66 AD for defending senatorial authority. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus suffered the same fate under Vespasian in 75 AD. This Helvidius’ son of the same name, a proponent of the same cause, was executed in turn in 93 AD. Epictetus also cites Thrasea and Helvidius as exempla in Discourses, 1.1.26 and 1.2.19–24, respectively. Marcius Porcius Cato, later known as Cato of Utica, was a staunch Republican who committed suicide after losing the battle of Thapsus in 46 BC rather than surrender to Julius Caesar. The Dio mentioned is either the follower of Plato Dion of Syracuse, who was assassinated after attempting to establish a philosopher-kingship in place of the rule of Dionysius II in Syracuse (353 BC), or Dio Cocceianus (40–120 AD), a Stoic philosopher and orator later known as Dio Chrysostomos (“the Golden-mouthed”), who was banished by the emperor Domitian. The son-in-law of Cato (above), Brutus was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and committed suicide after his defeat in the battle of Phillippi two years later at the hands of Mark Antony and Octavian. Marcus admired him and the other “martyrs” in this entry for their opposition to tyranny. Plutarch specifies that Brutus was not misokaisar (a hater of imperial rule) but misotyrannos (a hater of tyranny) (Brutus, 8.3).

Maximus: Claudius Maximus (2nd century AD) was a Roman politician, Stoic philosopher, and teacher of Marcus Aurelius. He served as judge in the trial of Apuleius, author of the novel The Golden Ass, for witchcraft. He reappears in 1.16, 1.17, and 8.25.

my adoptive father: Antoninus Pius (86–161 AD) adopted his nephews Marcus and Lucius Verus as his sons when he became the emperor Hadrian’s successor in 138 AD. Along with Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus himself, he is regarded as one of “The Five Good Emperors,” who reigned over a period of relative peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire.

A prohibition on the pursuit of boys: In contrast to classical Greek culture, Roman culture tended to disapprove of male homosexuality. By praising Antoninus for outlawing pederasty, Marcus is implicitly criticizing the emperor Hadrian, who famously and publicly took a Bithynian boy, Antinous, as his lover.

the imperial council: Not the Roman Senate but an advisory council the emperor consulted.

sophist: Marcus is using the word “sophist” in the pejorative sense to refer to a skillful speaker who will say anything to win an argument (regardless of the truth).

The habit of taking his daily bath: The “bad” emperors Caligula and Nero, in contrast, took baths at odd hours. Ancient Greek and Roman biographers see the trivial details of people’s lives as at least as revealing as any glorious deeds they may have done. In 6.30 Marcus lauds Antoninus for the regularity of his bowel movements.

Lorium: Location of a country estate owned by Antoninus’ family, twelve miles west of Rome. He was raised there, and some remnants of the palace he had built there survive.

Lanuvium: City twenty miles southeast of Rome. Antoninus was born on a family-owned estate there. The purpose of the references to Antoninus’ family properties is to show that he did not insist on extravagant imports and lived a relatively modest life, despite his extreme wealth.

Tusculum: City sixteen miles southeast of Rome, it was home to many wealthy Romans’ country villas. The story of Antoninus’ interaction with a customs agent has not come down to us. The ruins of the city can be seen today.

Socrates: Prominent Athenian philosopher (469–399 BC) who was sentenced to death after a trial in which he was charged with impiety and corruption of the young. His disciple Plato (427–348 BC), founder of the Platonic school of philosophy, features Socrates as the main character in most of his writings. Socrates’ endurance and self-control are legendary. In Plato’s Symposium, for example, Socrates proves that he can drink a large amount of alcohol without being affected (176c).

the gods: Here and throughout Meditations Marcus sees traditional Greco-Roman religion as compatible with his Stoic worldview. This position is standard among Stoic philosophers. Marcus refers to “the gods” generally and of an individual “God,” who is at times named “Zeus.” See discussion of God and the gods in the introduction.

such a brother: Marcus is referring to Lucius Verus, who was his co-emperor until he died in 169. Antoninus Pius adopted both Marcus and Lucius Verus as his sons in 138 AD.

Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus: See notes on 1.8, 1.7, and 1.15, respectively.

Benedicta and Theodotus: Likely attractive slaves, a female and male, in the imperial household.

my wife: Faustina, daughter of Antoninus Pius, a first cousin of Marcus. She bore Marcus fourteen children. After being implicated in a plot with the general Avidius Cassius, she died while she was with Marcus at the city of Halala in Cappodocia in 175. Marcus had her deified and renamed the city Halala Faustinopolis.

That remedies were bestowed on me: Like most Romans, Marcus believed in the efficacy of divination through dreams and oracles.

Oracle at Caieta: Marcus is referring to an oracle of the god Apollo that was on a promontory seventy-five miles southeast of Rome. Its modern name is Gaeta.

depend on the sustenance: This sentence has the rhythm of poetry in the Greek. Marcus is quoting from a poem here, but we do not know who wrote it.

Book 2

When you wake up each morning: Book 2 opens with advice to repeat upon waking. The self-exhortation involves managing one’s expectations and assumptions for the day. Three other sections (5.1, 8.12, and 10.13) contain advice on what to say to oneself upon waking. Self-exhortation upon waking may have been a daily practice for Marcus. Compare the Stoic Seneca’s nightly practice of retrospective self-examination (On Anger, 3.36.1–3).

“None of the people out there”: Marcus believes that the only real harm is what we inflict on ourselves through our own wrong actions (4.26, 8.55, and 9.4).

“As kinsmen, we were born to work”: In this entry we can see Marcus enacting oikeiōsis (identification) by calling all people his kinsman. See also 5.20 and 7.22 and the discussion of the human commonwealth in the introduction.

bits of meat, a whisper of breath, and a ruling power: Marcus here introduces the tripartite division which, he believes, makes up each person: flesh, breath/soul, and the ruling power. See also 3.16, 5.33, 7.16, 8.56, 12.13, and 12.14. He regularly uses diminutives (here sarkia for sarx and pneumation for pneuma) when describing flesh and breath to diminish their importance relative to the ruling power.

a puppet tugged by selfish urges: Marcus repeatedly compares those who are the slaves of external stimuli to marionettes controlled by a puppet master (3.16, 6.16, 7.3, and 12.19). He inherited the metaphor from Plato (Laws, 644d–645b).

the present moment: Stoic theory privileges “now,” the present moment, over the past and future, which are infinite and which we never inhabit. Marcus, it seems, has combined this theory with the literary theme “seize the day.” In Meditations this urgent mindset includes situating oneself within the broader context of the universe.

All that the gods control: According to Stoic universal cosmic determinism, events only seem to happen by chance. The things that happen in the universe are all good in the sense of being in accordance with Nature. Providence is what has prearranged the events that happen to us in such a way that they are beneficial to us. Marcus frequently contrasts this providential arrangement with the randomness of atoms in Epicurean philosophy. This is known as the Providence-vs.-atoms theme. See also 4.3.

muttering written words: Romans generally read aloud to themselves. I interpret the participle gongyzōn (“grumbling” or “muttering”) as referring to someone on their death bed mumble-reading words to themself out of a book.

like a Roman and a man: Marcus makes a similar distinction between himself as emperor and as a human being in 6.44. Rome is the home city for the former, but the whole world is the home city for the latter, where a human being’s duties are to the human commonwealth.

Go on and do it, soul: Marcus here uses apostrophe, a highly rhetorical figure in which a speaker addresses something that cannot hear or respond.

Theophrastus expresses himself like a true philosopher: Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC) became the second leader of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in 322 BC, after Aristotle. The work to which Marcus is referring here has not come down to us, but the contrast between desire and anger is typical of both Aristotelian and Platonic ethics. In the Nichomachean Ethics (11.49a) Aristotle asserts that “the lack of self-control that comes with anger is less shameful than the one that comes with desire.” In the usual Stoic conception all wrong deeds and wrong emotions (including anger and lust) are equally bad. Marcus’ ranking of anger above desire is Aristotelian. Anger is particularly relevant to Marcus because he sees himself as anger-prone (1.17 and 11.18).

If one speaks colloquially: Marcus adds this disclaimer because Stoics view all vices as equally bad.

If you strip away the nightmares: More expansive examples of this “stripping” method appear in 3.11 and 6.13; see also 8.36 and 12.8.

“delving into the things beneath the earth”: This is part of a verse by the poet Pindar (fr. 292 Snell). Marcus no doubt encountered it in Plato’s Theaetetus (174d). He quotes the passage that immediately follows it (174d–e) in 10.23.

Even if you could live three thousand years: Marcus here presents the standard Stoic view that all lives consist only of the present moment (not of the past and future), so all deaths are equal, regardless of the different ages of the decedents. He introduces the theme of eternal recurrence of objects and phenomena to argue that one will have seen everything that can exist even after a relatively short life, so there is no reason to want to live longer.

that all things from time immemorial: Stoic cosmology maintained that the universe is periodically consumed in fire and regenerated. See 5.13, 5.32, 6.4, and 10.7.

Monimus the Cynic: Monimus of Syracuse (c. 4th century BC) belonged to the Cynic school of philosophy, which exalted a life of virtue and scorned everything else, including standards of social behavior. The title “Cynic” (from the ancient Greek word for “dog”) may have come from the behavior of some of them who chose to live on the streets like feral dogs (see 4.30). Whereas Monimus’ aphorism propounds a radical relativism, Marcus takes it (“in the proper way”) as referring to the Stoic view that all our reactions in our lives depend on our assumptions.

a tumor, a growth on the world: The malcontent who rejects an experience Nature has bestowed on them is unhealthy and noxious, both to themself and the whole cosmic system. Elsewhere, Marcus writes of the malcontent isolating themself by cutting themself out of the human commonwealth and the universe in general (4.29 and 9.23).

