Book Six
1 The substance of the whole is obedient and pliant, and the reason that governs it has in itself no cause for doing harm; for it has no malice, and does nothing maliciously, and nothing is harmed by it. All things come about and are completed according to it.
2 Do not care whether you are cold or warm when you are doing what is right, whether you are drowsy or have had enough sleep, whether people speak ill of you or praise you, whether you are dying or doing something else. For dying too is one of the acts of life; so here too it is enough to do well what is at hand.
3 Look within. Do not let the particular quality or the worth of anything escape you.
4 All the things that exist will very soon change, and either be turned to vapor, if substance is one, or else be scattered.
5 The governing reason knows its own disposition, and what it is making, and in what material.
6 The best way of defending yourself is not to become like them.
7 Delight in one thing and rest in it: in passing from one social act to another social act, remembering god.
8 The ruling center is what wakes itself and turns itself, and makes itself whatever it wishes to be, and makes everything that happens appear to it as it wishes.
9 Each thing is accomplished according to the nature of the whole; certainly not according to some other nature, whether one that surrounds it from outside, or one contained within it, or one hanging apart outside it.
10 Either a stew, entanglement, and scattering, or unity, order, and providence. If the former, why do I even want to spend my time in such a random jumble and mess? Why should I care about anything but how I shall at last “become earth”?1 And why am I disturbed? The scattering will come upon me whatever I do. But if the latter, I revere, I stand firm, I trust in what governs.
11 When you are forced by circumstances to be, as it were, thrown into confusion, return quickly to yourself, and do not stay out of rhythm longer than you must; you will be more in control of the harmony by constantly returning to it.
12 If you had a stepmother and a mother at the same time, you would attend to your stepmother, and yet you would constantly go back to your mother. This is what the court and philosophy are to you now. Go back to philosophy often and rest in her; it is because of her that the court seems bearable to you, and you bearable in it.
13 When we have meat and other such food before us, how good it is to take the impression that this is the corpse of a fish, and this the corpse of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian is a little juice from a bunch of grapes, and the purple robe some sheep’s wool dyed in a shellfish’s blood; and as for sexual intercourse, that it is the rubbing of a bit of gut and the spurting out, with a sort of spasm, of a little mucus. How good these impressions are, getting to the things themselves and going right through them, so that one sees what kind of things they are! We must do this all through life: where things seem most worthy of our trust, strip them bare and see how cheap they are, and take away the story on which they pride themselves. For vanity is a terrible deceiver, and just when you think you are most engaged with serious things, then above all it bewitches you. See, at any rate, what Crates says about Xenocrates himself.2
14 Most of the things the multitude admires come down to the most general kind, things held together by mere cohesion or by growth: stones, timber, fig trees, vines, olives. Those admired by people a little more refined come down to things held together by a living soul, such as flocks and herds. Those admired by people more cultivated still, to things held together by a rational soul, though not the universal one, but rational in so far as it is skilled in some craft or clever in some other way, or simply because they own a crowd of slaves. But the man who honors a soul that is rational, universal, and civic no longer turns to any of the others, but above all keeps his own soul in a rational and social condition and motion, and works together with what is akin to him to this end.
15 Some things are hurrying to come into being, others to be gone; and of what is coming into being, part is already extinct. Flux and change renew the universe without end, as the unbroken course of time makes infinite eternity always new. In this river, then, what is there among the things rushing by that anyone should prize, when he cannot stand still on any of them? It is as if someone began to love one of the little sparrows flying past, and it is already out of sight. Even the life of each of us is something of this kind, like the vapor from blood and the breath drawn from the air. For as it is to draw in the air once and give it back, which we do every moment, so it is to give back the whole power of breathing, which you got when you were born yesterday or the day before, to the place from which you first drew it.
