Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

190 MEDITATIONS. K they would have been sought, if you had them not. At the same time, however, take care that you do not through being so pleased with them accustom yourself to overvalue them, so as to be disturbed if ever you should not have them. 28. Retire into yourself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquillity. 29. Wipe out the imagination. Stop the pulling of the strings. Confine yourself to the present. Understand well what happens either to you or to another. Divide and distribute every object into the causal [formal] and the material. Think of your last hour. Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done (viii. 29). 30. Direct your attention to what is said. Let your understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them (vii. 4). 31. Adorn yourself with simplicity and modesty, and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that law rules all — f And it is enough to remember that law rules all.f * 32. About death : whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change. 1 The end of this section is unintelligible.

MARCUS AUBELIUS ANTONINUS. 191 33. About pain : the pain which is intolerable carries us off; but that which lasts a long time is tolerable; and the mind maintains its own tranquillity by retiring into itself, f and the ruling faculty is not made worse. But the parts which are harmed by pain, let them, if they can, give their opinion about it. 34. About fame : look at the minds [of those who seek fame], observe what they are, and what kind of things they avoid, and what kind of things they pursue. And consider that as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after. 35. From Plato : * The man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, do you suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great ? It is not possible, he said. — Such a man then will think that death also is no evil. — Certainly not. 36. From Antisthenes: It is royal to do good and to be abused. 37. It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself. 38. It is not right to vex ourselves at things, For they care nought about it.2 1 Plato, Pol, vi. 486. • From the Bellerophon of Euripides.

192 MEDITATIONS. 39. To the immortal gods and us give joy. 40. Life must be reaped like the ripe ears of corn. One man is born ; another dies.1 41. If gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it. 42. For the good is with me, and the just.2 43. No joining others in their wailing, no violent emotion. 44. From Plato : 3 But I would make this man a sufficient answer, which is this : You say not well, if you think that a man who is good for anything at all ought to compute the hazard of life or death, and should not rather look to this only in all that he does, whether he is doing what is just or unjust, and the works of a good or a bad man. 45. 8For thus it is, men of Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the 1 From the Hypsipyle of Euripides. Cicero (Tuscul. iii. 25) has translated six lines from Euripides, and among them are these two lines, — " Reddenda terrae est terra : turn vita omnibus Metenda ut f ruges : Sic jubet necessitas." 8 See Aristophanes, Acharnenses, t. 661. * From the Apologia, c 16.