Life is fighting in a foreign war: This metaphor takes on extra resonance because this book of Meditations, according to its epigraph, was written while Marcus was on campaign against the Germanic tribe the Quadi, who occupied an area beyond the boundary of the empire to the northeast of the Roman province Pannonia Superior.

Book 3

Epigraph the fortress of Carnuntum: Roman legionary fortress and the capital of the province of Upper Pannonia (on the eastern edge of what is now Austria). Marcus had his headquarters there from 171–173 AD.

whether the time has come to die: Suicide was seen as acceptable by Stoics in certain situations. Both Zeno and Cleanthes, his successor as head of the Stoic school, are said to have opted for it late in their lives. Two of Marcus’ heroes, the Stoics Cato of Utica and Marcus Junius Brutus (1.14), committed suicide, the former after losing the battle of Thapsus (46 BC) to Julius Caesar and the latter after losing the battle of Phillipi (42 BC) to Mark Antony and Octavian. Marcus recommends suicide when a person is permanently unable to pursue the goals that rationality proposes (3.7, 5.29, 8.47, 9.2, 9.3, 10.8, 10.22, 10.32, and 11.3).

by-products of Nature: See also 6.36 and 8.50.

take in the attractions of his slaves: It was stylish for wealthy Romans to own attractive slaves. They both showed them off and used them for sex. See Marcus on Benedicta and Theodotus in 1.17. The Stoic sage would be above such behavior.

Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine: Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–370 BC) was a physician and philosopher. He is referred to as the “Father of Medicine” because he established medicine as a distinct discipline. The Hippocratic oath to do no harm takes its name from him. Though the circumstances of his death are unknown, he is said to have died at an advanced age in Larissa in Northern Greece while traveling.

The Chaldeans: Specialists in astrology who were from in and around Babylon. Most Romans believed in the predictive efficacy of signs in the stars.

Alexander the Great, Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar: Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was a Macedonian king who conquered Greece and swaths of North Africa and the Middle and Far East before his death at age thirty-two. Pompey the Great (106–48 BC) was a Roman general and politician. In 60 BC he joined Marcus Crassus (115–53 BC) and Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) in the First Triumvirate. He later came to side with the conservative optimates in the Senate in opposition to Caesar’s populares faction. After conquering Gaul and building up a loyal army, Julius Caesar instigated a civil war in the Roman Republic. Pompey lost the battle of Pharsalus to him in 48 BC and retreated to the court of Ptolemy XIII in Egypt, where he was assassinated by Egyptian courtiers. Caesar won the war in 45 BC. After being proclaimed “dictator for life,” he was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC.

Heraclitus: Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 BC) was a philosopher who propounded, in oracular language, that all is change and that fire is the first principle of the universe. According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus died of dropsy after coating his skin in cow dung in the hope of eliciting perspiration (The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.1).

Democritus: Democritus of Abdera (460–370 BC) was a philosopher who propounded an atomic view of the universe. Little is known for certain about his life, though it seems likely that he died in Athens at an advanced age. Marcus, it seems, is citing “lice” as the literal cause of his death.

Socrates: One of Marcus’ heroes; see 1.16. Marcus is using the word “louses” to refer to the three accusers who prompted Socrates’ trial (Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon) and perhaps to the Athenian jurors who condemned him to death. In the Greek Marcus plays on the repeated word “lice” (phtheires) by switching from a literal to a figurative meaning of it.

Train your mind to work in such a way: Marcus mentions this practice, the test of instant divulgence, again in 12.4.

The destiny he carries inside himself: Wordplay here creates a paradox: A person and their destiny are simultaneously carrying each other and carried by each other.

“drag you away,” as Socrates used to say: An allusion to Plato’s Phaedrus, 83a–83b.

“the greatest good is the one”: Epictetus, Discourses, 1.4.1–5 and 3.2.1–5.

No, even if it’s his time: For Marcus on suicide, see the note on 3.1.

like an actor forced to make a mid-play exit: This image recurs in the final entry of Meditations, 12.36.

stripped down to its essence: For further mentions of the “stripping method,” see 2.12, 6.13, 8.36, and 12.8.

the exalted city: For the universe as a city, see also 2.16 and 4.3.

my natural kin and fellow citizen: Marcus does not mean “kin” literally here. He aspires to see all others as both his kinspeople and his fellow citizens in the human commonwealth.

the Heroic Age: Marcus is referring to the heroes of Greco-Roman mythology, who were generally regarded as historical.

History of the Greeks and Romans: If Marcus did write on history, that work has not survived. He does later share some of his favorite passages from ancient Greek literature, perhaps from a commonplace book (7.35–46, 7.48, and 7.50–51).

Most people have no idea: Marcus here asserts that we come to understand actions and states of being by contemplating them with our minds. People who assess them entirely based on sensory information received through their eyes will remain ignorant of the essence of them.

body, vitality, and intelligence: For another summation of this tripartite division, see 2.2.

men who act like women: There is no denying the misogyny and homophobia expressed here. The assumption is that females cannot control themselves and that “womanlike” men have the same deficiency. Compare “womanish character” in 4.28. After the brief tributes to Marcus’ mother (1.3) and wife (1.17), Meditations, on the whole, has little to say about women.

Phaleris: A tyrannical ruler of Acragas in Sicily from 570 BC until he was overthrown and killed in 554 BC. He is said to have roasted victims alive inside a hollow statue of a bull that would “roar” with their screams of pain.

Nero: Nero (37–68 AD) here serves as a model of a bad Roman emperor. Sources portray him as self-centered, self-indulgent, and tyrannical. After a rebellion, he was proclaimed a public enemy and committed suicide.

Book 4

the master power within us: Marcus here refers to the ruling power (hēgemonikon) as a “master” (kyrieuon) in the sense of being lord over slaves and one’s household in general, including one’s wife.

it takes them in as fuel: Marcus here introduces, metaphorically, the theme of turning impediments into opportunities. See also 5.12, 5.29, 6.50, 8.35, 8.41, 8.47, and 10.12.

“retreat”: Translates the word anachōrēsis, which can refer to a literal vacation. Like Plato (Phaedo 67c–d) and Dio Chrysostomos (Oration 20: On Anachoresis) before him, however, Marcus uses the word to refer to retreating inwardly from one’s body into one’s mind.

either divine Providence or random atoms: For the Providence-vs.-atoms theme, see the note on 2.3.

Remember, too, that the universe: Marcus means that previous thinkers have given proofs that the human commonwealth exists; see Cicero’s On the Laws, 1.23, for example. Marcus goes on to give his own proof in the next section.

Because all of us humans . . . to nowhere: In this entry Marcus argues that our shared human rationality proves the existence of the pan-human republic the human commonwealth, first mentioned in the preceding entry. Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of this entry, first in the first person plural (“we”) and then the first person singular.

The power that naturally bestows benefits: Though Providence, a preordained sequence of events, plays out deterministically in the universe, Stoics attribute free will to human beings. Death, for example, is inevitable, but we can decide how and in some cases when we will die.

I do: The objector utters this brief sentence to set up Marcus the instructor’s response.

When grains of frankincense are tossed: Frankincense is a resin obtained from trees of the genus Boswellia. At the time Marcus was writing it was imported to Rome from the Arabian Peninsula. It was believed to ward off airborne contagions, including the Antonine plague (165–180 AD), which was raging in the Roman Empire at the time Marcus was writing Meditations. It is still used today in religious rituals as well as perfumes, essential oils, and home remedies. Marcus is here using grains of it as a metaphor for the deaths of human beings. He later twice quotes lines from Euripides’ tragedy Hypsipyle (7.40 and 11.6) to convey the same idea: The length and timing of human lives are irrelevant; see also 2.14.

to go from a wild beast: Marcus is alluding to a proverb (“either a god or a wild beast”) quoted by Aristotle (Politics, 1.2, and Nicomachean Ethics, 7.1).

Agathon: The text is corrupt here. Given that the conclusion of the section is metaphorical in a poetic way, the German classical scholar Wilhelm Xylander’s reading (“Agathon”) seems most likely. His was the first printed edition of Meditations in 1558. Agathon was an Athenian tragic poet (c. 448–401 BC). Unlike Socrates, he did accept, in 407 BC, an invitation to join the court of King Archelaus of Macedon (see note on 11.25). He died there around 401 BC. Very little of his work has come down to us, but Marcus seems to be quoting, most likely from memory, lines from one of his tragedies.

Purple fabric: Purple dye, obtained from the mucus of murex snails, was an expensive import. The color was called Tyrian purple because the shells were collected off the coast of Tyre in Phoenicia.

If every soul of every person: Some Stoics held that the soul disintegrates at death; others, that it survives for a time in the air. Marcus here explores the second conception.

A poet once exclaimed: Aristophanes (446–386 BC), an Athenian author of Old Comedy, wrote the line in question (fr. 112). We do not know its original context. Marcus is here encouraging allegiance both to one’s local government and the commonwealth of the universe.

“What is in harmony . . . city of Zeus”: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of the prayers in this entry.

A philosopher: The atomist Democritus of Abdera is quoted here (fr. 3 Diels-Kranz). See note on Democritus, 3.3.

a womanish character: See the note on “men who act like women,” 3.16.

a tumor in this universe: See 2.16 and the related note.

Whoever severs his soul: In Marcus’ conception, everything we experience, including others’ actions, comes from Nature and cannot happen other than the way it does. To become upset about the actions of another is not just antisocial but a breach with rationality and Nature. See 4.4.

Here’s one philosopher . . . I cleave to it: Marcus the aspirant speaks in the first person in this entry. He is likely envisaging Cynic philosophers, who flouted social convention and in some cases dressed like beggars. He later (11.28) refers to an episode in the life of Socrates in which he socialized while wearing only an undergarment. He is contrasting the poverty and asceticism of some philosophers with his own wealth and abundance.