16 It is not transpiring like plants that is to be prized, or breathing like cattle and wild beasts, or taking the stamp of impressions, or being jerked like a puppet by impulses, or herding together, or feeding; for that is on a par with getting rid of the waste of our food. What, then, is to be prized? Being clapped? No. So not being clapped by tongues either; for the praise of the many is a clapping of tongues. So you have let go of fame as well. What is left to be prized? This, I think: to move and to hold back according to your own constitution, the goal to which all pursuits and crafts lead. For every craft aims at this, that what it has made should be fit for the work it was made for. The planter and the vine dresser, the trainer of colts, the keeper of dogs, all look for this. And the bringing up of children, and teaching, what do they strive for? Here, then, is what is to be prized; and if this is well, you will not seek to get any of the other things for yourself. Will you not stop prizing many other things too? If not, you will be neither free, nor self-sufficient, nor free from passion. For you will be bound to envy, to be jealous, to suspect those who can take those things away, to plot against those who have what you prize. In short, anyone who lacks any of those things is bound to be in turmoil, and besides that to find much fault with the gods. But respect and honor for your own mind will make you pleasing to yourself, in harmony with your fellows, and in accord with the gods, that is, praising all that they assign and have ordained.
17 Up, down, in a circle: these are the motions of the elements. But the motion of virtue is in none of these; it is something more divine, and it goes on its way well, by a road hard to understand.
18 What a thing it is that they do! They will not speak well of the people who live in their own time and with them, yet they set great store by being spoken well of by those who will come after them, whom they have never seen and never will see. That is close to grieving because those who came before you did not speak well of you.
19 If something is hard for you to accomplish, do not suppose it is impossible for a man; but if something is possible for a man and proper to him, consider it within your reach too.
20 In the gymnasium someone has scratched us with his nails, or butted us with his head and given us a bruise; but we make no fuss, take no offense, and do not suspect him afterward of plotting against us. We do keep an eye on him, though not as an enemy or with suspicion, but stepping aside with good will. Let it be like this in the rest of life too: let us overlook much in those who are, as it were, our sparring partners. For it is possible, as I said, to step aside, and neither suspect nor hate.
21 If anyone can prove to me and show me that I am wrong in what I think or do, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever harmed. The one who is harmed is the one who persists in his own deception and ignorance.
22 I do my own duty; other things do not distract me. For they are either lifeless, or without reason, or gone astray and ignorant of the road.
23 Treat the animals that have no reason, and in general things and objects, generously and freely, as one who has reason dealing with things that have none; but treat men, since they have reason, as fellows. And in all things call on the gods. And do not trouble yourself over how long you will be doing this; even three hours spent like this are enough.
24 Alexander of Macedon and his mule driver came to the same thing when they died: either they were taken up into the same seed principles of the universe, or they were scattered alike into atoms.
25 Think how many things, bodily and mental alike, are happening in each of us at the same time, in the same instant; and so you will not be surprised if many more things, or rather all things that come into being, exist at the same time in the one and all that we call the universe.
26 If someone asks you how the name Antoninus is spelled, will you strain your voice and pronounce each letter? Then what if they get angry, will you get angry back? Will you not rather go on calmly and count out each of the letters? So here too remember that every duty is made up of certain parts. You must keep to these, without being flustered or meeting the annoyance of others with annoyance of your own, and finish methodically what is before you.
27 How cruel it is not to let people go after what seems to them proper to them and to their advantage! And yet in a way you do not allow them to do this when you are indignant that they do wrong; for they are surely drawn to what is, as they think, proper to them and to their advantage.—But it is not so.—Then teach them and show them, without being indignant.
28 Death is rest from the pulls of sense, from being jerked like a puppet by impulses, from the wanderings of thought, from service to the flesh.
29 It is shameful, in a life in which your body does not give out, for your soul to give out first.
30 Take care not to be turned into a Caesar, not to be dyed in the purple;3 it happens. Keep yourself, then, simple, good, pure, serious, unaffected, a friend of justice, reverent toward the gods, kind, affectionate, strong for the work that befits you. Struggle to remain the man philosophy wanted to make you. Revere the gods, keep men safe. Life is short; there is one harvest of our life on earth: a holy disposition and social acts. Do everything as a pupil of Antoninus:4 his energy for whatever was done according to reason, his evenness in everything, his holiness, the serenity of his face, his gentleness, his lack of vanity, his eagerness to grasp things. How he would never let anything pass without first looking into it well and understanding it clearly; how he bore with those who blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return; how he hurried over nothing; how he would not listen to slander; how exact he was in examining characters and actions, and not given to reproach, not easily alarmed, not suspicious, no sophist; how he was content with little, in lodging, bed, clothing, food, service; how hardworking and patient he was; how he could stay at the same task until evening, needing, because of his plain diet, not even to relieve himself except at the usual hour; his steadiness and constancy in friendship; his patience with those who opposed his views frankly, and his pleasure when someone showed him something better; how reverent he was toward the gods, without superstition. So that your last hour may find you with as good a conscience as his.
