Book Two

1 Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, insolent, treacherous, envious, unsociable. All this has come upon them through their ignorance of what is good and what is bad. But I have seen the nature of the good, that it is beautiful, and of the bad, that it is ugly, and the nature of the wrongdoer himself, that he is my kin, not because we share the same blood or seed, but because we share in the same mind and the same portion of the divine; and so I cannot be harmed by any of them, for no one can involve me in what is ugly; nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. We were born to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another, then, is against nature; and to be vexed with someone and turn away from him is to work against him.

2 Whatever it is that I am, it is flesh, a little breath, and the ruling center.¹ Let your books go; stop being pulled about. That is not granted you. Instead, as a man already dying, despise the flesh: blood and bits of bone and a little web, a woven net of nerves, veins, arteries. Look too at the breath, what kind of thing it is: wind, and never the same wind, but every moment breathed out and sucked in again. The third, then, is the ruling center. Think of it this way: you are an old man; do not let this part be a slave any longer, do not let it be jerked like a puppet by unsocial impulses any longer, do not let it any longer resent what fate gives it now or shrink from what is to come.

3 The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of chance are not apart from nature, or from the spinning and weaving together of the things that providence governs. Everything flows from there. Then there is what is necessary, and what is good for the whole universe, of which you are a part. And for every part of nature, what the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to preserve it, is good. And the universe is preserved by change, by the changes of the elements as well as by those of the things compounded from them. Let this be enough for you; let these be your principles. As for your thirst for books, throw it away, so that you do not die grumbling, but truly at peace, and grateful to the gods from your heart.

4 Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how many times you have been given a period of grace by the gods and not made use of it. It is time now, at last, to see what universe you are a part of, and from what governor of the universe you have flowed out as an emanation; and that a limit has been set to your time, and if you do not use it to clear the clouds from your mind, it will be gone, and you will be gone, and it will not come again.

5 Every hour, set your mind firmly, as a Roman and a man, on doing what is in hand with exact and unaffected dignity, with affection, freedom, and justice, and on giving yourself a rest from all other impressions. And you will give yourself that rest if you do each act as if it were the last of your life, free of all aimlessness, of every passionate turning away from the commands of reason, of pretense, self-love, and discontent with what has been allotted you. You see how few the things are which a man needs to master to live a life that flows well and is like the life of the gods; for the gods will ask nothing more of the one who keeps them.

6 Go on, insult yourself, insult yourself, my soul! But you will have no more time to honor yourself. Each person has one life, and yours is nearly finished, while you show no respect for yourself but place your own happiness in the souls of others.

7 Do things that happen outside you distract you? Then give yourself the time to learn something more that is good, and stop wandering about. But you must guard against the other kind of drifting as well. For those who are tired of life, and have no target at which to aim every impulse and, in a word, every impression, talk nonsense in their actions too.

8 No one is easily found to be unhappy for not attending to what goes on in another person’s soul; but those who do not follow the movements of their own soul are bound to be unhappy.

9 Always remember these things: what the nature of the whole is, and what my own nature is, and how this one stands to that one, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that no one can prevent you from always doing and saying what accords with the nature of which you are a part.

10 Theophrastus,² comparing wrongdoings as one might compare them in a general way, says like a true philosopher that the wrongs done through desire are graver than those done through anger. For the angry man seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and an unnoticed contraction; but the one who does wrong through desire, being overcome by pleasure, seems somehow more dissolute and more womanish in his wrongdoing. He was right, then, and spoke in a way worthy of philosophy, when he said that the wrong done with pleasure deserves greater blame than the wrong done with pain. And on the whole the one is more like a man who has been wronged first and has been driven to anger by pain; the other has set out to do wrong of his own accord, carried away to do something by desire.

11 Do every act, say every word, think every thought as one who might leave life this very moment. As for departing from among men, if there are gods, it is nothing to fear, for they would not involve you in anything bad; and if there are none, or if they do not care about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe empty of gods or empty of providence? But they do exist, and they do care about human affairs; and they have put it wholly in a man’s power not to fall into the things that are truly bad. And if there were anything bad among the rest, they would have provided for that too, so that it would be in everyone’s power not to fall into it. But how could something that does not make a man worse make a man’s life worse? The nature of the whole would not have overlooked this, either through ignorance, or knowing it but unable to guard against it or correct it; nor would it have made so great a mistake, through lack of power or lack of skill, as to let good and bad things fall to good and bad people alike, without distinction. But death and life, fame and obscurity, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these fall alike to good and bad people, being neither beautiful nor ugly. So they are neither good nor bad.