Vespasian: Emperor (9–79 AD) who ruled from 69–79 AD, roughly one hundred years before Marcus. He was the founder of the Flavian dynasty.

Trajan: Emperor (53–117 AD) who ruled from 98–117 AD. He was the second of “The Five Good Emperors” in the Nerva-Antonine dynasty.

the words that stand for celebrities: Fronto, Marcus’ tutor in Latin rhetoric, encouraged the selective use of archaic words.

Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus: Camillus (448–365 BC) is a legendary Roman politician and general. He is most famous for defending Rome after the Gauls defeated the Romans in 387 BC at the battle of Allia, eleven miles north of the city. There are several figures with the name Caeso in early Republican Roman history. We do not know to which Marcus is referring. Volesus is a family name exclusive to the patrician Valerii, who were prominent throughout Roman history. We do not know which of them Marcus has in mind. Sicinius Dentatus (died c. 450 BC) was a Roman solider and champion of the Roman plebs. In 455 BC he captured the camp of the Italic tribe the Aequi and thus turned the tide of the battle against them.

Scipio and Cato: Publius Cornelius Scipio (236–183 BC), a Roman general and politician, earned the title Africanus after defeating Hannibal and the Carthaginians at the battle of Zama (202 BC), a city in present-day Libya. For Cato, see note on 1.13.

Augustus, then Hadrian and Antoninus: Augustus Caesar (63 BC–14 AD), formerly Octavian, was the founder of the Roman Empire and the first emperor. Hadrian (76–138 AD) was the Roman emperor during Marcus’ youth. In the year of his death he adopted Antoninus as his successor on the condition that Antoninus adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as his successors in turn. For Antoninus, see the note on 1.16.

“turns unnoticeable and is named no more”: Marcus is quoting Homer’s Odyssey, 1.242.

Clotho: One of the three Fates who preside over human destinies in Greek mythology, along with Lachesis (the measurer) and Atropos (the cutter). Her name means the “spinner of thread” (that is, the one who spins raw wool into yarn). Marcus, with his emphasis on the present moment, may privilege Clotho here because, according to Plato, she spins the present, whereas Lachesis and Atropos have to do with the past and the future, respectively (Republic, 10.617c). See also 2.3 and 3.11.

As Epictetus liked to say: For Epictetus, see note on entry 1.7 and the brief history of Stoicism in the introduction. Marcus quotes this sentence (fr. 26, Schenkl 1916) by Epictetus a second time, with slight variation, in 9.24.

time is a river running with everything: Marcus is giving his own version of Heraclitus’ famous dictum: “All things flow.” For Heraclitus, see the note on 3.3.

“Water is the death of earth”: In this entry Marcus quotes and paraphrases Heraclitus (fr. 76 and 71–74 Diels-Kranz). For more on Heraclitus, see the note on 3.3.

Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum: Helice was a city in the north of the Peloponnese a little over a mile from the Corinthian Gulf. In 373 BC, after an earthquake and the subsequent tsunami, it vanished into the sea. Pompeii was a city near what is now Naples in Italy. In 79 AD the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius buried it under between thirteen and twenty feet of ash. Herculaneum was a city a little over seven miles southeast of Naples. Like Pompeii, it was buried under ash during the eruption of Vesuvius.

What yesterday was a glob: Marcus at times uses lower-register diction to shock himself into a disgust for the body and what comes from it. His word for “ejaculate” here is muxarion: a bit of snot. See also 5.12, 6.13, and 8.24.

you will meet your end gratefully: Marcus here “transfuses” the “you” and the olive in such a way that the latter takes on the human capacity to express gratitude.

I’m so unlucky: The objector speaks this sentence in order to prompt Marcus the instructor’s correction.

Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus: We cannot confidently identify these four presumably long-lived men.

three full human generations: Marcus is here playfully alluding to two epithets of the Homeric wiseman Nestor, who was held to have lived for three human generations.

Book 5

Make sure you have this admonition: For other instances of morning admonition, see 2.1 (and note), 8.12, and 10.13.

But it’s so pleasant here in bed: Here and in the italicized sentence below, the objector is speaking in response to Marcus the instructor.

I will keep moving forward: Marcus the aspirant speaks in the first person in this entry.

A prayer from the Athenians: We do not know the author of this prayer.

If you aren’t going to pray: Marcus more fully discusses prayer in 9.40; see also 6.44 and 12.14.

“Asclepius the god of medicine”: Asclepius is the Greco-Roman god of physicians and healing. The snake-wound staff he frequently carries has become a symbol of medicine and appears on paper prescriptions. The Greeks and Romans prayed in his temples for continued health or medical advice.

sponge, warm compress, lotion, or irrigation: Marcus is referring to ancient treatments for conjunctivitis (pink eye).

rent boy: Translation of the Greek word kinaidos, which here, given the preceding female prostitute, seems to refer to a preadult male hired by adult males for sex. Though a philhellene, Marcus disapproves of pederasty which was, in different eras and places, a culturally accepted ancient Greek practice. See note on “rent boy” in 1.16.

And I won’t even mention how hard: Though this entry begins in the voice of Marcus the instructor, Marcus the aspirant takes over and finishes it in the first person.

old line of comic poetry: The line to which Marcus is referring is from the play The Ghost (fr. 42) by the New Comic playwright Menander (c. 344–292 BC). The whole quotation is “He is so rich in the good things of life that, through sheer abundance, he doesn’t have a pot to shit in.” Marcus criticizes New Comedy in a discussion of ancient Greek drama in 11.6.

I am made of form and matter: Marcus the aspirant delivers these reflections on change in the first person.

Even if the universe is organized: For more on the cyclic incineration and regeneration of the universe, see 2.14 and the related note.

It was proved long ago: Marcus is referring to previous thinkers such as Aristotle (Politics, 1253a). Marcus himself presents an argument to prove the existence of the human commonwealth in 4.4.

In one sense, all my fellow human beings: Marcus the aspirant delivers these injunctions regarding interpersonal relations (and obstacles) in the first person. In the last sentence he uses the literary device paradox: An obstacle paradoxically helps us make progress.

someone has veered astray: Marcus the aspirant, the speaker of this entry, here talks about his behavior with a note of self-congratulation.

The ruling part of your soul: When activities in our bodies try to force themselves on our consciousnesses, they are to be excluded. When they offer themselves up for our acceptance, they are to be regarded as mere matters of indifference.

“Live in harmony with the gods”: This seems to be a quotation, but we do not know from what work.

But human beings have reason: The objector speaks these sentences to prompt Marcus the instructor’s response.

you should remain alive here: For suicide, see the note on 3.1.

these lines from The Odyssey: Marcus is paraphrasing The Odyssey, 4.690, where Penelope is telling the herald Medon of the virtues Odysseus exhibited in Ithaka before he went to fight in the Trojan War. Marcus is likely recalling the line from memory.

everything in the universe: Stoics maintained that periodically recurring conflagrations divided the universe into epochs. For more on the cyclic incineration and regeneration of the universe, see 2.14 and the related note.

“from the wide ways of earth to Mt. Olympus”: This line appears in an apocalyptic passage in Hesiod’s Works and Days (197) toward the end of his account of the Five Ages of Humankind.

But what can I do?: The objector speaks this and the following italicized sentence in response to Marcus the instructor.

by curbing yourself and carrying on: Marcus has taken the Greek verbs he uses here from a maxim of Epictetus (fr. 10 Schenkl).

If a certain wrongness: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of this entry. In his conception, a person ideally keeps his “soul focused on actions and states of being that serve reason and the human commonwealth” (6.14).

the old man in the comedy: Marcus is referencing a play that is unknown to us.

Book 6

If it is an indissoluble whole: The standard Stoic view maintains that all material things will be sublimated into vapor during cyclically recurring cosmic conflagrations. See 2.14 and the related note.

If it can fully disintegrate: Marcus is referring to the Epicurean belief that everything, at the cessation of existence, disintegrates into atoms.

The universe is either: Marcus the aspirant offers this pithy summation of the Providence-vs.-atoms dichotomy in the first person. He makes clear elsewhere that he believes the universe is planned (2.2 and 4.27). He does at times entertain the possibility that the universe is not providentially organized but only to argue that one’s ethical goal is consistent with both options (9.39).

the cosmic music: Marcus is referring, metaphorically, to the Stoic view that both a virtuous life and the happiness that comes with living it are in harmonious agreement with Nature.

birthmother: Marcus praises the ethical character and frugality of his deceased mother, Domitia Lucilla, in 1.3.

Falernian wine: Potent white wine made from Aglianico grapes grown on Mt. Falernus (now Mt. Massico), which marks the border between Campania and Latium. It was the premiere wine of Marcus’ day.

imperial-purple robe: See notes on 4.20 and 9.36.

the chafing of a bit of exposed entrail: Marcus seems to be using the Cynic technique of blunt “outspokenness” (parrhēsia) to shock himself into the right opinion (R. B. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study. Oxford Classical Monographs. Clarendon Press, 1991).

If something strikes you: For further mentions of the “stripping method,” see 2.12, 3.11, 8.36, and 12.8.

Crates’ words about Xenocrates: Both were foreigners who lived in Athens and performed diplomatic duties on its behalf. Crates (4th–3rd centuries BC) was a Cynic philosopher, and Xenocrates was the head of the Platonic Academy from 339–314 BC. We do not know what Crates said, but Xenocrates was known for his humility (Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 4.2).

What does have value: The objector speaks this sentence to trigger Marcus the instructor’s reply.

There are the four elements: Earth, air, water, and fire. In 9.9 Marcus explains that earth and water naturally move downward, and air and fire naturally move upward. See also 2.3. According to Stoic physics the four elements’ cyclic alternations continuously refresh the universe.

wrestling: Popular sport in the Roman Empire. It was used to train soldiers and as exercise for males of all social classes. It also featured in some gladiatorial events.