31 Sober up and call yourself back; and once you have woken again and realized that it was dreams that troubled you, wide awake once more, look at these things as you looked at those.
32 I am made of a poor body and a soul. To the body all things are indifferent, for it cannot care about anything. To the mind, all things are indifferent that are not its own activities; and all its own activities are in its power. And of these it is concerned only with the present; for its activities to come and its activities past are themselves already indifferent.
33 Labor is not against nature for the hand or the foot, as long as the foot does the work of a foot and the hand the work of a hand. So for a man, as a man, labor is not against nature, as long as he does the work of a man. And if it is not against his nature, it is not bad for him either.
34 What pleasures robbers have enjoyed, and catamites, and parricides, and tyrants!
35 Do you not see how ordinary craftsmen go along with laymen up to a point, but none the less hold on to the reason of their craft and will not bear to depart from it? Is it not shameful if the architect and the doctor respect the reason of their own craft more than a man respects his own reason, which he shares with the gods?
36 Asia and Europe are corners of the universe; every sea a drop of the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe; all of present time a point in eternity. All things are small, changeable, vanishing. All things come from there, starting from that common ruling center, or else following from it as consequences. And so the lion’s gaping jaws, and poison, and every kind of harmfulness, like thorns, like mud, are by-products of those solemn and beautiful things. Do not imagine, then, that they are foreign to what you revere, but reflect on the source of all things.
37 Whoever has seen the present has seen all things, whatever has come about from eternity and whatever will be to infinity; for all things are of one kind and one form.
38 Think often of the bond of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For in a way all things are woven together, and all are therefore dear to one another; for one thing follows on another in order, because of the tension that moves them, their breathing together, and the unity of their substance.
39 Fit yourself to the things that have fallen to your lot, and love the people with whom it is your lot to live, but truly.
40 An instrument, a tool, a vessel, if it does what it was made for, is in good order, though the one who made it is no longer there. But in things held together by nature, the power that made them is within and remains; so you must respect it all the more, and believe that if you keep yourself and live according to its will, everything is as you would wish it. So too for the whole: its affairs are as it would wish.
41 Whatever thing outside your will you set up as good or bad for yourself, it is inevitable that when you meet with such a bad thing or miss such a good thing you will blame the gods, and hate the men who are, or whom you suspect will be, the cause of your missing it or meeting with it. And we do much wrong because we care about these things. But if we judge only the things in our power to be good and bad, there is no reason left either to accuse god or to take up an enemy’s stand against a man.
42 We are all working together toward one end, some knowingly and with understanding, others without realizing it; as Heraclitus, I think, says that even those who sleep are workers and fellow workers in what goes on in the universe.5 One helps in one way, another in another; and even the man who finds fault and tries to oppose and undo what happens helps abundantly; for the universe had need of such a man too. It remains for you to understand among which workers you are placing yourself. For he who governs the whole will in any case make good use of you, and will receive you as a part of his fellow workers and helpers; but see that you are not such a part as the cheap and ridiculous line in the play that Chrysippus mentions.6
43 Does the sun think fit to do the work of the rain? Or Asclepius the work of the Fruit-Bearer?7 And what about each of the stars? Are they not different, yet working together to the same end?
44 If the gods have taken counsel about me and about what must happen to me, they have taken good counsel; for it is not easy even to imagine a god without counsel. And for what reason would they set out to do me harm? What would they, or the common good, which is their chief concern, gain from it? But if they have not taken counsel about me individually, they have surely taken counsel about the common good, and since these things follow from that, I ought to welcome them and be content with them. And if they take counsel about nothing at all (a thing it is impious to believe, or else let us neither sacrifice nor pray nor swear by them, nor do any of the other things we do in the belief that the gods are present and live among us), if indeed they take counsel about nothing that concerns us, then it is open to me to take counsel about myself, and my concern is with what benefits me. And what benefits each is what accords with his own constitution and nature; and my nature is rational and civic. My city and country, as Antoninus,8 is Rome; as a man, the universe. What benefits these cities, then, is alone good for me.