12 How quickly all things vanish: the bodies themselves in the universe, the memory of them in time. What all the things of sense are like, and above all those that lure us with pleasure, or frighten us with pain, or are trumpeted abroad by vanity: how cheap they are, how contemptible, how sordid, how perishable and dead. This is for the faculty of the mind to consider. What are they, these people whose opinions and voices give us our good name? What is dying? And that if one looks at it by itself, and with analysis takes apart the images that cling to it, one will no longer think it anything but a work of nature; and anyone who fears a work of nature is a child. And this is not only a work of nature but also something that serves it. How a man touches god, and with what part of himself, and when that part of the man is in what condition.

13 Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes around everything in a circle, and “searches,” as the poet says, “the things beneath the earth,”³ and tries by guesswork to find out what is in the souls of his neighbors, and does not see that it is enough to attend only to the spirit within himself⁴ and to serve it truly. And to serve it is to keep it pure of passion, and of aimlessness, and of discontent with what comes from gods and men. For what comes from the gods deserves reverence for their goodness; what comes from men deserves our love, because they are our kin, and sometimes too, in a way, our pity, for their ignorance of good and bad; this is a disability no less than the one that robs us of telling white from black.

14 Even if you were going to live three thousand years, or thirty thousand, still remember that no one loses any other life than the one he is living, and lives no other than the one he loses. So the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is the same for all, and so what passes away is the same, and what is lost turns out to be a mere instant. No one can lose either the past or the future: how could anyone take from him what he does not have? Remember these two things, then. One, that all things from eternity are of the same form and come round again in cycles, and that it makes no difference whether a man sees the same things for a hundred years or two hundred or for an infinite time. The other, that the one who lives longest and the one who will die soonest lose the same thing. For it is only the present that a man can be deprived of, since that is all he has, and no one loses what he does not have.

15 That everything is judgment. What was said to Monimus the Cynic is plain enough;⁵ plain too is the use of the saying, if one takes what is good in it as far as it is true.

16 The soul of a man insults itself above all when it becomes, as far as it can, an abscess and a sort of tumor on the universe; for to be vexed at anything that happens is to break away from nature, in which the natures of all other things are each contained as parts. Second, when it turns away from any person, or even moves against him meaning to harm him, as the souls of angry people do. Third, it insults itself when it is overcome by pleasure or pain. Fourth, when it plays a part and does or says anything falsely and insincerely. Fifth, when it lets any act or impulse of its own go at no target, but acts at random and without thought, whereas even the smallest things ought to be done with reference to the end. And the end of rational creatures is to follow the reason and law of the most venerable city and commonwealth.

17 Of human life, the time is a point, the substance is flowing, the perception dim, the composition of the whole body subject to rot, the soul a whirl, fortune hard to read, fame uncertain. In short, all that belongs to the body is a river, all that belongs to the soul a dream and smoke, life a war and a stranger’s stay, and posthumous fame oblivion. What then can see us through? One thing and only one: philosophy. And that means keeping the spirit within unviolated and unharmed, master of pleasures and pains, doing nothing at random, nothing falsely or with pretense, not needing anyone else to do or not do anything; accepting, besides, all that happens and is allotted, as coming from the same place from which the spirit itself came; and, above all, waiting for death with a kindly mind, as nothing but the dissolving of the elements of which every living thing is composed. And if there is nothing to fear for the elements themselves in each one’s constantly changing into another, why should anyone look with dread on the change and dissolution of them all? It is according to nature; and nothing according to nature is bad.

At Carnuntum.⁶

Notes

1. 1. The hēgemonikon: in Stoic thought, the part of the soul that judges, assents, and gives rise to impulse.

2. 2. Aristotle’s pupil and successor (fourth to third century BC). The work quoted is lost.

3. 3. Pindar, quoted by Plato, Theaetetus 173e.

4. 4. The daimōn: the divine portion in each person, nearly the same in this book as the ruling center or the mind.

5. 5. Monimus, a pupil of Diogenes, is said to have called all judgment typhos, smoke or vanity (Diogenes Laertius 6.83, quoting the comic poet Menander).

6. 6. A Roman legionary base on the Danube, between modern Vienna and Bratislava; Marcus’s headquarters for several years of the Marcomannic Wars.