If someone can prove: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this and the following entry.

Even, say, three hours: Marcus is expressing the Stoic view that, in ethics, quality is more important than quantity.

Alexander the Great and his stable boy: See note on Alexander the Great, 3.3. The name of Alexander’s stable boy has not come down to us. Marcus is using his very anonymity as a foil for Alexander.

how to spell “Antoninus”: Upon becoming emperor in 161 AD, Marcus adopted the name “Antoninus” out of respect for his predecessor and adoptive father, Antoninus Pius. Marcus writes at length of Antoninus’ virtues in 1.16.

But they’re wrong: The objector speaks this sentence.

Caesarified: Marcus makes a verb out of the title “Caesar” that belongs to a Roman emperor. It originated with Julius (see note on 3.3) and Augustus Caesar (see note on 4.33).

Antoninus Pius: For more on Antoninus Pius, see 1.16 and the related note.

how he didn’t need to take time: See 1.16 and the related note on Antoninus’ bathing habits.

All I am is a paltry body: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

Mt. Athos: A mountain on the Chalkidiki peninsula that was in the Roman province of Macedonia. Starting roughly 150 years after Marcus’ death, it became a Christian monastery and is still active as such today.

by-products of what is divine: Marcus exhorts himself to see things not normally considered to be beautiful as beautiful because they come from natural processes. In 8.50 he compares these “by-products” to wood shavings on the floor of a carpenter’s workshop. See also 3.2.

centripetal tension: Marcus is using a technical Stoic term for the vibration of pneuma (the breath of existence) inside of things. In animate existences pneuma is a soul. In inert objects centripetal tension provides the cohesion that holds them together.

“as if sleepwalking”: Marcus is quoting Heraclitus (fr. B 75 Diels-Kranz).

Chrysippus: (c. 279–206 BC) Known as “the second founder” of Stoicism after Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), he was born in Soli, a coastal city in present-day Turkey. Chrysippus excelled in all three branches of Stoicism—logic, physics, and ethics. See also 7.19 and the brief history of Stoicism in the introduction. Chrysippus maintained that even wrong deeds form an integral part of the harmonious universe and, apparently, supported this position by pointing out that “cheap and farcical lines” contribute to the greater purpose of a comic play (Plutarch Moralia, 1065 D).

Does Asclepius do the work: Greco-Roman god of medicine; see note on 5.8. Ceres is the Roman name for the Greek Demeter, the goddess who presided over cereal crops.

Think of a single star: Stoics often cite the orderly movement of heavenly bodies as proof of cosmic design. See also 7.47, 9.9, and 11.27.

If the gods have made a plan: Marcus the aspirant delivers these reflections on the gods and the human commonwealth in the first person.

Antoninus: For Marcus’ assumption of the name Antoninus in honor of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, see the note on that name in 6.26.

Just make sure you mean “benefit”: As Marcus sees it, matters of indifference such as fame or wealth cannot be truly beneficial because they are not good (or even bad). People, however, commonly speak of them as good things.

spectacles in the arena: Marcus is referring to gladiatorial combat and chariot racing in the arena and to plays and other sorts of performances in theaters. In 1.5 Marcus expresses the contempt he felt for such spectacles from an early age.

Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion: These three men have not been identified. Marcus is naming them as examples of people with no reputation. He may be referring to slaves in his household who had died.

Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates: For Heraclitus, see note on 3.3. Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–490 BC) was a philosopher and mathematician who discovered the Pythagorean theorem. He founded the Pythagorean school of philosophy. For Socrates, see note on 1.16.

Eudoxus, Hipparchus, and Archimedes: Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–340 BC) was an astronomer, physician, and philosopher. We have only fragments of his writings. Born in Nicaea, Bithynia, Hipparchus (c. 190–120 BC) was a physician, astronomer, and mathematician. He invented trigonometry and discovered the procession of equinoxes. Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212) was a polymath who is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity. Most famous for coming up with the objective Archimedean point of reference, he invented many devices as well as anticipated calculus.

Menippus: Satirist and Cynic philosopher (2nd century BC) from the city of Gadara at the northwestern tip of what is now Jordan. The seriocomic and often bawdy genre of Menippean satire takes its name from him. His work influenced the Roman novels The Satyricon and The Golden Ass as well as Roman satire.

What was it that I did accomplish?: The objector speaks this sentence to prompt Marcus the instructor’s explanation.

Honey tastes bitter: A buildup of the compound bilirubin causes jaundice (yellowing) on the skin and in the whites of eyes. It also causes a bitter taste in one’s mouth.

Water is frightening: Marcus is referring to hydrophobia (“fear of water”), a late-stage symptom of rabies. The rabid experience spasms in their throats when they attempt to swallow.

What thing out there is causing anger: The objector is the speaker of the italicized sentence. The jaundiced, the rabid, and the boy are all having reactions (negative or positive) to external things—honey, water, and a ball. These examples prompt the objector to ask himself what object has resulted in his current emotional state (anger). Marcus the instructor then brings the entry around with the implication that the misassessment that has led to his anger is worse than what causes jaundice and rabies.

Book 7

When you are talking with others: Marcus structures this entry chiastically, that is, in an ABBA format. The first sentence concerns speech; the second, an urge; the third, the urge; and the fourth, speech.

Is my understanding equal to a task: Marcus the aspirant delivers these remarks on work and collaboration in the first person.

siege warfare: In siege warfare the Romans usually built a ramp (agger) up against a city wall. They then scaled the remaining distance to the top of the wall with ladders (scalae). Marcus refers to climbing a ladder here.

“Like all my fellow rational animals”: Marcus plays on the words melos (“limb”) and meros (“part”). “Might” and “mote” are an attempt to capture their sonic similarity. Marcus is making a distinction between an isolated part and an integrated component that works in concert with others to benefit humanity in general (including itself). For another instance of wordplay, see 3.3 and the related notes on Democritus and Socrates.

Let any external thing: Marcus the aspirant speaks in the first person in this and the following entry.

I should be like an emerald: Marcus uses personification to attribute speech to an inanimate emerald.

Happiness in a person: Marcus the aspirant uses the rhetorical figure of apostrophe to address phantasia in the first person. For more on that concept, see the section on phantasia in the introduction.

how many Chrysippuses: Marcus pluralizes the names of thinkers who were influential on him. For Chrysippus, see note on 6.42. For Socrates, see note on 1.16. For Epictetus, see note on 1.7.

I have only one worry: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

in wax for a ceramic mold: The overarching metaphor in this entry is the lost-wax method for ceramics. The ceramicist first makes a wax model. That model is then covered in clay to make a mold—an exact copy of the outside of the wax model. When the mold is fired in a kiln, the wax melts and drains from it. The solid sculpture or vessel that results from this process is hollow and can be “shattered.”

Scowling is very much at odds: For more on facial expression and deportment, see 7.37 and 7.60.

“Everything is a convention”: Marcus is quoting Democritus (fr. 9 Diels-Kranz). For Democritus, see note on 3.3.

Unbearable sufferings carry us off: Marcus is paraphrasing the philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), the founder of Epicureanism, which was the major rival to Stoicism in Marcus’ day (fr. 447 Usener). See also 7.64 and 12.34.

“Say there is a person”: Plato, Republic, 486a–b (Book 6). This passage is part of Socrates’ larger argument that the true philosopher is the most suitable person to rule in an ideal state.

“Doing good deeds and getting trashed”: Quote by Antisthenes (fr. 20c Caizzi; 445–365 BC), a follower of Socrates who became a philosopher in his own right. He was the teacher of Diogenes the Cynic and is sometimes regarded as the founder of the Cynic school of philosophy. For Diogenes the Cynic, see the note on 8.3.

Your face: For more on facial expression, see 7.24 and 7.60.

“How pointlessly we rage”: This entry is a line from Euripides’ tragedy Bellerophon (fr. 287, 1–3 Nauck); also quoted in 11.6.

“Come and share your joyfulness”: We do not know the author of these verses.

“There is a reaping of lives”: Euripides, Hypsipyle (fr. 757, 125–6 Collard and Cropp). Though Marcus could have read this line in a text of the play or heard it performed, he more likely became acquainted with it from other sources. Epictetus (Discourses, 2.6.11–14) and Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, 3.59) both quote it. Marcus quotes these lines again in 11.6.

“If the gods no longer see”: Euripides, Antiope (fr. 208, 1–3 Collard and Crop); also quoted in 11.6.

“I’ve got what’s just and good”: Lines from an unknown play by Euripides (fr. 918, 3–4 Collard and Crop).

“Don’t join the others”: The author of these lines is unknown.

“I would give that man”: This passage is from Plato’s Apology, 28b. In it Socrates, on trial in Athens for impiety and corruption of the young, is explaining that he is not ashamed that his behavior led to a prejudice that will likely result in his execution. He argues that, when it comes to one’s duty, the risk of death is irrelevant.

“Here’s the truth, men of Athens”: Plato’s Apology, 28d, a continuation of the passage quoted in the preceding entry. Socrates utters these two sentences after comparing his disregard of death to that of the greatest Homeric hero, Achilles.

“But consider this, fine sir”: Plato’s Gorgias, 512d–e.

“If you want to speak or write”: Marcus here paraphrases Plato’s Theaetetus, 173e–174a.

“What Earth has mothered”: These lines are from Euripides’ tragedy Chrysippus (fr. 839, 9–11).

“There they are, trying to divert”: These lines are from Euripides’ tragedy Suppliants, 1110–11.

“There is a storm wind”: The author of this passage is unknown.

“No, that man’s merely better”: This quotation recalls a Spartan anecdote (Plutarch, Sayings of Spartans, 236e). Told that his opponent was “the better man,” a defeated Spartan wrestler said, “No, only better at throwing his opponent.” Like that wrestler, Marcus takes “better” in the moral sense.