45 Whatever happens to each benefits the whole. That should have been enough. But if you look carefully you will also see, as a rule, that whatever benefits one man benefits other men too. But here take “benefit” in the more common sense, as applied to indifferent things.
46 Just as the shows in the amphitheater and such places grate on you, because the same things are always being seen, and the sameness makes the spectacle tedious, so it is with the whole of life; for everything, up and down, is the same and comes from the same things. How long, then?
47 Think constantly of all kinds of men, of every calling and of every nation, who are dead; so that you come down even to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion.9 Now pass on to the other kinds of people. We must change our home to the place where there are so many great orators, so many solemn philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, so many heroes of old, so many generals and tyrants after them; and besides these Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes,10 other sharp natures, high-minded, hardworking, cunning, self-willed, mockers of this perishable and short-lived human life itself, like Menippus and others of his kind. Think of all of these, that they have long been lying in the ground. What harm is that to them? And what of those whose names are not even mentioned? One thing here is worth a great deal: to live out your life with truth and justice, kindly toward liars and the unjust.
48 When you want to cheer yourself, think of the good qualities of those who live with you: the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third, and something else in another. For nothing is so cheering as the images of the virtues shining out in the characters of those who live with us, and meeting together as many as possible at once. So keep them ready at hand.
49 You are not upset, are you, that you weigh so many pounds and not three hundred?11 Then do not be upset that you must live so many years and no more. As you are content with the amount of substance marked out for you, so be content with the time.
50 Try to persuade them, but act even against their will when the reason of justice leads that way. But if someone uses force to obstruct you, turn to acceptance and freedom from distress, and use the obstacle for another virtue; and remember that your impulse was made with a reservation, and that you did not aim at the impossible. At what, then? At an impulse of just this kind. And that you achieve; the things we were moved toward are coming about.
51 The lover of fame thinks another’s activity his own good; the lover of pleasure, his own feelings; the man of sense, his own action.
52 It is possible to form no judgment about this, and not to be troubled in your soul; for things in themselves have no power by nature to create our judgments.
53 Train yourself to attend to what is being said by another without your mind wandering, and as far as you can, get inside the soul of the speaker.
54 What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee.
55 If the sailors spoke ill of their helmsman, or the sick of their doctor, would they have anything else in mind but how he himself could bring about the safety of those on board, or the health of those he is treating?
56 How many of those with whom I came into the world have already left it!
57 To people with jaundice honey seems bitter, to people bitten by mad dogs water is a terror, and to small children a ball is a beautiful thing. Why then am I angry? Or do you think that a false belief has less power than bile in the jaundiced or venom in the man bitten by a mad dog?
58 No one will prevent you from living according to the reason of your own nature; nothing will happen to you against the reason of the common nature.
59 What sort of people they are whom men want to please, and for what gains, and by what actions! How quickly time will cover all things, and how many it has covered already!
Notes
1. From Homer, Iliad 7.99: “May you all become water and earth.”
2. Crates the Cynic and Xenocrates, Plato’s pupil and later head of the Academy. Crates’ remark has not survived.
3. The Greek verb, apokaisarousthai, is apparently Marcus’s coinage; the “dye” is the imperial purple.
4. His adoptive father and predecessor, Antoninus Pius.
5. Heraclitus, fragment 75, known only from this passage.
6. The Stoic Chrysippus said that a coarse line in a comedy, worthless in itself, contributes to the whole play (Plutarch, On Common Conceptions 14).
7. Karpophoros, a title of Demeter, goddess of grain.
8. Antoninus was also Marcus’s own name as emperor (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus).
9. Unknown; apparently people of Marcus’s circle who had recently died.
10. Eudoxus and Hipparchus, astronomers; Archimedes, the mathematician; Menippus, a Cynic writer who mocked human affairs.
11. The Greek litra is the Roman pound, about twelve ounces.