Your actions matter; their circumstances do not: One can control one’s actions and, ideally, turn them toward what benefits the human commonwealth. The circumstances that surround those actions are not in our control and, thus, matters of indifference (neither good nor bad). Circumstances are the medium on which our efforts should work.

What your face expresses: See also 7.24 and 7.37.

“No soul ever chooses”: This passage is a paraphrase of sentiments expressed by Plato in The Republic, 413a, and The Sophist, 228c–d. Marcus most likely encountered this idea of Plato’s in Epictetus’ Discourses, 1.28.4 and 2.22.36. He mentions the idea again in 11.18.

“It’s neither intolerable nor interminable”: Marcus is quoting Epicurus (fr. 447). He paraphrases the passage earlier, in 7.33.

savages: Apanthrōpoi, translated here as “savages,” literally means “those outside of humanity.” These people are subhuman in Marcus’ eyes because they ignore the goal of their human nature.

Telauges was not a better man: Marcus is referring to a dialogue written not by Plato, but a follower of Socrates named Aeschines of Sphettus. Though that work has not come down to us, Teleauges most likely served as the interlocuter and foil to Socrates in it.

resolutely withstood a frosty winter night: Marcus is referring to a story that Alcibiades tells about Socrates in Symposium, 220a–d.

nobly chose to defy the order: Marcus is referring to a story Socrates tells in Plato’s Apology, 32c–d. Leon of Salamis was a supporter of democracy in Athens during the brief reign (404–403 BC) of the Thirty Oligarchs there.

“swaggered about the streets of Athens”: A line about Socrates from Aristophanes’ Clouds, 362. Plato refers to it in Symposium, 221b.

you have abandoned your hope: Marcus admits that he can claim expertise in only one branch of Stoicism: ethics. He is not an authority in logic or “physics” (which in classical times referred to the study of the physical world).

No one ever grows tired: The good deeds we do are beneficial to others, Nature, and ourselves. We should want to help other people because the help we give benefits us as well.

either everything is proceeding: Another iteration of the Providence-vs.-atoms theme. See note on 2.3.

Book 8

“Your whole situation is in the way”: Marcus is here referring to his duties and role as emperor as an obstacle to his philosophical growth.

“Where is it, then?”: The objector speaks this and the following two italicized sentences.

Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Pompey the Great: For background on these three figures, see the note on 3.3.

Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates: Diogenes the Cynic (c. 410–323 BC) was born in the city of Sinope, which is on the northern coast of present-day Turkey. The founder of the Cynic school of philosophy, he rejected social conventions and hierarchies as artificial. See also the note on 1.6. For Heraclitus, see the note on 3.3. For Socrates, see the note on 1.16.

Hadrian and Augustus: For Hadrian and Augustus, see the note on 4.33.

Even their proportions: This last sentence is elliptical in the Greek, and some editors omit it. I have translated the words where they appear in the manuscript and not Farquharson’s relocation of them (The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, 1944).

Whenever you don’t want to get out of bed: Marcus also gives advice on what to do upon waking in 2.1, 5.1, and 10.13.

Helios himself: The sun god in Greek mythology. Marcus frequently refers to Zeus by name but rarely does so for the other gods. See discussion of God and the gods in the introduction.

Lanterns are like that: It is not clear how this last sentence in the entry relates to the preceding metaphor.

Am I doing something?: Marcus the aspirant delivers these reflections on work and the acceptance of one’s experiences in the first person.

After laying Verus to rest, Lucilla died: The Lucilla intended is presumably Marcus’ mother (see 1.3). The Verus might then be his father, Marcus Annius Verus, who died when he was three (1.2).

After laying Maximus to rest, Secunda died: For Maximus, see 1.15. Secunda may have been Maximus’ wife.

After laying Diotimus to rest, Epitynchanus died: A Diotimus is mentioned as a mourner of Hadrian in 8.37. Epitynchanus is unknown.

After laying Faustina to rest, Antoninus died: For Antoninus Pius, see note on 1.16. The Faustina intended is likely Faustina the Elder, who was Marcus’ aunt and Antoninus’ wife.

After laying Hadrian to rest, Celer died: The name Hadrian here may not be referring to the emperor but a sophist. There was a Celer who taught Marcus oratory for a time.

Charax, Demetrius, Eudaemon: Charax may have been a philosopher of whom we know nothing. Demetrius was possibly a Cynic philosopher banished by Vespasian (reigned 69–79 AD). The Eudaemon meant here may have been one of Marcus’ secretaries for a time.

people in the court of Emperor Augustus: For Augustus, see the note on 4.33. Marcus most likely has Augustus’ third wife, Livia Drusilla (59 BC–29 AD), in mind. She had considerable political influence. Augustus’ daughter Julia the Elder, his sole surviving child, came from his second wife Scribonia (70 BC–16 AD). Julia went on to be the second wife of the next emperor, Tiberius. Octavia the Younger, the sister of Augustus (then named Octavian), married Mark Antony in an attempt to reconcile the two men. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (c. 62–12 BC) was the emperor Augustus’ most trusted friend and righthand man. Arius Didymus of Alexandria, Egypt (1st Century AD), was Augustus’ friend and court philosopher. He was a Stoic. The rhetorician Quintilian claims Arius taught rhetoric as well (Institutio Oratoria 2.15.36, 3.1.16). Gaius Maecenas was an immensely wealthy friend and assistant of the emperor Augustus. He presided over civic projects and funding for the arts.

family of Pompey the Great: Pompey and his descendants were all killed in the civil war they waged against Julius Caesar. See note on 3.3 and entry 8.3.

But something outside of me: The objector speaks this and the following italicized sentence in response to the instructor.

something you have stripped down: For further mentions of the “stripping method,” see 2.12, 3.11, 6.13, and 12.8.

Panthea and Pergamus still holding a vigil: Panthea, a courtesan, was the mistress of Lucius Verus, Marcus’ adoptive brother. Pergamus is unknown to us. The implication is that he was close enough to Lucius Verus to mourn a long time for him after his death in 169 AD.

Chabrias and Diotimus still holding a vigil: Both Chabrias and Diotimus are unknown to us, though the latter is mentioned in 8.25. Hadrian died in 138 AD.

“to add wise judgment”: The poet and the original context are unknown.

When I look at the virtues: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of this entry.

Who is there speaking?: Marcus personifies pain in this entry. It speaks the two sentences in quotation marks.

Empedocles’ “perfectly round sphere”: Marcus is referring to a fragment (B 27.4 Diels-Kranz) of the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles (c. 494–434 BC). He maintained that, in the primordial state of the cosmos, there was a perfectly round sphere in which subsequently opposing powers were in harmonious rest. See 11.12 and 12.3.

I don’t deserve to keep causing pain: Marcus the aspirant here delivers this poignant reflection in the first person. He is also the speaker of the following section.

Whisk me away and drop me: Marcus the aspirant here speaks of his devotion to his inner divinity and avoidance of vice in the first person.

something stronger than I am: The objector speaks this and the following italicized sentence in response to Marcus the instructor.

you should leave this life: For suicide, see note on 3.1.

This cucumber tastes bitter: The objector is the speaker of this and the following italicized sentence. Their purpose is to provoke responses from Marcus the instructor. This entry is similar to Epictetus, Discourses, 1.6.30–32.

make sure your soul: The soul is portrayed as contracting in pain and expanding with pleasure.

To my free will: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of this entry.

An arrow flies in one manner: Marcus deploys the rhetorical device paradox in this entry: The mind described is moving straight ahead even when it is moving in circles.

Book 9

Nature consists of all the things: Farquharson in his text (1944) locates this sentence before the one that introduces the “liar.” It seems out of place there. Like other translators, I have placed it after the sentence that, in my edition, starts the second paragraph of this entry.

pestilence in the air: Marcus may well have the Antonine Plague, likely smallpox, in mind here. It was ubiquitous in the empire during the time he was writing Meditations.

forms of existence superior to ours: Marcus means the gods.

Don’t suffer through your work: Marcus quotes verses by Euripides on this theme in 7.51.

Today I escaped: Marcus the aspirant here congratulates himself in the first person.

For animals like ourselves: This entry has a chiastic arrangement: A (“good and bad”), B (“from action, not our feelings”), B (“from action, not our feelings”), A (“virtue and vice”).

life under your grandfather: For Marcus’ grandfather Marcus Annius Verus, see note on 1.1; for his mother, Domitia Lucilla, see note on 1.3; for his father, also named Marcus Annius Verus, see note on 1.2. Marcus, however, most likely means his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius (1.16), here.

puffs of soul dragging their corpses: A favorite saying of Epictetus; see note on 4.41.

The shades of the Underworld: Marcus is alluding to Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, known as “The Book of the Dead.” In it Odysseus travels to the Underworld and sees and interacts with the souls of the deceased.

The things that fluctuate: The cosmic cycles to which Marcus is referring result from the periodic destruction of the universe by fire. See 2.14 and the related note.

If the universe lacks purpose: For more on the Providence-vs.-atoms theme, see the note on 2.3.

What does that mean for you: The thrust of the argument is that human beings should harmonize their actions with the dashing “spate” of Nature’s activities by obeying their specific human nature and accepting whatever happens to them.

Plato’s republic: Marcus is referring to the ideal state laid out in Plato’s Republic.

Alexander the Great, Philip of Macedon, and Demetrius: For Alexander the Great, see the note on 3.3. Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon, reigned from 359–336 BC. Demetrius of Phalerum (a port of the city of Athens) was an orator and politician. Cassander, king of Macedon, set him up as sole ruler of Athens. He reigned for ten years (317–307 BC), then his enemies drove him into exile.

imperial purple, rock snail blood: See the note on 4.20.

Either all things come from one intelligent source: For more on the Providence-vs.-atoms theme, see the note on 2.3.

“When I was ill”: Epicurus (fr. 191). These speeches are consistent with the sentiment of his deathbed letter (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 10.9–11).

Book 10

Regardless of whether it’s atoms: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

periodically renewed by fire: For more on the cyclic incineration and regeneration of the universe, see 2.14 and the related note.

just like a half-devoured gladiator: Most gladiators were slaves or prisoners of war. The gladiator in this passage seems to be a prisoner because he begs to be “locked up again” rather than be killed.

leave your life for good: For more on suicide, see the note on 3.1 and entry 5.29.

Sarmatian tribesmen: The Sarmatians were an ancient Iranian tribe from the Eurasian Steppe who allied themselves with German tribes during the Marcomannic Wars (166–180 AD).

path that runs through the law: Laws are large-scale acts that serve the human commonwealth, and Zeus (or God) is the creator of that commonwealth (11.8).

The moment you wake up: Marcus again gives himself words to repeat on waking; compare 2.1, 5.1, and 8.12.

“The earth loves rain”: These lines paraphrase lines from a tragedy by Euripides (fr. 989 Nauck). Aristotle quotes them in the Nicomachean Ethics (1155b2–4).

That’s why I say to the universe: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

You will find that Plato’s words: This sentence seems to mean “you will find (when you consult the original text) that . . .”

“penned in a sheepfold”: A loosely remembered rendition of Plato’s Theaetetus, 174d–e.

What state is my ruling power: Marcus the aspirant here checks in with his ruling power in the first person.

runaway slave: In the Roman world, runaway slaves, if recaptured, suffered severe punishments at the hands of their masters, including whipping, being branded on their foreheads with the letters FUG for “fugitive,” and hard labor in mines.

We are eyewitnesses to none: Marcus is using the rhetorical figure paradox: the powers in question are both invisible to the eye and conspicuous.

court of Hadrian . . . then of Antoninus: See the note on 4.33.

Philip of Macedon: See the note on 9.29.

Alexander the Great: See the note on 3.3.

King Croesus: A Lydian king (reigned 585–546 BC) held up in antiquity as the archetype of the extravagantly wealthy Eastern despot.

Satyrion, Eutyches, or Hymen: Marcus is encouraging himself to think of dead people when he encounters living people related to them in their beliefs or occupation. We have no further information on Satyrion, Eutyches, and Hymen, but they may be Platonists contemporary with Marcus and thus, in a way, followers of Socrates.

Eutychion or Silvanus . . . the dead Euphrates: Likely Stoics contemporary with Marcus. He exhorts himself to compare them to the deceased Stoic philosopher Euphrates (c. 35–118 AD), a teacher of Pliny the Younger (61–c. 113 AD).

Alciphron . . . Tropaeophorus: Both men are unknown.

When you see Severus, see the dead Crito or Xenophon: In 1.14 Marcus gives thanks to Severus for introducing him to Stoic philosophers and opponents of tyranny. To Marcus the living Severus may be a friend and supporter of philosophy, as the Athenians Crito (fifth and early fourth centuries BC) and the Greek historian Xenophon (c. 430–355 or 354 BC) were friends and supporters of Socrates.

the now-dead Caesars: Marcus encourages himself to see himself as any one of the deceased Roman emperors before him.

nothing can harm a citizen: What Marcus has to say here applies both to one’s home country and the human commonwealth. In the former, the laws are literal; in the latter, they are rational principles (that is, principles derived from the Logos).

“like the leaves a wind / pours”: A condensed version of Homer, Iliad, 6.146–9. The Trojan Glaucus utters this simile to Diomedes before revealing his genealogy.

there’s your own situation: Marcus is referring to the fact that he is the Roman emperor.

pulling your strings: The marionette metaphor is only here used with positive connotations. A man is living rightly if his ruling power is pulling his strings. See, for contrast, 2.2.

Book 11

(as with the Christians): The scholarly consensus is that this phrase is an interpolation. The Roman Empire required participation in the worship of the traditional Greco-Roman deities as well as of deified emperors and family members of emperors. It was tolerant and accepting of non-Greco-Roman gods, so long as subjects also prayed to the gods of the empire. Subjects, most of them polytheists themselves, generally tolerated the required religious observances, and gods were readily syncretized with each another. The Greek goddess Aphrodite and the Egyptian goddess Isis, for example, became aspects of the same divinity. The adherents of two monotheistic and Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, regularly refused to perform the required worship of what they saw as the “graven images” forbidden by the Second Commandment. The interpolator of the word “Christians” here is making Marcus express disapproval of the Christians of his day because their martyrdoms came from stubbornness, not rational thought.

In the beginning tragedies: In this entry Marcus focuses on drama, both tragedy and comedy. He sees tragedy as serving a moral purpose by teaching audiences about (tragic) things that could happen to them. Epictetus sees tragedy as operating along the same lines (Discourses, 1.4.25–26).

“Oh, Cithaeron!”: Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1391. Oedipus, now aware of his incest and parricide, is explaining to the chorus why he blinded but didn’t kill himself when he utters this exclamation. Cithaeron is a mountain in Greece between Thebes and Corinth. He was meant to be exposed (left to die) there as an infant but was handed off to a shepherd instead.

“If the gods no longer see”: See the note on 7.41.

“How pointlessly we rage”: See the note on 7.38.

“There is a reaping of lives”: See the note on 7.40.

Old Comedy: Old Comedy refers to the original kind of comedic plays produced in Athens roughly from the late sixth century through the beginning of the fourth century BC. Eleven plays of Aristophanes are the only exemplars to have come down to us. They are frank, political, and often obscene. Marcus sees Old Comedy as embodying parrhēsia, or radical free speech, and discouraging arrogance through travesties of arrogant people.

Diogenes the Cynic: See the note on 8.3.

Middle Comedy: Successor to Old Comedy in the fourth century BC that lasted until the 320s BC. It focused on social issues.

New Comedy: (c. 320–250 BC) Form that presented neighborly contexts that focused on domestic issues. The playwright Menander was a major practitioner and wrote in a witty and comparatively inoffensive style. One of his plays, The Grouch, has come down to us in its entirety, and we have substantial portions of three more.

“various natures are each superior”: Marcus is citing a line of poetry, but we do not who wrote it.

The sphere of the soul: See note on 8.41. For a fuller account of the soul as sphere, see 12.3.

Athenian general Phocion: Though Phocion (c. 402–318 BC) served Athens well as a politician and general, it ultimately condemned him to be executed. He is said to have told his son before his death not to bear a grudge against the Athenians (Plutarch, Phocion, 36). Marcus the aspirant is the speaker of this entry through the allusion to Phocion; then Marcus the instructor reasserts himself.

honesty should be as obvious: The pronouns are all masculine here. Marcus seems to be referring to the Greek pederastic tradition, with one “beloved” preadult male the object of desire for multiple adult males; see Plato’s Symposium. Marcus elsewhere makes clear that he disapproves of such relationships (1.16).

But how does one get rid of them?: The objector utters this question in response to Marcus the instructor.

Cherish these nine rules: Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne the Goddess of Memory, the Muses preside over the arts, literature, and music. The traditional number of them, nine, corresponds to the number of rules in this entry.

Apollo, leader of the Muses: Greco-Roman god of prophecy, music, and healing, often represented as leading the Muses in song and dance by playing the lyre.

hillside mouse and the household mouse: Marcus is referring to the well-known fable of the country and the city mouse traditionally ascribed to the Greek author Aesop, a legendary figure said to have lived from the late seventh to the early to mid sixth centuries BC. In it a snobby city mouse visits his cousin in the country and scorns his rustic fare. The country mouse then goes to the city with his cousin and briefly enjoys city cuisine before a cat drives the two mice into hiding. The country mouse concludes that life in the country is better (less dangerous) and goes home. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) retells the story in his Satires (2.6).

“lamias”: In ancient Greek legend, a lamia is an often-snakelike female monster who steals and eats children.

King Perdiccas’ court: Marcus here confuses King Perdiccas II of Macedon (reigned 454–413 BC) with his successor, Archelaus (reigned 413–399 BC). Socrates was invited to tutor Archelaus’ children and serve as court philosopher. Aristotle includes this story in his Art of Rhetoric (1398a). Marcus likely encountered it there.

Epicureans: It is Epicurus himself who proposed this exercise (fr. 210 Usener); see also Seneca, Letters, 11.8–9 and 25.5. It may well have been standard Epicurean practice.

The Pythagoreans exhort us: Founded by the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos (570–490 BC), Pythagoreanism maintained that numbers were behind cosmic harmony and that souls transmigrate into other existences at death.

his wife, Xanthippe: Plato portrays her as a stock character type in ancient Greek literature—the shrewish, demanding wife. She was at least twenty-five years younger than Socrates because he had young sons by her at the time of his death at age seventy.

“Because you are a slave”: A line from an unknown play.

“and the heart inside of me”: This quoted line is from The Odyssey (9.413) where Odysseus is gloating over having blinded and escaped from Polyphemus. Its relevance to Meditations is unclear.

“They would denounce” virtue itself: Hesiod, Works and Days, 186. Marcus has either misremembered or intentionally altered the original. He substitutes “virtue itself” for “their parents” in the original.

when you kiss a child: Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.88–89. For more on this theme, see 8.49, 9.40, 10.34, and 10.35.

“No one can steal free will”: Epictetus, Discourses, 3.22.105. Compare 8.48 and 12.14.

“We need to master the art”: Epictetus (fr. 27 Schenkl).

“What we’re contesting here”: Epictetus (fr. 28 Schenkl).

Socratic dialogue: This conversation resembles philosophical dialogues involving Socrates written by Plato and Xenophon, but it may well be by Epictetus instead. It is included among collected fragments of Epictetus’ writings (fr. 28a Schenkl). The implication is that, if all the addressees really did have healthy rational souls, they would be in agreement rather than in conflict.

Book 12

“perfectly round and rejoicing”: Empedocles (B 27.4 Diels-Kranz). See note on 8.41 and 12.3.

I have often marveled: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

divulge out loud everything: For more on the test of immediate divulgence, see 3.4.

The gods have arranged everything: The objector speaks these italicized sentences in order to provoke Marcus the instructor’s indignant response.

Strip things bare of their husks: For further applications of the “stripping method,” see 2.12, 3.11, 6.13, and 8.36.

“nothing is anything but thinking”: See note on 2.15.

boxer: Marcus is contrasting gladiatorial fights with the pankration, a mixture of boxing and wrestling in which the contestants did not wear boxing gloves.

gladiator: For more on gladiators, see 1.5 (with note) and 10.8 (with note).

entities dwelling in the air: Marcus likely means only the sun, moon, and stars but may be referring to the popular belief that the souls of the recently dead reside in the ether.

Fabius Catullius: Perhaps the Fabius in 4.50; otherwise unknown.

Lucius Lupus: Unknown.

Stertinius about Baiae: This Stertinius was perhaps a wealthy physician of Naples (Pliny, Natural History, 29.5). Baiae was a fashionable resort town on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Naples.

Tiberius about Capri: The emperor Tiberius (42 BC–37 AD) retired to the island of Capri in the Tyrrhenian Sea and spent most of his last ten years there.

Rufus about Velia: This Rufus was a correspondent of the rhetorician Fronto, but he is otherwise unknown. Founded by Greeks as Elea, Velia was the Roman name of a city on the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Some people ask: Marcus the aspirant is the speaker in this entry.

the gods’ existence is obvious: Marcus is presumably relying here on the standard Stoic theodicy: Cosmic elegance and order (such as in the motions of astral bodies) prove that an organizer or organizers exist (Epictetus, Discourses, 2.15.25–27). He may also be thinking of divine epiphany in dreams and perhaps even in life. He thanks the gods for medical prescriptions bestowed on him in dreams in 1.17.

What should most rouse us: Marcus is referring to adherents of Epicureanism according to which pleasure is the great goal. It is not simply hedonistic, however, because the absence of fear and pain are regarded as affording the greatest pleasure. See also 7.33.

citizen in the greatest state: Marcus is referring to the universe, the “city of Zeus” (4.23).

like a director dismissing an actor: Marcus introduces the situation of an actor making a mid-play exit in 3.8.

Who’s Who

Agathon

Athenian tragic poet (c. 448–401 BC). Unlike Socrates, he did accept, in 407 BC, an invitation to join the court of King Archelaus of Macedon (see note on 11.25). He died there around 401 BC. Thirty-one fragments are all that we have of his work. 4.18.

Alexander the Grammarian

Alexander of Cotiaeum (c. 70–80–150 AD), now Kütahya in Turkey, was a Greek grammarian and authority on the works of Homer. 1.10.

Alexander the Great

Macedonian king (356–323 BC) who conquered Greece and swaths of North Africa and the Middle and Far East before his death at age thirty-two. 3.3, 6.24, 8.3, 9.29, and 10.27.

Alexander the Platonist

Nicknamed Peloplaton (“The Clay-Plato”), Alexander the Platonist (2nd century AD) was a philosopher and rhetorician from Seleucia, near what is present-day Baghdad, Iraq. He became Marcus’ secretary for Greek-language correspondence sometime in the mid-170s. 1.12.

Antisthenes

(445–365 BC) Follower of Socrates who became a philosopher in his own right. He was the teacher of Diogenes the Cynic and is sometimes regarded as the founder of the Cynic school of philosophy, which focuses on virtue and scorns social mores. 7.36.

Antoninus Pius

(86–161 AD) Successor to the emperor Hadrian in 138 AD, he adopted his nephews Marcus and Lucius Verus as his sons. Along with Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus himself, he is regarded as one of “The Five Good Emperors,” who reigned over a period of relative peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire. Marcus praises him repeatedly and at length. 1.16, 4.33, 6.30, 8.25, and 10.27.

Apollonius

Apollonius of Chalcedon (2nd century AD) was a Stoic philosopher and teacher of rhetoric. At the invitation of Antoninus Pius, he came to Rome to teach Marcus and Lucius Verus. 1.8.

Archimedes

Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 BC) was a polymath who is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity. Most famous for coming up with the objective Archimedean point of reference, he invented many devices as well as anticipated calculus. 6.47.

Aristophanes

(c. 446–386 BC) Prominent poet of Old Comedy in Athens. His comedies are the only that survive complete from that period. They are often fiercely political and lampoon leading figures of Aristophanes’ day. 4.23 and 11.6.

Aristo the Stoic

A contemporary of Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, Aristo of Chios (fl. 260 BC) stressed Stoic ethics over logic and natural science. Epictetus and Marcus himself share his focus.

Athenodotus

(2nd century AD) Taught rhetoric to Fronto, who was Marcus’ teacher and friend. 1.13.

Avidius Cassius

Celebrated Roman general (130–175 AD). While serving in the Roman province of Syria Palestina in the Middle East, he announced that he had heard rumors that Marcus had died of the Antonine plague. He proclaimed himself emperor on the alleged basis of the support of the troops. The revolt ended when a soldier killed Avidius and brought Marcus his head as proof of death.

Brutus

Son-in-law of Marcus Porcius Cato, Brutus (85–42 BC) was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and committed suicide after his defeat in the battle of Philippi two years later at the hands of Antony and Octavian. Marcus admires him and other “martyrs” for their opposition to tyranny. Plutarch specifies that Brutus was not misokaisar (a hater of imperial rule) but misotyrannos (a hater of tyranny) (Brutus 8.3). 1.14.

Chrysippus of Soli

(c. 279–206 BC) Second head of the Stoic school who built on and further systematized the founder Zeno’s work along the lines of the division the latter made between ethics, logic, and natural science. Like Zeno’s writings, his survive only in fragments gleaned from writers who quote or paraphrase him. 6.42 and 7.19.

Cinna Catulus

Stoic philosopher (2nd century AD) whose lectures, it seems, Marcus attended. We know nothing more about him. 1.13.

Claudius Maximus

Roman politician, Stoic philosopher, and teacher of Marcus Aurelius (2nd century AD). He served as judge at the trial of Apuleius, author of the novel The Golden Ass, for witchcraft. 1.15, 1.16, 1.17, and 8.25.

Croesus

Lydian king (585–546 BC) who ruled over an area roughly coextensive with what is now Turkey. He is often held up as a model of a superrich and extravagant Eastern despot. 10.27.

Democritus

Democritus of Abdera (460–370 BC) was a philosopher who originated an atomic view of the universe. Little is known for certain about his life, though it seems likely that he died in Athens at an advanced age. 3.3 and 7.31.

Dio

Either Dio (or Dion) of Syracuse (408–354 BC) or Dio Cocceianus (40–120 AD). The first was assassinated after attempting to establish a philosopher-kingship in place of the rule of Dionysius II in Syracuse (353 BC). The second, a Stoic philosopher and orator later known as Dio Chrysostomos (“the Golden-mouthed”), was banished from Rome by the emperor Domitian. 1.14.

Diogenes the Cynic

(c. 410–323 BC) Founder of the Cynic school of philosophy. He was born in the city of Sinope, which is on the northern coast of present-day Turkey. He rejected social conventions and hierarchies as artificial and pursued a life of virtue on his own terms. 8.3 and 11.6.

Diognetus

Young Marcus’ painting instructor (2nd century AD). He is otherwise unknown but, it seems, was devoutly philosophical and an important early influence on Marcus. 1.6.

Domitia Lucilla

Marcus’ mother (died c. 160 AD). Member of a patrician family, she raised Marcus with the assistance of his grandfather Marcus Annius Verus (see 1.1). She inherited a vast family fortune from a factory that had supplied bricks for such buildings as the Coliseum and the Pantheon. Marcus inherited that factory at her death when he was in his late thirties. He praises her for having lived without extravagance despite being superrich. 1.3.

Domitius

Likely Gnaeus Domitius Afer (died 59 AD), who taught the orator Quintilian (35–96) and possibly Athenodotus as well. The latter was a teacher of Fronto. 1.13.

Empedocles

Presocratic philosopher (c. 494–434 BC) who maintained that, in the primordial state of the cosmos, there was a perfectly round sphere in which subsequently opposing powers were in harmonious rest. Marcus refers to that sphere in 8.41, 11.12, and 12.3.

Epictetus:

Teacher of Stoic philosophy (c. 50–135 AD). Born a slave in Hieropolis, present-day Pamukkale in western Turkey, he later taught in Rome and then in Nicopolis, Greece. Marcus frequently refers to his Discourses. Four of its original eight books have come down to us. 1.7, 4.41, 7.19, 11.34, 11.36, 11.37, and 11.38.

Epicurus

(341–270 BC) Founder of Epicureanism, which was the major rival to Stoicism in Marcus’ day. It maintained that the universe consists of atoms and that pleasure should be the primary human concern. See 7.64 and 9.41.

Eudoxus

Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–340 BC) was an astronomer, physician, and philosopher. We have only fragments of his writings. 6.47.

Euripides

Prominent writer of tragedies (c. 480–406 BC) who lived in Athens. He is said to have moved to the court of King Archelaus of Macedon shortly before his death. Marcus quotes his work more than that of any other tragedian. 7.38, 7.40, 7.41, 7.42, 7.50, 7.51, 10.21, and 11.6.

Faustina the Younger

Faustina (130–175 AD), daughter of Antoninus Pius, became Marcus’ wife on the basis of a dynastic decision meant to bind the two men even more closely together. She bore Marcus fourteen children, of whom only six survived. After being implicated in a plot with the general Avidius Cassius, she died while she was with Marcus in the city of Halala in Cappodocia in 175 AD. Marcus had her deified and renamed the city Halala Faustinopolis. 1.17.

Hadrian

Roman emperor from 117 to 138 AD. Ranked as one of “The Five Good Emperors,” he was fond of the young Marcus, calling him “Verissimus”—a play on his name Marcus Annius Verus (which Marcus shared with his father and paternal grandfather). In the interests of dynastic succession Hadrian adopted the future emperor Antoninus Pius in 138 AD on the condition that Antoninus, in turn, adopt Marcus and Lucius Verus. 4.33, 8.5, 8.25, 8.37, and 10.27.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Philosopher (fl. c. 500 BC) who propounded, in oracular language, that all is change and that fire is the first principle of the universe. According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus died of dropsy after coating his skin in cow dung in the hope of eliciting perspiration (The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.1). 3.3, 4.46, 6.42, and 6.47.

Herodes Atticus

Marcus’ Greek tutor for a time as well as his friend, Herodes Atticus (101–171 AD) was a very wealthy Athenian orator. In addition to being a philanthropist and working in local government, he rose to prominence in the stylistic movement known as The Second Sophistic (50–230 AD).

Hipparchus

Physician, astronomer, and mathematician (c. 190–120 BC) born in Nicaea, Bithynia (now northern Turkey). Hipparchus invented trigonometry and discovered the procession of equinoxes. 6.47.

Hippocrates of Cos

Physician and philosopher (c. 460–370 BC). He is referred to as “The Father of Medicine” because he established medicine as a distinct discipline. The Hippocratic oath to do no harm takes its name from him. 3.3.

Julius Caesar

(100–44 BC) Member of the First Triumvirate (60–53 BC) along with Marcus Crassus and Pompey the Great. He later came to side with the populares faction in opposition to Pompey’s conservative optimates. After conquering Gaul and building up a loyal army, he instigated a civil war in the Roman Republic (49 BC). Caesar won the war in 45 BC. After being proclaimed “dictator for life,” he was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC. 3.3 and 8.3.

Lucius Catilius Severus

(fl. early 2nd century) Marcus’ maternal step-great-grandfather was a Roman senator and twice served as consul, once with the future emperor Antoninus Pius. 1.14 and 10.31.

Lucius Verus

(130–169 AD) Marcus’ cousin, adoptive brother, and eventual co-emperor. The two seem to have worked well together, though sources attest that Marcus was the more attentive administrator, with Lucius being inclined toward popular entertainments and sensual pleasures. Lucius served as sole general during the Parthian War and as general with Marcus during the Marcomannic Wars until his death, likely from the Antonine plague. Marcus has nothing but praise for him. 1.17.

Marcius Porcius Cato

(95–46 BC) Later known as Cato of Utica, he was a staunch Republican Roman who committed suicide after losing the battle of Thapsus in 46 BC rather than surrender to Julius Caesar. 1.14.

Marcus Annius Verus (Marcus’ grandfather)

Marcus’ paternal grandfather (c. 50–138 AD) was a friend of the emperor Hadrian and a prominent politician who attained the rank of consul. His family was of Spanish extraction and produced olive oil, a high-demand product in the classical world, near modern Córdoba. He raised his grandson the future emperor when his own son, Marcus’ father, died young. He died at age eighty-eight when Marcus was seventeen. 1.1.

Marcus Annius Verus (Marcus’ father)

After rising to prominence in Roman politics, Marcus’ father died in 124 AD when Marcus was three. The “modesty and manfulness” Marcus remembers his father possessing must have come from very early memories. Marcus’ father’s sister Faustina the Elder was married to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. 1.2.

Marcus Cornelius Fronto

Grammarian and rhetorician (c. 95–166 AD) hired by the emperor Antoninus Pius to be the tutor to his adoptive sons, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Marcus and Fronto became lifelong friends. Extensive correspondence between them has come down to us. 1.11.

Menippus

Satirist and Cynic philosopher (2nd century BC) from the city of Gadara (at the northwestern tip of what is now Jordan). The seriocomic and often bawdy genre of Menippean satire takes its name from him. His work influenced the Roman novels The Satyricon and The Golden Ass as well as Roman satire. 6.47.

Monimus the Cynic

Monimus of Syracuse (c. 4th century BC) belonged to the Cynic school of philosophy, which exalted a life of virtue and scorned everything else, including standards of social behavior. 2.15.

Philip II of Macedon

(382–336 BC) King of Macedon during its rise to supremacy in the Greek-speaking world. He defeated many states on the Greek mainland and consolidated power under himself. He is the father of Alexander the Great. 9.29 and 10.27.

Pindar

(c. 518–438 BC) Prominent Greek poet whose surviving work primarily consists of poems that praise victors at athletic competitions such as the Olympics. 2.13.

Plato

Originally a disciple of Socrates, Plato (428–348 BC) went on to found the philosophical school of Platonism. He is one of the most influential philosophers in history. Marcus quotes a fair number of passages written by him. 7.48, 7.63, 9.29, 10.23, and 11.39.

Pompey the Great

Roman general and politician (106–48 BC). In 60 BC he joined Marcus Crassus (115–53 BC) and Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) in the First Triumvirate. He later came to side with the conservative optimates in opposition to Caesar’s populares faction. In 48 BC, toward the end of a civil war (49 BC), Pompey lost the battle of Pharsalus to Julius Caesar and retreated to the court of Ptolemy XIII in Egypt, where he was assassinated by Egyptian courtiers. Caesar won the war in 45 BC. 3.3, 8.3, and 8.31.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–490 BC) was a philosopher and mathematician who discovered the Pythagorean theorem. He founded the Pythagorean school of philosophy, whose beliefs included the transmigration of souls. 6.47.

Quintus Junius Rusticus

(c. 100–170) Stoic Roman politician as well as a teacher. He was greatly influential on Marcus. 1.7 and 1.17.

Sextus of Chaeronea

Philosopher and teacher (c. 95–185 AD). Sources identify him as either a Platonist or a Pyrrhonist (radical skeptic) philosopher. An anecdote suggests that Marcus was still studying with Sextus in his late forties (Philostratus, The Lives of the Sophists, 2.9). 1.9.

Socrates

Legendary Athenian philosopher (469–399 BC) who was sentenced to death after a trial in which he was charged with impiety and corruption of the young. Socrates features as the main character in the writings of his disciple Plato (427–348 BC), founder of the Platonic school of philosophy. 1.16, 3.3, 3.6, 6.47 7.19, 7.66, 8.3, 10.31, 11.23, 11.25, and 11.28.

Theophrastus

(c. 371–287 BC) Second leader of the Peripatetic school of philosophy starting in 322 BC in Athens, after Aristotle. He was originally from Lesbos and worked on subjects as diverse as ethics and botany. 2.10.

Trajan

(53–117 AD) Emperor who expanded the Roman Empire to its greatest extent through conquest. He is ranked, along with Marcus, as one of “The Five Good Emperors.” He was succeeded by Hadrian. 4.32.

Vespasian

(9–79 AD) Roman emperor from 69–79 AD, roughly one hundred years before Marcus. He was the founder of the Flavian dynasty, which included the emperors Titus and Domitian. 4.32.

Zeno of Citium

(c. 334–262 BC) Founder of Stoicism, he named the new school by giving lectures in the Stoa Poikilē, or “Painted Colonnade,” in the main market in Athens. He divided Stoicism into its three branches: logic, natural science, and ethics. His work survives only in fragments.

Bibliography

Collard, Christopher, and Martin Cropp, eds. with trans. Euripides: Dramatic Fragments. 2 vols. Harvard University Press, 2008–2009.

Diels, Hermann, ed. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Edited by W. Kranz. 3 vols. Weidmann, 1951–2.

Farquharson, A. S. L., ed. with trans. and commentary. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. 2 vols. Oxford University Press, 1944.

Gill, Christopher, ed. with trans. and commentary. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, Books 1–6. Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Hadot, Pierre. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Henderson, Jeffrey, ed. and trans. Aristophanes: Fragments. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Nauck, August, ed. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. 2nd ed. Leipzig, Teubner, 1889.

Page, D. L., and A. S. F. Gow, eds. The Greek Anthology. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Rutherford, R. B. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study. Oxford Classical Monographs. Clarendon Press, 1991.

Schenkl, Heinrich, ed. Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae. 2nd ed. B. G. Teubner, 1916.

Sherman, Nancy. Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Snell, Bruno, ed. Pindari Carmina cum Fragmentis. Editio Tertia. B. G. Teubner, 1964.

Usener, Harmann. Epicurea. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

About the Author

Marcus Aurelius ruled as Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD. His reign is seen as a time of relative prosperity in the empire. He embraced Stoicism at an early age and pursued its great goal—living in harmony with Nature—for the rest of his life. His private philosophical notebook, the Meditations, provides a record of his daily efforts to improve himself.

About the Translator

Aaron Poochigian is a poet, classics scholar, and translator who lives and writes in New York City. He earned a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. His translations include Stung with Love, a translation of Sappho, and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. His immersive tour of Central Park in verse, Four Walks in Central Park, was published in 2025. His work has appeared in New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and Poetry magazine, among many other journals, newspapers, and magazines.

Also by Aaron Poochigian

Four Walks in Central Park

American Divine

Manhattanite

Mr. Either/Or

The Cosmic Purr

Translations

The Flowers of Evil

Four Plays by Aristophanes

Bacchae

Jason and the Argonauts

Persians, Suppliants, and Seven Against Thebes

Phaenomena

Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho

Copyright © 2026 by Aaron Poochigian All rights reserved

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Jacket design: Jim Tierney

Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Anna Oler

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978-1-324-09639-9

ISBN 978-1-324-09640-5 (ebook) Liveright Publishing Corporation, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

Authorized EU representative: EAS, Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia