Meditations

1. From my grandfather Verus: goodness of heart, and freedom from anger.

2. From the reputation and remembrance of my father: modesty, and manliness.

3. From my mother: reverence for the divine, generosity, and abstention—not only from doing wrong, but even from entertaining the thought of it; and, further, simplicity in my way of life, far removed from the habits of the rich.

4. From my great-grandfather: not to attend the public schools, but to employ good teachers at home; and to understand that on such things one must spend unstintingly.

5. From my tutor: not to become a partisan of Green or Blue, of Palm or Shield; to endure hardship and need little; to work with my own hands and mind my own affairs; and to be slow to admit slander.

6. From Diognetus: freedom from vain pursuits; distrust of what wonder-workers and sorcerers say about incantations, the expulsion of spirits, and such things; not to breed quails for fighting or be carried away by pursuits of that kind; to tolerate frank speech; to make philosophy my own; to hear first Baccheius, then Tandasis and Marcianus; to write dialogues as a boy; and to desire a camp bed and a hide, and all else belonging to the Greek discipline.

7. From Rusticus: to grasp that my character needed correction and care; not to stray into sophistic ambition, nor write treatises on doctrines, nor deliver little exhortatory discourses, nor make a show of myself as an ascetic or benefactor in order to impress; to withdraw from rhetoric, poetry, and verbal display; not to parade about the house in formal dress or indulge in things of that kind; to write letters simply, like the very letter he wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; to be ready to recall and reconcile with those who have grown angry and done wrong, as soon as they themselves are willing to return; to read with precision, not content with a broad impression, and not hastily assent to those who talk around a subject; and to encounter the notes of Epictetus, which he shared with me from his own collection.

8. From Apollonius: freedom and an unwavering refusal to leave anything to chance; to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, but reason; to remain always the same—in acute pain, in the loss of a child, in long illnesses; and to see clearly in a living example that the same person can be at once most ardent and relaxed; not to grow impatient when explaining; to see a man who plainly regarded his experience and facility in communicating doctrines as the least of his gifts; and to learn how one should receive what are taken for favors from friends—neither surrendering oneself on their account nor passing them by without feeling.

9. From Sextus: benevolence; the example of a household governed as a father’s house; the conception of living according to nature; dignity without affectation; attentive care for friends; tolerance of ordinary people and of those who form opinions without reflection; an ease with everyone that made his company more pleasing than any flattery, while at that very time he inspired the deepest respect in those present; the ability, with sure comprehension and method, to discover and arrange the principles necessary for life; never to give even the appearance of anger or any other passion, but to be at once utterly free of passion and full of natural affection; to speak well of others without noise, and to possess great learning without display.

10. From Alexander the grammarian: to refrain from fault-finding, and not reproachfully to pounce on those who uttered a barbarism, a solecism, or some discordant expression, but tactfully to introduce only the very wording that should have been used—in the form of a reply, or a confirming addition, or a joint discussion of the matter itself rather than the word, or by some other graceful reminder of the same kind.

11. From Fronto: to recognize the envy, duplicity, and hypocrisy that belong to tyranny; and that, in general, those whom we call our patricians are somehow deficient in natural affection.

12. From Alexander the Platonist: not often, and never without necessity, to say to someone or write in a letter, “I am busy”; nor continually to use such a pretext to evade the duties arising from our relations with those who share our life, pleading the pressure of circumstances.

13. From Catulus: not to treat lightly a friend’s accusation, even if he happens to accuse without reason, but to try to restore the accustomed bond; to praise one’s teachers wholeheartedly, as is recorded of Domitius and Athenodotus; and to love one’s children truly.

14. From Severus: love of family, love of truth, and love of justice; through him, to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dio, and Brutus; and to conceive a polity of equal law, governed by equality and equal freedom of speech, and a kingship honoring above all the liberty of the governed. From him also: steadiness and vigor in the esteem of philosophy; beneficence, unstinting generosity, and good hope; confidence that one is loved by one’s friends; openness with those who met with his disapproval; and that his friends never had to guess what he wanted or did not want—it was plain.

15. From Maximus: mastery of himself, and never to be swept away by anything; good cheer in every circumstance, including illness; a character well balanced, gentle, and venerable; the uncomplaining accomplishment of what lay before him; that everyone trusted that he thought as he spoke and acted without ill intent; never to wonder or be stunned, never to hurry or hesitate, never to be at a loss or downcast or grimly smiling, nor, in turn, angry or suspicious; beneficence, forgiveness, and truthfulness; to give the impression of a man naturally straight rather than one straightened out; and that no one could ever have thought himself looked down on by him, nor ventured to think himself better than he; graciousness in …

16. From my father: gentleness, and an unshaken constancy in decisions reached after careful examination; freedom from vanity about what passes for honor; love of work and perseverance; a readiness to hear those who had something to contribute to the common good; an undeviating care to allot each person what accorded with his worth; the experience to know where effort was needed and where relaxation; putting an end to his passions for boys; his fellow-feeling, and his allowing his friends neither to dine with him on every occasion nor necessarily to accompany him on his journeys, while those who had stayed behind because some duty required it always found him unchanged; his searching exactness and persistence in deliberation—not abandoning an inquiry too soon, content with the impressions nearest at hand; his gift for keeping his friends, being neither quick to tire of them nor infatuated with them; his self-sufficiency in everything, and his brightness of spirit; his foresight from far off, and his quiet ordering in advance of even the smallest details; the way acclamations and every form of flattery were checked in his presence; his constant watch over the necessities of government, his economy in public expenditure, and his endurance of the blame such conduct brought; toward the gods, no superstition, and toward human beings, no courting the crowd, currying favor, or pandering to the mob, but sobriety in all things and steadfastness, with no lapse into bad taste and no appetite for novelty; his use, without pretension and without apology, of the things that make life easier and that fortune had supplied in abundance, so that when they were present he took them naturally, and when they were absent he felt no need of them; the fact that no one could have called him a sophist, a household wit, or a pedant, but rather a mature man, complete, beyond flattery, capable of presiding over his own affairs and those of others.

Besides these: his respect for those who practiced philosophy in truth, while neither reproaching the rest nor being easily led by them; his ease in company and his graciousness, never cloying; his measured care for his own body, neither as one enamored of life, nor for adornment, nor yet neglectfully, but so that through his own attentiveness he had very little need of medicine, drugs, or external applications; above all, his ungrudging deference to those who possessed some particular power—eloquence, for example, or knowledge of laws, customs, or other matters drawn from history—and his eagerness to help them, so that each might win distinction according to his own excellence; his doing everything in accordance with ancestral ways, without even cultivating the appearance of preserving ancestral ways; furthermore, his not being easily shifted or tossed from one thing to another, but lingering over the same places and the same tasks; and after the attacks of headache, his returning at once fresh and vigorous to his accustomed work; his having not many secrets, but very few and very rare ones, and those only for the public good; his prudence and measure in presenting spectacles, undertaking public works, making distributions, and the like—the conduct of a man whose eye was fixed upon what needed to be done itself, not upon the good repute to be won from its doing.

He did not bathe at untimely hours; he had no passion for building; he did not invent refinements in food, or in the weave and color of clothes, or in the beauty of bodies. His dress at Lorium, when he came up from the lower country house; and most of what he did at Lanuvium; how he treated the tax collector at Tusculum when the man appealed to him—and his whole manner was of this kind. Nothing harsh, nothing implacable, nothing violent, nothing that could ever make one say, “to the point of sweating”; rather, everything individually distinguished and reasoned out as if at leisure—untroubled, ordered, strong, and in harmony with itself.

What is remembered of Socrates would fit him: he was able both to abstain from and to enjoy those things from which many are too weak to abstain and to whose enjoyment they too readily yield. But to remain strong, to endure, and to keep one’s sobriety in either case belongs to a man with a sound and unconquerable soul—as Maximus showed in his illness.

17. From the gods: to have good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good members of the household, kinsmen, friends—almost everyone around me, good; and that I did not rush into doing wrong to any of them, although I had a disposition from which, had the occasion arisen, I might indeed have done some such thing. But it was the gods’ kindness that no conjunction of circumstances occurred which would have exposed me.

That I was not brought up any longer in my grandfather’s concubine’s household; that I preserved the bloom of youth, did not become a man before my time, but even let the time extend beyond it.

That I was placed under a ruler and father who was to strip away all my conceit and bring me to understand that it is possible to live at court without requiring bodyguards, distinctive robes, torches, statues, and displays of that kind, or any similar pomp; that one may draw one’s life very close to that of a private citizen and yet be no less dignified or energetic in dealing, as a ruler, with what must be done for the common good.

That I was blessed with such a brother—one able by his character to awaken me to the care of myself, while at the same time delighting me with his respect and affection.

That my children were not born without natural ability or deformed in body.

That I made no greater progress in rhetoric, poetry, and the other pursuits in which I might perhaps have become absorbed, had I felt myself advancing smoothly in them.

That I acted in time to establish those who had brought me up in the rank I thought they desired, and did not put them off with the hope that, since they were still young, I would do it later.

That I came to know Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus.

That the nature of a life according to Nature was vividly and repeatedly presented to me, so that—as far as the gods and the gifts, assistance, and inspirations proceeding from them are concerned—nothing now prevents me from living according to Nature; and if I still fall short of it at all, the fault is my own, because I do not keep watch over the gods’ reminders and all but direct teachings.

That my body has held out so long under such a life.

That I touched neither Benedicta nor Theodotus; and that later, too, when I fell into erotic passions, I recovered my health.

That, though I was often angry with Rusticus, I did nothing further for which I would have repented.

That my mother, though destined to die young, nevertheless lived her final years with me.

That whenever I wished to assist someone in poverty or in need of anything else, I never had to hear that I lacked the money from which it could be done; and that no similar need ever befell me myself, requiring me to receive help from another.

That my wife is as she is: so compliant, so affectionate, so unpretending.

That I had an ample supply of suitable tutors for my children.

That remedies were granted through dreams—among others, remedies against spitting blood and against vertigo—and the message at Caieta: “As you shall use...”

That when I longed for philosophy, I did not fall into the hands of some sophist, nor settle down to writing treatises, dissecting syllogisms, or occupying myself with celestial phenomena.

For all these things require “the gods’ help and fortune.”

1. At dawn, say beforehand to yourself: I shall meet a meddler, an ingrate, an insolent man, a deceiver, an envier, one who shuns fellowship. All these traits have befallen them through ignorance of good and evil. But I have beheld the nature of the good—that it is beautiful—and of evil—that it is shameful—and the nature of the wrongdoer himself: that he is akin to me, not by the same blood or seed, but by sharing in mind and in a portion of the divine. Therefore none of them can harm me, for no one can clothe me in shame; nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. For 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 contrary to nature; and resentment and aversion are forms of working against one another.

2. Whatever this thing is that I am, it is a little flesh, a little breath, and the ruling faculty. As for the flesh, hold it in contempt: gore and little bones, a woven skein, a mesh of sinews, tiny veins, and arteries. Consider the breath too, what sort of thing it is: wind—not even always the same, but at every moment vomited out and sucked in again. The third, then, is the ruling faculty. Let the books go; be pulled no longer—this has not been granted you. Instead, think in this way, as one already dying: you are old; no longer let this faculty be enslaved, no longer let it be twitched like a puppet by an impulse hostile to fellowship, no longer resent what fate has brought in the present or look suspiciously upon what is to come.

3. The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of chance are not without nature, nor without a co-spinning and entanglement with all that providence orders. Everything flows from there; and joined to it are necessity and what benefits the whole cosmos, of which you are a part. For every part of nature, what the nature of the whole brings is good, as is whatever preserves that nature. And the cosmos is preserved by transformations: those of the elements, and likewise those of the things compounded from them. Let these things suffice you; let them always be your principles. Cast away your thirst for books, so that you may die not murmuring, but truly gracious and grateful to the gods from your heart.

4. Remember how long you have been postponing these things, and how often the gods have granted you extensions that you have not used. At last you must perceive of what cosmos you are a part, from what governor of the cosmos you came forth as an outflow, and that a boundary has been drawn around your allotted time. If you do not use it to emerge into the clear, it will pass away—and you will pass away—and no further chance will come.

5. At every hour, take steadfast care—as a Roman and a man—to carry out the task in hand with exact... and unaffected dignity, with loving care, freedom, and justice, and to secure for yourself release from every other impression. You will secure it if you perform each action as though it were the last of your life, freed from all aimlessness, from every passionate recoil away from the reason that chooses, from pretence, self-love, and discontent with what has fallen to your share. You see how few are the things which, once mastered, enable a person to live a smoothly flowing and god-revering life; for the gods themselves will ask nothing more of one who guards these things.

6. You do yourself violence, do yourself violence, O soul; and you will have no further season in which to honor yourself. Each person’s life is a moment, and yours is almost spent—yet you do not revere yourself, but place your good fortune in the souls of others.

7. Are things that strike you from outside scattering your attention? Then grant yourself the leisure to learn some further good thing, and cease drifting. But now you must guard against another kind of circling too: for those who are wearied by life and have no goal toward which they direct every impulse and, without exception, every impression, babble even in their deeds.

8. A person is seldom seen in misery for failing to attend to what is happening in another’s soul; but those who do not follow closely the movements of their own soul must necessarily be miserable.

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

10. Theophrastus, philosophically comparing wrongdoings—as such things might be compared in more ordinary terms—says that offences committed from desire are graver than those committed from anger. For one who is angry appears to turn away from reason with a certain pain and an inward contraction of which he is unaware; but one who goes wrong from desire, conquered by pleasure, appears somehow more undisciplined and more effeminate in his wrongdoing. Rightly, then, and worthily of philosophy, he said that an offence attended by pleasure merits a greater charge than one attended by pain. In general, the first is more like someone who has suffered a prior wrong and has been forced by pain into anger; the other has launched himself into wrongdoing from the outset, carried toward some act by desire.

11. Do and say and think each thing as one who may even now depart from life. But to go away from humankind, if gods exist, is nothing terrible; for they would not clothe you in evil. If, however, they do not exist, or if human affairs do not concern them, why should I live in a cosmos empty of gods or empty of providence? Yet they do exist, and human affairs do concern them; and so that a human being may not fall into what is truly evil, they placed the whole power in his own hands. And if anything among the remaining things were evil, they would have provided for that as well, so that it would lie within everyone’s power not to fall into it. (But how could what does not make a human being worse make a human life worse?) The nature of the whole would not have overlooked these things through ignorance; nor would she have known of them yet lacked the power to guard against or correct them. Nor would she have erred so greatly, through either incapacity or want of skill, that good and evil should befall good people and bad alike, confusedly and without distinction. Yet death and life, fame and obscurity, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty—all these befall good people and bad alike, being neither beautiful nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

12. How swiftly everything vanishes back into what it came from: the bodies themselves into the cosmos, and their memories into eternity. What all things perceived by the senses are like—especially those that entice by pleasure, terrify by pain, or are loudly acclaimed by vanity; how cheap they are, how contemptible, soiled, perishable, and dead—these are matters for the mind’s power to dwell upon. And what are those people whose judgments and voices bestow good repute and ill repute? What is it to die? If one looks at death alone and, by dividing the conception, dissolves the phantoms associated with it, one will no longer suppose it to be anything but a work of nature. Whoever fears a work of nature is a child; and death is not only nature’s work, but also serves her good. How the human being touches god, through what part of himself, and how that human part must be disposed when he does.

13. Nothing is more wretched than one who makes the circuit of everything, “searching out,” as the poet says, “the depths beneath the earth,” and seeking by conjecture what lies in the souls of those around him, yet fails to perceive that it is enough to remain with the divinity within himself and serve it faithfully. Its service is to keep it pure of passion, aimlessness, and discontent with what comes from gods and human beings. What comes from the gods deserves reverence for its excellence; what comes from human beings deserves affection for our kinship—and sometimes, in a certain way, pity as well, because of their ignorance of good and evil. This impairment is no less severe than the one that takes away the power to distinguish white from black.

14. Even if you were to live three thousand years, and ten thousand times as many, still remember that no one loses any life but the one he is living, nor lives any life but the one he loses. Thus the longest life comes to the same as the shortest. For the present is equal for all; therefore what passes away is equal, and what is lost proves to be no more than an instant. No one could lose either the past or the future: how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?

Always remember, then, these two things. First: all things from eternity are of one kind and return in cycles, and it makes no difference whether one sees the same things in a hundred years, in two hundred, or through infinite time. Second: the longest-lived and the soonest dead lose an equal amount. For the present is the only thing of which a person is to be deprived, if indeed this alone is what he has—and no one loses what he does not have.

15. That everything is judgment. The objections raised against Monimus the Cynic are plain enough; plain, too, is the value of the saying, if one accepts what is wholesome in it only so far as it is true.

16. The human soul violates itself most of all when, so far as it can, it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumor upon the cosmos. For to resent anything that comes to pass is to revolt from Nature, within whom the individual natures of all other things are severally contained.

Next, when it turns away from another human being, or even moves against him with intent to harm—as do the souls of those in anger.

Third, it violates itself when it is overcome by pleasure or pain.

Fourth, when it plays a part, and does or says anything under a mask and without truth.

Fifth, when it lets any act or impulse of its own go forth toward no aim, but does whatever it does at random and without due attention—though even the smallest actions ought to be governed by reference to the end. And the end for rational creatures is to follow the reason and ordinance of the most ancient city and commonwealth.

17. The span of human life is a point; its substance, a flow; its perception, dim; the whole body’s composition, quick to rot; the soul, a wanderer; fortune, hard to fathom; fame, undiscerning. In sum: all that belongs to the body is a river; all that belongs to the soul, dream and delusion; life is warfare and a stranger’s sojourn; and fame hereafter is oblivion.

What, then, can escort us on our way? One thing, and one alone: philosophy. And this consists in keeping the divinity within inviolate and unharmed, master of pleasures and pains; doing nothing at random, nothing falsely or with pretence; needing no other person to do something or leave it undone; and further, receiving whatever befalls and is allotted as coming from that same source from which it came itself. Above all, it awaits death with a gracious mind, as nothing but the release of the elements from which every living creature is composed. If there is nothing terrible for the elements themselves in each one’s ceaseless change into another, why should anyone look askance at the change and dissolution of them all? It accords with nature; and nothing that accords with nature is evil.

1. It is not only this that must be reckoned: that with each passing day life is being spent, and a smaller part of it is left. This too must be reckoned: that even if one should live longer, it is uncertain whether the mind will still remain equally sufficient for understanding affairs and for that contemplation which tends toward experience of things divine and human. For if the mind begins to wander, there will be no lack of breathing, feeding, receiving impressions, feeling impulses, and all else of that kind; but the power to make use of oneself, to calculate precisely the measures of duty, to articulate what appears before us, to consider whether the time has already come to conduct oneself out of life, and all else of this kind—which has the utmost need of a reason trained by exercise—is extinguished beforehand. We must hurry, then, not only because at every moment we draw nearer to death, but also because our comprehension of things and our ability to follow them may cease before it comes.

2. We should also watch for such things as these: even what arises incidentally from things coming into being by nature possesses a certain grace and allure. When bread is baking, for example, parts of it split open; and these very fissures, though in a way they lie outside the baker’s intended result, have their own fitting beauty and peculiarly stir our appetite for the food. Again, figs gape when they are ripest; and in olives ripening on the tree, the very nearness of decay adds a beauty of its own to the fruit. So too the bending heads of grain, the lion’s knitted brow, the foam flowing from boars’ mouths, and many other things: viewed each by itself, they are far from comely, yet because they attend what comes to pass by nature, they adorn it besides and charm the soul. Thus, if someone has feeling and a deeper apprehension for what comes to pass in the Whole, scarcely anything even among incidental consequences will fail to appear to him somehow pleasingly composed. Such a person will look upon the real gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than upon the images painters and sculptors display in imitation; with his own discerning eyes he will be able to see in an old woman and an old man a certain prime and ripeness.. and the lovely bloom in children. And many such things—not persuasive to everyone—will present themselves to the one alone who has become genuinely intimate with nature and her works.

3. Hippocrates, after healing many illnesses, fell ill himself and died. The Chaldaeans foretold the deaths of many; then destiny overtook them too. Alexander, Pompey, and Gaius Caesar, after so many times utterly destroying whole cities and cutting down many tens of thousands of cavalry and infantry in battle, one day departed from life themselves. Heraclitus, after all his inquiries into nature concerning the world’s conflagration, died with his insides filled with water and his body smeared in cow dung. Lice killed Democritus; other lice killed Socrates. What of it? You embarked, you sailed, you have come to harbor: disembark. If into another life, nowhere is empty of gods, not even there. If into insensibility, you will cease enduring pains and pleasures and serving a vessel so much worse than that which serves it: the one is mind and divinity; the other, earth and gore.

4. Do not wear away the portion of life that remains to you in impressions concerning other people, unless you refer them to some common good. For you deprive yourself of another work.. whenever you imagine what this person is doing and why, what he is saying, what he is thinking, what he is contriving, and all else of the kind that makes you stray from attending to your own ruling faculty.

You must therefore keep out of the train of your impressions whatever is aimless and futile, and above all whatever is meddlesome and malicious. Accustom yourself to imagine only such things that, if someone were suddenly to ask, “What are you thinking now?” you could at once answer frankly, “This” or “That”; so that your very words would immediately make it plain that all within you is simple and benevolent, worthy of a social being who gives no care to impressions of pleasure or, in a word, self-indulgence, nor to any contentiousness, envy, suspicion, or anything else whose presence in your mind you would blush to acknowledge.

For such a man—no longer postponing his place among the best—is a kind of priest and servant of the gods. He makes use also of the power established within him, which keeps a human being unstained by pleasures, unwounded by any pain, untouched by every outrage, insensible to every wickedness: an athlete in the greatest contest, never to be thrown by any passion; steeped to the depths in justice; welcoming with his whole soul all that happens and all that is allotted; and seldom, and never without some great necessity serving the common good, imagining what another person says or does or thinks.

For he makes only what is his own his field of action, and continually considers what is spun together with him from the Whole. The former he makes noble, and the latter he is convinced is good; for the lot allotted to each is carried along with him and carries him along. He remembers also that every rational being is kin, and that care for all human beings accords with human nature; yet he must not hold fast to the opinion of everyone, but only of those who avowedly live in agreement with nature. As for those who do not so live, he keeps in mind what they are like at home and outside it, by night and by day, and with what sort of people they mingle. So he takes no account of praise from such people, who are not even pleasing to themselves.

5. Act neither unwillingly, nor without regard for fellowship, nor without examination, nor while pulled in contrary directions. Let no affectation adorn your thought. Be neither a torrent of words nor a busybody.

And let the god within you be guardian of a being manly and mature, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler—one who has taken up his post like a man awaiting the recall from life, ready to be released, needing neither an oath nor any human witness. Let there be cheerfulness within, and no need of service from outside, no need of the repose that others provide. You must therefore stand upright, not be held upright.

6. If, in human life, you find anything better than justice, truth, self-command, courage—and, in a word, than your mind’s contentment with itself in whatever it enables you to do according to right reason, and with destiny in whatever is apportioned without your choosing—if, I say, you see anything better than this, turn toward it with your whole soul and enjoy the supreme good you have found.

But if nothing appears better than the guardian spirit established within you—which has brought its own impulses under its rule, examines its impressions, has drawn itself away, as Socrates used to say, from the persuasions of the senses, has subjected itself to the gods, and gives humanity its care—if you find everything else smaller and cheaper than this, give no room to anything else. Once you incline and turn aside toward it, you will no longer be able, without distraction, to honor above all that good which is your own, truly yours. For it is not right to set against the good of a rational and civic being anything of another kind whatsoever: the praise of the crowd, for example, or offices, wealth, or the enjoyment of pleasures. All these, even if for a little while they seem to accord with it, suddenly gain mastery and sweep us away.

But you, I say, choose the better simply and freely, and hold fast to it. “Yet the better is what benefits.” If it benefits you as a rational being, preserve it; if only as an animal, declare that plainly, and keep your judgment free of conceit. Only make sure that your examination is secure.

7. Never value as your own advantage anything that will one day compel you to break faith, abandon reverence, hate someone, grow suspicious, curse, play a part, or desire anything that needs walls and curtains. The one who has chosen before all else his own mind and guardian spirit, and the sacred rites of that spirit’s virtue, makes no tragedy of life, does not groan, and will need neither solitude nor crowds. Most important, he will live neither pursuing nor fleeing. Whether his soul remains enclosed in the body for a longer span or a shorter one matters to him not at all. Even if he must depart at once, he will go as readily released as he would undertake any other act that can be performed with reverence and good order. Throughout his life he guards against this alone: that his mind should ever take on a disposition alien to a rational and civic creature.

8. In the mind of one disciplined and cleansed you would find nothing suppurating, nothing bruised, nothing festering underneath. Nor does destiny overtake his life unfinished, as one might say of an actor in tragedy who leaves before completing his part and playing the drama through. There is, moreover, nothing servile in him, nothing affected, nothing fastened on, nothing torn away, nothing liable to judgment, nothing skulking in a den.

9. Revere your power of judgment. In it lies everything: that no judgment should ever again arise in your ruling faculty contrary to nature and to the constitution of a rational creature. This power promises deliberation without rashness, kinship with humankind, and a following in the steps of the gods.

10. Cast all else away, then, and hold fast to these few things alone. Remember this as well: each of us lives only this present instant, a point of time; all the rest has either been lived or lies unseen. Small, then, is the span each person lives; small the corner of earth where he lives; small even the longest fame to come—and that too passes down through a succession of little human beings who will very soon be dead, who do not know even themselves, much less one who died long, long ago.

11. To the guiding principles already spoken, let one more be added: always make a definition or outline of whatever presents itself to your impression, so that you may see it as it is in its essence—naked, whole, divided through and through—and tell yourself its proper name and the names of the things from which it was compounded and into which it will be dissolved.

For nothing so creates greatness of mind as the ability to test, methodically and truthfully, each thing that meets us in life, and always to look into it so as to grasp at once what kind of universe this is, what kind of use the thing provides within it, what value it has for the Whole, and what value for the human being—a citizen of the highest city, of which all other cities are like households. What is this thing now making an impression on me? From what is it compounded? How long is it naturally fitted to remain? What virtue does it require of me—gentleness, courage, truthfulness, good faith, simplicity, self-sufficiency, or another?

Therefore, at each event one must say: “This comes from a god; this comes through the conjunction of events, the interweaving thread spun with them, and a meeting and chance of this kind; this comes from one of my own tribe and kind and fellowship, though he does not know what accords with his own nature. But I do know. Therefore I treat him with goodwill and justice, according to the natural law of fellowship; and at the same time, among things neither good nor bad, I aim at the value proper to each.”

12. If you perform the work at hand in obedience to right reason—earnestly, vigorously, with goodwill—and allow no side concern to intrude, but keep your own guardian spirit standing pure, as though you might have to return it even now; if you bind yourself to this, expecting nothing and fleeing nothing, content with your present activity according to nature and with heroic truth in all you say and utter, you will live well. And no one has the power to prevent it.

13. As physicians always keep their instruments and blades ready to hand for sudden demands of treatment, so keep your principles ready for understanding things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest thing, in remembrance of the bond between the two. For you will not perform any human act well without referring it also to the divine, nor the reverse.

Wander no more. For you are not going to read your notebooks, nor the deeds of the ancient Romans and Greeks, nor the extracts from writings that you were laying aside for your old age. Hasten, then, toward the goal; abandon empty hopes and, if you care at all for yourself, come to your own aid while you still may.

14. Wander no more. For you are not going to read your notebooks, nor the deeds of the ancient Romans and Greeks, nor the extracts from writings that you were laying aside for your old age. Hasten, then, toward the goal; abandon empty hopes and, if you care at all for yourself, come to your own aid while you still may.

15. They do not know how much is signified by “to steal,” “to sow,” “to buy,” “to be at rest,” “to see what must be done”—a seeing accomplished not with the eyes, but with another kind of sight.

16. Body, soul, mind: sensations belong to the body, impulses to the soul, judgments to the mind. To receive the stamp of impressions is shared even by grazing beasts; to be jerked by the strings of impulse, even by wild animals, androgynes, Phalaris, and Nero; and to have the mind as guide toward duties that appear before it, even by those who acknowledge no gods, those who abandon their country, and those who do ‹anything whatever› once they have shut their doors.

If, then, all the rest is shared with those already named, what remains as the good person’s own is this: to love and welcome what befalls him and what is spun together with him; not to soil the guardian spirit established within his breast, nor trouble it with a mob of impressions, but to keep it serene, following God in seemly order, uttering nothing contrary to truth and doing nothing contrary to justice. And though everyone distrusts him, doubting that he lives simply, modestly, and with a cheerful heart, he is neither angry with any of them nor turned aside from the road that leads to life’s end—where he must arrive pure, tranquil, ready to be released, joined without force in harmony with his own allotted fate.

1. The ruling power within, when it is disposed according to nature, stands so toward whatever happens that it always shifts with ease to what is possible and what is given. For it cherishes no material marked out beforehand, but sets out toward preferred things with reservation; and whatever is brought against it, it makes into material for itself—like a fire when it masters what falls upon it, though a little lamp would have been quenched by the same. A blazing fire swiftly makes its own whatever is heaped upon it, consumes it, and rises higher from those very things.

2. Let no act be done at random, nor otherwise than in accordance with a principle that brings the art to completion.

3. People seek retreats for themselves in country places, on shores, among mountains; and you too are accustomed to long for such things above all. But this is altogether most unsophisticated, since you may, at whatever hour you wish, retreat into yourself. For nowhere does a human being retreat to greater quiet or freedom from affairs than into his own soul—especially one who has within him things upon which he need only gaze to find himself at once in perfect ease; and by ease I mean nothing other than good order. Continually, then, grant yourself this retreat and renew yourself. Let the truths that first meet your gaze be brief and fundamental, enough at once to wash away all distress and send you back without resentment toward those things to which you return.

For what will you resent? Human wickedness? Recall the judgment that rational creatures have come into being for one another; that forbearance is a part of justice; that people go wrong unwillingly; and how many who once were enemies, suspicious, hateful, locked in combat, now lie stretched out and turned to ash. Be still at last.

Or do you resent what is allotted from the Whole? Renew the disjunction: either providence or atoms; and remember all the proofs that the cosmos is as it were a city.

Will bodily things still lay hold of you? Consider that the mind does not mingle with the breath, whether it moves smoothly or roughly, once the mind has recovered itself and recognized its own authority; and consider, besides, all that you have heard and assented to concerning pain and pleasure.

Will your scrap of reputation distract you? Look at the swiftness with which all things are forgotten; the abyss of infinite time on either side; the emptiness of applause; the fickleness and lack of judgment in those who seem to speak well of us; and the narrowness of the place within which fame is confined. For the whole earth is a point, and what a tiny corner of it is this inhabited land—and here, how few and what sort are those who will praise you?

Remember, then, to withdraw into this little field of your own. Above all, do not wrench or strain yourself; be free, and look upon things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal creature. And among the truths nearest at hand, into which you will gaze, let these two stand: first, that things do not touch the soul, but stand outside it, motionless, while disturbances arise solely from the judgment within; second, that all these things you see will, in almost no time, change and be no more. Keep constantly in mind how many transformations you yourself have already witnessed.

The cosmos is alteration; life is judgment.

4. If the power of understanding is common to us, then reason, by which we are rational, is also common. If so, then the reason that commands what is to be done or not done is common. If so, law too is common. If so, we are citizens. If so, we share in some commonwealth. If so, the cosmos is as it were a city—for in what other common polity will anyone say that the whole human race shares? And from there, from this common city, comes our very power of understanding, reason, and law—or from where? For just as the earthy part of me has been apportioned from some earth, the watery from another element, the breath-like from some source, and the warm and fiery from its own particular source—for nothing comes from nothing, just as nothing departs into nonbeing—so too the power of understanding comes from somewhere.

5. Death is a thing like birth, a mystery of nature: a joining of the same elements, a dissolution into the same. In all respects it is nothing one should be ashamed of, for it is neither contrary to what follows for an intelligent creature nor contrary to the reason of its constitution.

6. Such things, by necessity, naturally come from such people; whoever does not wish it wishes the fig tree to have no sap. And in all things remember this: within the briefest time, both you and this man will be dead, and shortly afterward not even your names will remain.

7. Take away the judgment, and “I have been harmed” is taken away; take away “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.

8. What does not make a man worse than he is does not make his life worse either, nor does it harm him from without or within. The nature of what is beneficial was bound to do this.

9. “Everything that happens, happens justly.” If you watch closely, you will find it so. I do not mean only that it follows in due sequence, but that it accords with justice, as though allotted by one who assigns to each what is deserved. Keep watch, then, as you began; and whatever you do, do it together with this: being good—good in the proper sense in which the good person is conceived. Preserve this in every act.

10. Do not form such judgments as the insolent man forms, or as he wishes you to form; see things instead as they truly are.

11. Two kinds of readiness must always be yours: one, to do only what the reason of kingship and lawgiving proposes for the benefit of humankind; the other, to change your position if someone is at hand to correct you and lead you away from some belief. Yet this change must always arise from some persuasive ground, such as justice or the common good; and only things of that kind should be preferred—not anything merely because it appeared pleasant or glorious.

12. “Do you possess reason?”“I do.”“Why, then, do you not use it? For if reason is doing its own work, what else do you want?”

13. You came into being as a part. You will vanish again into that which generated you—or rather, through transformation you will be taken back into its generative reason.

14. Many grains of incense upon the selfsame altar: one fell into the fire sooner, another later. It makes no difference.

15. Within ten days you will seem a god to these very people to whom you now seem a beast and an ape, if you return to your principles and to reverence for reason.

16. Do not live as though you were destined for ten thousand years. What is due hangs over you. While you live, while it is possible, become good.

17. How much leisure is gained by the man who does not watch what his neighbor has said or done or thought, but only what he himself is doing, to ensure that this very thing is just and reverent, or worthy of the good man; not casting about for a dark character, but running straight along the line, unswerving.

18. The man enthralled by fame after death does not picture to himself that every person who remembers him will very soon be dead as well, and then in turn the one who succeeds that person, until all memory is extinguished as it passes through lives that flare up and go out. But suppose those who will remember you are immortal, and the memory immortal: what is that to you? I do not even say, “What is it to the dead?”—but to the living, what is praise, except perhaps as an instrument of some practical ordering? For now, out of season, you are letting pass the gift of nature, which rests on no other account. In short...

19. Whatever is beautiful in any way is beautiful from itself, and ends in itself, with praise no part of it. What is praised, then, becomes neither worse nor better. I say this even of things called beautiful in the more ordinary sense—material objects, for example, and works fashioned by art. And what is beautiful in truth—what need has it of anything? No more than law does, no more than truth, no more than goodwill or self-respect. Which of these is beautiful because it is praised, or spoiled because it is blamed? Does an emerald become inferior to itself if it is not praised? And what of gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a little knife, a floweret, a sapling?

20. If souls endure, how has the air held them from all eternity? And how does the earth hold the bodies of those buried through so vast an age? For just as here, after the bodies remain awhile, their alteration and dissolution make room for other dead, so the souls translated into the air remain together for a time, then change, diffuse, and kindle, being taken back into the generative reason of the Whole; and in this way they make room for those who come to dwell there after them. Such an answer might be given on the assumption that souls endure.

But we must consider not only the multitude of bodies buried in this fashion, but also the multitude of animals eaten each day by us and by other animals. How vast a number is consumed and, in a manner, buried in the bodies of those they nourish; and yet there is room to receive them, through their conversion into blood, through their transformation into what is airy or fiery.

What is the means of investigating the truth of this? Division into the material and the causal.

21. Do not drift away, but in every impulse render what justice requires, and with every impression preserve the power of apprehending what is true.

22. All that accords with you accords with me, O Cosmos. Nothing is early for me, nothing late, that is timely for you. All is fruit to me that your seasons bear, O Nature: from you are all things, in you all things, into you all things. One man says,

“Beloved city of Cecrops”;

and will you not say,

“Beloved city of Zeus”?

23. “Do few things,” he says, “if you would keep a tranquil heart.” But might it not be better to do what is necessary, and all that the reason of a being political by nature chooses, and in the manner it chooses? For this brings not only the serenity born of acting well, but also that born of doing few things. Most of what we say and do is unnecessary; remove it, and one will have more leisure and less disturbance. So at every occasion we must remind ourselves: Is this, perhaps, not among the necessary things? And we must remove not only unnecessary actions, but unnecessary impressions as well; for then no superfluous actions will follow in their train.

24. Put it to the test: see how the life of the good man fares for you—the man content with what is apportioned from the Whole, satisfied with the justice of his own action and the goodwill of his own disposition.

25. You have looked at those things; now look at these. Do not trouble yourself. Make yourself simple. Someone does wrong? He does wrong to himself. Something has happened to you? Good. From the beginning, everything that happens was assigned to you and woven into your thread from the Whole. To sum it all up: life is short. The present must be won with sound judgment and justice. Be sober, yet at ease.

26. Either an ordered cosmos, or a medley tumbled together—yet still a cosmos. Or can an order subsist in you, but disorder in the Whole, when all things are so distinct, so diffused, and so bound in sympathy?

27. A black character; an effeminate character; a tortuous character; beastly, cattle-like, childish, witless, counterfeit, buffoonish, huckstering, tyrannical.

28. If one who does not know the beings within the cosmos is a stranger to it, no less a stranger is one who does not know what comes to pass within it. A fugitive is one who flees the reason of civic fellowship; blind, one who shuts the eye of understanding; a beggar, one who needs another and does not have within himself all that life requires; an abscess on the cosmos, one who withdraws and severs himself from the reason of our common nature by resenting what happens—for the same nature brings this forth that brought you forth; a splinter from the city, one who splinters his own soul away from the soul of rational beings, which is one.

29. One man practices philosophy without a tunic, another without a book. Here is another, half-naked: “I have no bread,” he says, “and still I abide by reason.” But I have the nourishment that learning gives, and do not abide by it.

30. Love the modest craft you have learned, and take your rest in it. Pass through what remains of life as one who, with his whole soul, has entrusted all that is his to the gods, while making himself neither tyrant nor slave to any human being.

31. Picture, for argument’s sake, the age of Vespasian, and you will see all the same things: people marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, waging war, keeping festivals, trading, farming, flattering, behaving arrogantly, suspecting, plotting, praying for certain people to die, grumbling at their present lot, falling in love, hoarding treasure, coveting consulships and thrones. And now that life of theirs is nowhere at all. Pass next to the age of Trajan: again, all the same things; that life too is dead. In the same way, survey the inscriptions of other ages and of whole peoples, and see how many, after straining to the utmost, soon fell and were dissolved into the elements. Above all, recall those you yourself knew tugging at empty things, abandoning the work that accorded with their own constitution instead of holding fast to it and finding it enough. But here it is necessary to remember that the attention given to each action has its own proper worth and measure. For then you will not lose heart, provided you spend no more time than is fitting on lesser things.

32. Words once familiar are now strange glosses; so too the names of those once hymned by all are now, in a way, strange glosses: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus; then, little by little, Scipio and Cato as well; then Augustus; then Hadrian and Antoninus. For all things fade, and swiftly pass into legend; swiftly, too, utter oblivion buries them. And I say this of those who somehow shone with wondrous brilliance. As for all the rest, the moment they breathed their last, they were “out of sight, out of hearing.” And what, in any case, is everlasting remembrance? Emptiness altogether. On what, then, must we expend our earnest care? This one thing: a just mind; actions for the common good; speech incapable of falsehood; and a disposition that welcomes everything that happens as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from a source and origin of this very kind.

33. Give yourself willingly into Clotho’s hands, and let her entwine you with whatever affairs she chooses.

34. Everything is for a day—both what remembers and what is remembered.

35. Contemplate continually how all things come to be through change, and train yourself to understand that the nature of the Whole loves nothing so much as changing what exists and making new things like it. For everything that exists is, in a certain way, the seed of what will arise from it. Yet you imagine that seeds are only those cast into earth or womb—and that is far too limited a view.

36. Soon you will be dead, and still you are neither simple nor untroubled, neither free of the suspicion that anything outside can harm you, nor gracious toward all; nor do you place wisdom in this alone: acting justly.

37. Look through into their ruling minds—even those of the discerning—and see what things they shun and what they pursue.

38. No evil of yours can subsist in another person’s ruling mind, nor indeed in any turn or alteration of what surrounds you. Where, then? Wherever within you lies the faculty that judges things to be evils. So let it make no such judgment, and all is well. Even if the nearest thing to it, this little body, is cut, burned, festers, or rots, still let the part that judges these things remain at rest—that is, let it decide that whatever can happen equally to a bad person and a good one is neither evil nor good. For whatever happens equally to one who lives contrary to nature and to one who lives according to nature is itself neither according to nature nor contrary to it.

39. Continually conceive of the cosmos as one living creature, containing one substance and one soul; how all things are delivered up into its single field of perception; how by one impulse it does all things; how all that comes to be shares in causing everything else that comes to be; and what a weaving together, what an interwinding, there is.

40. You are a little soul carrying a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

41. For things coming to be through change there is no evil, just as for things arising from change there is no good.

42. Time is a river of things coming to be, a violent current: no sooner has each thing appeared than it is swept away; another is swept past, and another will be borne along.

43. Everything that happens is as customary and familiar as the rose in spring and fruit in summer. Such too are sickness and death, slander and conspiracy, and all that delights or grieves the foolish.

44. What follows always comes fittingly upon what went before. For this is not like some mere tally of disconnected items, joined only by necessity, but a rational coherence. And just as existing things have been ordered into a harmonious whole, so events display not a bare succession, but a wondrous kinship.

45. Always remember the saying of Heraclitus: that earth’s death is to become water, water’s death to become air, air’s death to become fire—and the reverse. Remember also the one who forgets where the road leads; and that they are at odds with what they encounter most continually—the Logos that governs the Whole; and that the things they meet each day appear strange to them; and that we must not act and speak as though asleep, for even then we seem to act and speak; and that we must not be like children of our parents—that is, follow blindly merely what we have received.

46. Suppose one of the gods told you that you would die tomorrow, or at all events the day after tomorrow. Unless you were utterly ignoble, you would no longer make much of dying the day after tomorrow rather than tomorrow—for how great is the interval? In the same way, consider it no great matter whether you die many years from now or tomorrow.

47. Consider continually how many physicians have died, after so often knitting their brows over the sick; how many astrologers, after solemnly foretelling the deaths of others; how many philosophers, after endlessly arguing about death or immortality; how many champions, after killing multitudes; how many tyrants, after wielding power over human lives with dreadful arrogance, as though they themselves were immortal; and how many whole cities have, so to speak, died—Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. Pass in review also all whom you yourself have known, one after another: one man buried another and then was laid out himself; another buried him—and all within a little while. The sum of it is this: always look upon human things as fleeting and cheap—yesterday a drop of mucus, tomorrow cured flesh or ash. Pass, then, through this instant of time according to nature, and reach your end graciously, as a ripe olive might fall, blessing the earth that bore it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.

48. Be like the headland against which the waves break without cease: it stands fast, and around it the water’s fury falls asleep.

“Unfortunate am I, that this has happened to me.” Not so—but rather: “Fortunate am I, that though this has happened to me, I remain untouched by grief, neither shattered by the present nor afraid of what is to come.” For such a thing could have happened to anyone; but not everyone could have remained untouched by grief because of it. Why, then, is the one a misfortune rather than the other a good fortune? And do you call anything a human misfortune if it is not a failure of human nature? Or does something seem to you a failure of human nature when it does not run counter to the purpose of that nature? Well, then: you have learned its purpose. Does what has happened prevent you from being just, great-hearted, self-controlled, thoughtful, unerring, undeceived, honorable, free—and all the rest whose presence together enables human nature to possess what is its own?

Remember, then, whenever anything would lead you into grief, to make use of this conviction: this is not misfortune; to bear it nobly is good fortune.

49. A commonplace aid, yet an effective one, toward contempt for death is to call to mind those who clung tenaciously to life. What more have they now than those who died before their time? Somewhere, by now, they surely lie—Caedicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or any others of that kind—men who carried many to burial and then were carried out themselves. All in all, the interval is small; and through how much, in what company, and in what a little body it is endured! Do not, then, regard it as a matter... Look behind you at the boundless reach of time, and ahead at another infinity. Within that expanse, what difference is there between one who lives three days and one who lives three lifetimes?

50. Always run by the shortest way; and the shortest is the way according to nature. Thus speak and act in everything by the soundest rule. For such a purpose releases you from drudgery and campaigning, from every contrivance and affectation.

1. At dawn, when you wake reluctantly, have this ready to hand: I am rising to a human being’s work. Am I still resentful, then, if I am going to do what I was born for, what I was brought into the world to do? Or was I fashioned for this—to lie under the covers and keep myself warm?

“But this is more pleasant.”

Were you born, then, for pleasure—for being acted upon, in short, and not for action? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, each doing its own work, each in its own way helping to order the world? And then you refuse to do what belongs to a human being; you do not hasten toward what accords with your own nature.

“But one must rest as well.”

One must; I say so too. Yet nature has given rest its measure, just as it has given measures to eating and drinking. And still you go beyond those measures, beyond what is enough; but in your actions you no longer go beyond—there you stop short of what you can do. For you do not love yourself; if you did, you would also love your nature and what it wills. Others, loving their crafts, consume themselves in their proper tasks, unwashed and unfed. Do you value your own nature less than the engraver values engraving, the dancer dancing, the lover of money his silver, or the lover of empty fame his scrap of glory? When these people are impassioned, they would sooner forgo food and sleep than fail to increase the things to which they are devoted. But to you, do actions for the common good seem cheaper, and worth less effort?

2. How easy it is to thrust away and erase every troubling or alien impression, and at once to be in perfect calm.

3. Judge yourself worthy of every word and deed that accords with nature, and do not let the blame or talk that follows from certain people lead you aside. If the doing or saying is noble, do not deem yourself unworthy of it. They have their own ruling mind and follow an impulse of their own. Do not look around at that, but complete your straight course, following both your own nature and the nature common to all; for the road of both is one.

4. I journey on through what accords with nature until, fallen, I come to rest—breathing my last into that from which I draw breath each day, and falling upon that from which my father gathered the seed, my mother the blood, and my nurse the milk; that from which, day after day for so many years, I am fed and watered; that which bears me as I tread upon it and make such manifold use of what it gives.

5. They have no sharpness of yours to admire. So be it. But there are many other things of which you cannot say, “I was not born for this.” Offer, then, what lies wholly within your power: integrity, dignity, endurance of hardship, indifference to pleasure, no grievance against your lot, few needs, goodwill, freedom, simplicity, freedom from idle talk, greatness of spirit. Do you not see how many things you are already able to offer—things for which no lack of natural gift or aptitude can serve as an excuse—and yet you still remain beneath them by choice? Or are you compelled by some defect in your natural make-up to grumble, to be miserly, to flatter, to accuse your little body, to curry favor, to vaunt yourself, and to let your soul be tossed about so much? No, by the gods. You could have been rid of these long ago. At most, perhaps, you need only be faulted for being somewhat slow and hard to follow. But this too must be trained, without making light of your slowness or taking a secret pleasure in it.

6. One person, when he has done someone a good turn, is quick to set the favor down to that person’s account. Another is not quick to do this, yet inwardly regards the man as a debtor and knows what he has done. A third, in a certain sense, does not even know what he has done, but is like a vine that has borne a cluster of grapes and seeks nothing more once it has borne its own fruit. A horse has run, a hound has followed the scent, a bee has made honey—and a human being, having done good, does not make a record of it, but passes on to another act, as the vine passes on to bearing another cluster in its season.

We ought, then, to be among those who do this in a certain sense without watching themselves do it.

“Yes, but this very thing must be watched: for it is characteristic,” he says, “of a social being to be conscious that he is acting for the common good—and, by Zeus, to want his fellow also to be conscious of it.”

“What you say is true, but you are misconstruing what is now being said. For that reason you will be one of those I mentioned before; they too are led astray by a certain rational plausibility. But if you are willing to understand what the saying means, do not fear that this will make you neglect any act for the common good.”

7. A prayer of the Athenians:

“Rain, rain, beloved Zeus,on the Athenians’ ploughlandand on their plains.”

Either we should not pray, or we should pray like this—simply and freely.

8. What is meant by saying, “Asclepius prescribed this man riding, or cold baths, or going barefoot,” is the same as saying, “The nature of the whole prescribed this man illness, or disability, or loss, or something else of that kind.” For there too, “prescribed” means something like this: “It assigned him this as fitting for his health”; and here, what befalls each person has in some fashion been assigned to him as fitting for his destiny. Indeed, we speak of things “befalling” us just as craftsmen say that squared stones in walls or pyramids “come together,” when, in a given arrangement, they fit one another.

For there is one harmony embracing all. And just as the cosmos, a body of this kind, is completed from all bodies, so destiny, a cause of this kind, is completed from all causes. Even the wholly unlearned understand what I mean, for they say, “This was what came his way.” Then this was coming his way, and this was prescribed for him. Let us accept such things, therefore, as we accept what Asclepius prescribes. Many of his prescriptions too are harsh, yet we welcome them in hope of health.

Regard the accomplishment and fulfillment of what the common nature intends as you regard your own health; and in this spirit welcome everything that happens, even if it seems severe, because it leads toward that end: toward the health of the cosmos and the prosperous course and success of Zeus. For he would not have brought this to anyone unless it contributed to the whole; nor does any nature bring about something unfitted to what it governs.

For two reasons, then, you should cherish what befalls you. First, because it happened to you, was prescribed for you, and stood in some relation to you, spun together from above out of the most ancient causes. Second, because even what comes separately to each person is a cause of the good course, the fulfillment—and, by Zeus, the very continuance—of the one who governs the whole. For the complete whole is maimed if you sever even the smallest thing from the coherence and continuity of its parts—and likewise of its causes. And you do sever it, so far as you can, whenever you are discontented; in a manner, you destroy it.

9. Do not grow disgusted, do not give up, do not lose heart if acting in every case from right judgments does not become unbroken practice for you. When you are knocked away, return again; be glad if most of what you do is worthier of a human being; love that to which you return. Do not return to philosophy as to a schoolmaster, but as sore-eyed people turn to the sponge and the egg, as another turns to a poultice, another to a soothing rinse. In this way you will make no display of obedience to reason, but will find rest in it.

Remember that philosophy wants only what your nature wants, while you wanted something else, contrary to nature. What could be more gracious than what nature wants? Is it not by seeming gracious that pleasure makes us fall? But look and see whether greatness of soul is not more gracious, and freedom, simplicity, fair-mindedness, reverence. What is more gracious than wisdom itself, when you consider how unerring and smooth in all things is the power that apprehends and knows?

10. Things themselves lie beneath such a veil that more than a few philosophers—and no ordinary ones—have judged them wholly beyond comprehension; even the Stoics themselves find them difficult to comprehend. And every assent of ours is liable to shift—for where is the person who never shifts? Pass on, then, to the objects themselves: how brief their life, how little their worth, how they may be in the possession of a male prostitute, a whore, or a robber. Next, turn to the characters of those who live with you: even the most gracious of them can scarcely be endured, to say nothing of how a person can scarcely endure himself.

In such darkness and filth, amid so great a flux of substance and time, of motion and all that moves, I cannot conceive what could possibly be highly valued or taken seriously at all. On the contrary, one must console oneself and await the natural dissolution, without chafing at the delay, but finding rest in these two things alone: first, that nothing will befall me which is not in accord with the nature of the whole; second, that it is within my power to do nothing against my own god and daimon. No one can force me to transgress against him.

11. What use am I now making of my soul? At every turn, ask yourself this again, and examine what is now present in this part of me they call the ruling faculty. Whose soul do I have now? A child’s? A youth’s? A little woman’s? A tyrant’s? A beast of burden’s? A wild beast’s?

12. You may grasp the character of what the multitude takes for goods from this as well. If someone were to conceive certain things as truly good—wisdom, temperance, justice, courage—then, with these already in mind, he could no longer bear to hear the phrase “under the weight of good things,” for it would not fit. But if someone first calls to mind the things that appear good to the multitude, he will listen on and readily accept the comic poet’s words as a natural conclusion. The multitude too perceives the distinction in this way. Otherwise, the first saying would not jar upon us and be rejected, while in the case of wealth and the lucky gifts that serve luxury or reputation, we accept it as pointed and wittily expressed.

Go on, then, and ask whether things should be honored and judged good when, once they are called to mind, it can aptly be added that the man who possesses them, from sheer abundance, “has nowhere to shit.”

13. I am composed of a causal principle and a material one. Neither will perish into nonbeing, just as neither arose out of nonbeing. Every part of me, then, will by transformation be assigned to some part of the cosmos; that in turn will change into some other part of the cosmos, and so onward to infinity. Through such transformation I too came into being, and those who begot me—and, tracing back, into another infinity. Nothing prevents us from speaking this way, even if the cosmos is governed in cycles with finite bounds.

14. Reason and the rational art are powers sufficient to themselves and to the works that accord with them. They set out, then, from their own proper source and make their way toward the end before them. That is why actions of this kind are called right actions: the name signifies the straightness of the road.

15. None of these things is to be prized by a human being if it does not befit a human being precisely as human. They are not requirements of humanity; human nature does not profess them, nor are they fulfillments of human nature. Therefore neither does the human end lie in them, nor what completes that end—the good. Further, if any of them truly befitted a human being, it would not be fitting to look down upon them and rise above them; the one who makes himself independent of them would not be praiseworthy; nor, if these things were good, would anyone who deprived himself of any one of them be good. But as things are, the more a person strips himself of these and other things like them—or, when stripped of any of them, bears the loss—the better he is.

16. As are the impressions you picture again and again, so will your mind become; for the soul is dyed by its impressions. Dye it, then, in the unbroken succession of impressions such as these: wherever it is possible to live, there it is also possible to live well; it is possible to live at court; therefore it is also possible to live well at court. And again: that for whose sake each thing has been fashioned, toward that it has been fashioned; toward what it has been fashioned, it is borne; where it is borne, there lies its end; and where its end lies, there too lie each thing’s advantage and good. The good of a rational creature, then, is fellowship. For it has long been shown that we came into being for fellowship. Or was it not plain that the lower things exist for the sake of the higher, and the higher for one another? Living things are higher than lifeless things, and rational beings higher than living things.

17. To pursue the impossible is madness; and it is impossible that bad people should not do things of this kind.

18. Nothing happens to anyone that the person is not naturally made to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he does not recognize what has happened, or because he makes a display of greatness of soul, he stands firm and remains uninjured. Is it not dreadful, then, that ignorance and vanity should prove stronger than practical wisdom?

19. Things themselves do not touch the soul in the least. They have no entrance into the soul, nor can they turn or move it. The soul alone turns and moves itself; and whatever judgments it deems itself worthy of making, such does it make for itself the things that stand before it.

20. In one respect, a human being is the being most akin to us, insofar as we must do people good and bear with them. But insofar as some obstruct the works proper to me, a human being becomes for me one of the indifferent things, no less than the sun, the wind, or a wild animal. These may obstruct some activity, but they cannot obstruct impulse or disposition, because of the reservation and the power to turn. For the mind turns and shifts every hindrance to activity into what takes precedence: what checked the deed becomes a means to the deed, and what barred the road becomes a means along that road.

21. Honor what is sovereign in the cosmos: that which makes use of all things and governs all things. In the same way, honor what is sovereign in you: it is of one kind with that cosmic power. For in you too, this is what makes use of everything else, and by this your life is governed.

22. What does no harm to the city does no harm to the citizen. Whenever the impression arises that you have been harmed, apply this rule: if the city is not harmed by this, neither am I harmed; but if the city is harmed, do not be angry—show the one who harms the city what he has failed to see.

23. Often consider the swiftness with which things that are and things coming to be are swept along and carried out of sight. For substance is like a river in unceasing flow; its activities are in continual change, its causes in ten thousand turnings, and almost nothing stands still—not even what is nearest. Consider too the gaping infinity of past and future, in which all things vanish from view. How, then, is one not a fool who amid such things is puffed with pride, or pulled this way and that, or cries out in distress, as though troubled by something enduring and destined to last?

24. Remember the substance of the whole, of which you partake in the smallest measure; the whole of time, from which a brief and momentary interval has been marked off for you; and fate—what infinitesimal part of it are you?

25. Another does wrong. What is that to me? He shall see to it: his disposition is his own, his action his own. I now have what universal nature wills me now to have, and I do what my own nature wills me now to do.

26. Let the governing and sovereign part of your soul remain unchanged by any smooth or rough motion in the flesh, and let it not blend with it; let it draw a boundary around itself and confine those pressures to the bodily parts. But when, through that other sympathy natural to a united body, they rise into the mind, you must not try to resist the sensation, since it is natural. Only let the governing part add from itself no judgment that the sensation concerns either good or evil.

27. “To live with the gods.” The one who lives with the gods continually shows them a soul content with what is allotted, and doing all that the divine spirit wills—the spirit Zeus gave to each person as guardian and guide, a fragment of himself. This is each person’s mind and reason.

28. Are you angry with the man who reeks of sweat? Angry with the man whose breath stinks? What can he do to you? Such is his mouth, such are his armpits; from such things, such an odor must arise. “But the man has reason,” you say, “and, if he pays attention, can understand how he offends.” Good for you. Then you too have reason: move a rational disposition by your rational disposition; show him, remind him. If he listens, you will cure him, and there will be no need for anger.Neither a tragic actor nor a whore.

29. As you intend to live once you have gone away, so you may live here. But if they do not allow it, then depart from life itself—yet as one suffering no evil. “There is smoke, and I leave.” Why regard this as any great affair? But until something of that kind drives me out, I remain free, and no one will prevent me from doing what I will; and I will what accords with the nature of a rational and social creature.

30. The mind of the whole is social. Accordingly, it made the lower things for the sake of the higher, and joined the higher to one another in harmony. You see how it subordinated and coordinated, allotted to each according to its worth, and gathered the sovereign beings into concord with one another.

31. How have you borne yourself until now toward gods, parents, brother, wife, children, teachers, tutors, friends, kin, and servants? Can it be said of you, toward them all, down to this day:

“Neither to do anyone a lawless deed, nor speak one”?

Call to mind, too, all that you have passed through, and all you have proved able to endure; that the story of your life is full now, and your service complete; how many beautiful things you have seen; how many pleasures and pains you have looked beyond; how many honors you have passed by; and toward how many ungrateful people you have shown gratitude.

32. Why should unskilled and untaught souls throw a skilled and knowing soul into confusion? What soul, then, is skilled and knowing? The one that knows beginning and end, and the Reason that reaches through the whole of being and, through all eternity, orders the universe in appointed cycles.

33. A little while, and you are ash or skeleton—and either a name, or not even a name; and a name is a sound and its echo. The things prized so highly in life are empty, rotten, petty: puppies snapping at one another, quarrelsome children, laughing and then at once in tears.

But Faith and Reverence and Justice and Truthhave gone to Olympus from the broad-wayed earth.

What, then, still holds you here, if sensible things are quick to change and never still, the senses dim and easily stamped with impressions, the little soul itself an exhalation from blood, and good repute among such beings an emptiness? What, then? Await with grace either extinction or removal. And until the time for it arrives, what is enough? What else but to revere the gods and bless them; to do good to human beings, to bear with them and refrain from them; and to remember that whatever lies within the bounds of this scrap of flesh and wisp of breath is neither yours nor in your power?

34. You can always flow well, if you can also fare well upon the way—if your judgments and actions follow the way. Two things are common to the soul of god and human being and every rational creature: not to be obstructed by another, and to find its good in a disposition and action governed by justice, letting desire come to rest there.

35. If this is neither a vice of mine, nor an activity arising from vice in me, and if the common good is not harmed, why am I troubled over it? And what harm has come to the common good?

36. Do not be swept away wholesale by an impression. Help as far as you can and as the matter deserves; and even if people suffer loss in things indifferent, do not picture the loss itself as harm—for that is a bad habit. Rather, as the old man, when he left, asked back for his foster-child’s spinning top, remembering that it was a spinning top, so must you do here.

And when you are crying out upon the Rostra: Human being, have you forgotten what these things were?

“Yes—but to them they matter desperately.”

Must you, for that reason, become a fool as well?

37. “Once, wherever I was overtaken, I was a man blessed with a good lot.”

But to be blessed with a good lot is to allot a good lot to yourself; and a good lot is this: good turns of the soul, good impulses, good actions.

1. The substance of the whole is compliant and readily turned; and the reason that governs it has in itself no cause for doing evil, for it has no evil in it. It does nothing badly, nor is anything harmed by it. By its rule all things come to be and reach their end.

2. Let it make no difference to you whether you do what is fitting while shivering or warm, whether drowsy or amply rested, whether spoken ill of or praised, whether dying or doing something else. For dying too is one of the acts of life. So in this act as well, it is enough to dispose the present moment well.

3. Look within. Let neither the distinctive quality of anything nor its worth escape you.

4. All that lies before us will change with utmost speed and either rise as vapor, if substance is one, or be scattered abroad.

5. The governing reason knows its own disposition, what it is doing, and upon what material it works.

6. The finest way to defend yourself is not to become like them.

7. Take delight and find renewed repose in one thing: passing from one action for the common good to another action for the common good, with God in mind.

8. The ruling faculty is that which awakens and turns itself, makes itself whatever it wills to be, and makes everything that happens appear to it as it wills.

9. Each thing reaches its end according to the nature of the whole—not according to some other nature, whether enclosing it from without, contained within it, or suspended apart outside.

10. Either a potion of confusion, mutual entanglement, and dispersal—or unity, order, and providence. If the former, why should I desire to linger in a random compound and such a welter? What else should concern me but how one day “to become earth”? And why be troubled? Dispersal will reach me, whatever I do. But if the latter is true, I revere, stand firm, and put my trust in the One who governs.

11. Whenever circumstances compel you to be thrown, as it were, into disorder, return swiftly to yourself, and do not fall out of rhythm beyond what necessity demands. For you will gain a stronger command of the harmony by continually returning to it.

12. If you had both a stepmother and a mother, you would attend to the former, yet your return to your mother would be constant. Such for you now are the court and philosophy. Return here often and rest beside her: through her, what happens there seems bearable to you, and you are bearable amid it.

13. As when, in regard to delicacies and such foods, one receives the impression: this is the corpse of a fish, that the corpse of a bird or a pig; and again: Falernian wine is a little grape juice, and the purple-bordered robe is sheep’s hair dyed with the blood of a shellfish; and, in sexual union: the rubbing of an entrail and, with a kind of spasm, the discharge of a little mucus. Such are the impressions that reach down to the things themselves and pass right through them, so that one sees what they truly are. So must you act throughout your whole life: wherever things make too persuasive an appearance, strip them bare, look closely upon their cheapness, and remove the story by which they glorify themselves. For conceit is a formidable deceiver, and just when you think yourself most occupied with serious matters, you are most thoroughly bewitched. See, at any rate, what Crates says about Xenocrates himself.

14. Most things admired by the multitude fall under the broadest kinds of things held together by structure or nature: stones, timber, fig trees, vines, olive trees. What those of slightly better judgment admire falls under things held together by soul: owning flocks, herds, or simply a multitude of slaves. What the still more cultivated admire falls under things held together by a rational soul—not insofar as it is rational, however, but insofar as it is skilled in some craft or clever in some other way. But one who honors a soul that is rational and civic no longer turns toward any of those other things. Above all, he preserves his own soul in a rational and social disposition and movement, and works together toward that end with every soul of the same kind.

15. Some things hasten to be born, others hasten to have been; and of what is coming to be, something has already gone out. Ceaseless currents and alterations renew the cosmos, just as the unbroken sweep of time keeps boundless eternity forever new. In this river, where no one may stand still, which of these things racing past could one prize? It would be like beginning to love one of the little birds flying by: already it has vanished from sight. Such too is each person’s life—an exhalation from blood, a drawing-in from air. For as it is to take in air once and give it back, which we do at every moment, so it is also to give back the whole power of breath which you acquired yesterday or the day before, when you were newly born, to that place from which you first drew it.

16. Neither transpiring like plants is worthy of honor, nor breathing like grazing beasts and wild animals; nor being stamped by impressions; nor being jerked by impulse like a puppet; nor gathering in herds; nor feeding—for that is akin to discharging the waste of food. What, then, is worthy of honor? To be applauded? No. Then neither to be applauded by tongues, for the acclaim of the many is the clatter of tongues. So you have relinquished petty fame as well. What remains worthy of honor? This, I think: to move and be held in check according to your proper constitution—the end toward which all care and craft lead. (For every craft aims at this: that what it fashions should be well suited to the work for which it was fashioned. The gardener and the keeper of the vine, the horse trainer and the keeper of the dog, seek this.) And toward what do education and teaching hasten? Here, then, lies what is worthy of honor. If this stands well, you will secure none of those other things for yourself. Will you not stop honoring many other things too? Otherwise you will be neither free, self-sufficient, nor untroubled by passion. You will inevitably envy and be jealous, regard with suspicion those able to take those things away, and scheme against those who possess what you honor. In short, whoever lacks any such thing must be in turmoil and, besides, must often blame the gods. But reverence and honor for your own understanding will make you acceptable to yourself, well attuned to your fellows, and in accord with the gods—that is, praising all that they apportion and ordain.

17. Upward, downward, round about sweep the courses of the elements. But virtue’s motion lies in none of these: it is something more divine, advancing by a road hard to conceive, and journeying well.

18. What a thing it is that they do. They are unwilling to speak well of the people who live in their own time and in their company, yet they set great store by being spoken well of themselves by later generations—people they have never seen and never will. But this comes close to being grieved that earlier generations, too, did not speak your praises.

19. Do not suppose that, because something is hard for you yourself to accomplish, it is impossible for a human being; rather, if something is possible and proper for a human being, consider it attainable by you as well.

20. In the training ground someone has raked us with a nail or, crashing his head against ours, dealt us a blow; yet we neither mark him for it, nor take offense, nor afterward regard him suspiciously as a plotter. We do guard against him, but not as an enemy and not with suspicion: we simply give way with goodwill. Let something like this happen in the other parts of life as well: let us make allowance for much in those who are, as it were, training beside us. For we may, as I said, move out of the way without either suspecting or hating.

21. If anyone can refute me and show me that my judgment or action is not right, I shall gladly change; for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever harmed. Harm comes to the one who persists in his own deception and ignorance.

22. I do the duty that is mine; other things do not draw me aside. For they are either lifeless, irrational, or else astray and ignorant of the road.

23. Toward irrational animals—and toward things and material objects generally—I act, as one who has reason toward what has none, with nobility and freedom; toward human beings, because they have reason, I act as a fellow member of the community; and in all things I call upon the gods. Do not concern yourself with how long you will go on doing this: even three such hours are enough.

24. Alexander the Macedonian and his muleteer, once dead, came to the same condition: either they were taken back into the same seminal principles of the universe, or they were scattered alike among the atoms.

25. Consider how many bodily and psychic events occur together in each one of us within the same indivisible instant; and then you will not wonder that many more—rather, that all things coming to be within the one all-embracing whole that we call the universe—subsist in it at once.

26. If someone asks you how the name Antoninus is written, will you not pronounce each letter distinctly? What, then, if they grow angry—will you grow angry in return? Will you not calmly proceed to count out every letter? Remember, then, that here too every duty is completed from a certain number of parts. You must observe these, remain undisturbed, and not answer vexation with vexation, but bring the task before you to completion by the proper course.

27. How cruel it is not to permit human beings to pursue what appears to them fitting and beneficial. And yet, in a way, you do not allow them to do this whenever you are indignant that they go wrong; for they are invariably borne toward what they take to be fitting and beneficial to themselves. “But it is not so.” Then teach them and show them, without indignation.

28. Death: a repose from the resistance of sensation, from the puppet-twitching of impulse, from the coursing of thought, and from service to the flesh.

29. It is shameful, in a life in which your body has not yet given out, for your soul to give out before it.

30. See that you are not Caesar-dyed, not stained through; for it happens. Keep yourself, then, simple, good, uncorrupted, grave, unadorned, a friend to justice, reverent toward the gods, kindly, affectionate, steadfast in the work that is fitting. Strive to remain the person philosophy wished to make you. Revere the gods; preserve human beings. Life is brief; the one fruit of earthly life is a holy disposition and actions for the common good.

In everything, be a pupil of Antoninus: remember his vigor in doing what accords with reason; his evenness everywhere; his holiness; the serenity of his face; his gentleness; his freedom from empty glory; his devotion to comprehending affairs. Remember how he would let absolutely nothing pass before he had first inspected it thoroughly and understood it clearly; how he bore those who blamed him unjustly, without blaming them in return; how he hurried toward nothing; how he admitted no slanders; how exact an examiner he was of character and conduct, never reproachful, never easily alarmed, never suspicious, never sophistical; how little contented him—in lodging, bedding, clothing, food, and service; how hardworking and forbearing he was; how, because of his simple diet, he could remain at the same task until evening without even needing to relieve himself outside the customary hour; the firmness and constancy of his friendships; his tolerance of those who openly opposed his opinions, and his delight if anyone showed him something better; and how reverent he was toward the gods, without superstition—so that your last hour may come upon you with a conscience as clear as his.

31. Sober up, call yourself back, and wake again. Once you realize that dreams were troubling you, look upon these things, now awake, as you looked upon those.

32. I am composed of a little body and a soul. To the little body, then, all things are indifferent, for it cannot itself make distinctions. To the mind, all that is not its own activity is indifferent; but all that is its own activity lies within its power. And even among these, it is occupied only with the present; for its future and past activities are themselves already indifferent.

33. Pain is not contrary to nature for the hand or the foot, so long as the foot performs the work of a foot and the hand the work of a hand. In the same way, pain is not contrary to nature for a human being as a human being, so long as he performs the work of a human being; and if it is not contrary to his nature, neither is it an evil for him.

34. What mighty pleasures have been enjoyed by robbers, sexual debauchees, men who struck their fathers, and tyrants.

35. Do you not see how artisans in the common trades accommodate themselves up to a point to laypeople, yet nevertheless hold fast to the principle of their craft and will not endure abandoning it? Is it not dreadful if the architect and the physician show greater reverence for the principle of their own craft than a human being shows for his own—the principle he shares with the gods?

36. Asia, Europe—corners of the cosmos. Every sea—a drop of the cosmos. Athos—a clod of the cosmos. All the present—a point in eternity. All things are small, easily turned, vanishing away.

All things come from there, set in motion by that common governing principle, or following as consequences. And so the lion’s gaping jaws, poison, and everything that does harm—like the thorn, like the mire—are outgrowths of those august and beautiful things. Do not imagine them, then, alien to that which you revere, but reckon up the source of all things.

37. Whoever has seen the present has seen all things: all that has come to be from eternity, and all that will be into infinity. For all are of one kind and one form.

38. Often call to mind the interconnection of all things in the cosmos and their relation to one another. For in a way all things are interwoven with one another, and in this respect all are dear to one another: one thing follows upon another because of the tensional movement, the common breath, and the unity of substance.

39. Fit yourself to the circumstances allotted with you; and love the people allotted with you—but truly.

40. Every instrument, tool, and vessel is sound when it performs the work for which it was fashioned, though in its case the craftsman is elsewhere. But in things held together by nature, the power that fashioned them is within and remains there. You should therefore revere her all the more, and believe that, if your condition and conduct accord with her will, everything is as your mind would have it. And in the same way, the Whole has its own affairs as its mind would have them.

41. Whatever among the things outside your choice you suppose to be good or evil, it follows necessarily that, when you encounter such an evil or fail to attain such a good, you will blame the gods and hate those people who are, or whom you suspect of becoming, the causes of the failure or the encounter. Indeed, we commit many injustices because of the distinctions we make concerning these things. But if we judge only what is up to us to be good or evil, no cause remains either to accuse a god or to take a hostile stand against a human being.

42. We all work together toward one result: some knowingly and with understanding, others without knowing it—just as Heraclitus, I think, says that even sleepers are workers and fellow-workers in what comes to pass in the cosmos. Each contributes in a different way; and contributing in superabundance are the faultfinder and the one who tries to resist and undo what comes to pass—for the cosmos had need even of such a person. It remains, then, for you to understand among which you rank yourself. For he who governs the Whole will certainly make good use of you and receive you as some part of the company of workers and contributing powers. But do not you become the sort of part played by the cheap and ridiculous line in the drama that Chrysippus mentions.

43. Does the Sun claim the work of the Rain-god as his to do? Does Asclepius claim the work of the Fruit-bearer? And what of each of the stars? Are they not different, yet fellow-workers toward the same end?

44. If the gods have deliberated about me and what must happen to me, they have deliberated well. For a god without counsel is not easy even to conceive; and for what reason would they be moved to harm me? What advantage would come of it either to them or to the common good, for which they care above all? But if they have not deliberated about me individually, they have certainly deliberated about the common good; and since these things happen as consequences of that, I ought to welcome and cherish them.

But suppose they deliberate about nothing—an impious thing to believe; or else let us neither sacrifice nor pray nor swear nor do any of the other things we do at every turn as though the gods were present and living beside us. Yet suppose, then, that they deliberate about none of our concerns: I am still able to deliberate about myself, and mine is the consideration of what is beneficial. What benefits each being is what accords with its own constitution and nature; and my nature is rational and civic.

As Antoninus, my city and fatherland is Rome; as a human being, the cosmos. Therefore only what benefits these cities is good for me.

45. Whatever happens to each being benefits the Whole. That would suffice. But if you watch closely, you will also see this to be generally true: whatever happens to one human being benefits other human beings as well. Here, however, let “benefit” be understood more broadly in the case of things indifferent.

46. Just as the spectacles in the amphitheatre and places of that kind grow wearisome to you because the same things are always seen, and their sameness makes the sight cloying, so you suffer throughout the whole of life. For everything, above and below, is the same and comes from the same things. How long, then?

47. Continually reflect that people of every kind, pursuing every kind of life and belonging to every nation, have died; descend in thought as far as Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Pass now to the other tribes. We must indeed change our abode to where so many formidable orators lie, so many grave philosophers—Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates—so many heroes of earlier days, and after them so many generals and tyrants. And besides these, Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other natures acute, great-minded, industrious, cunning, overbearing—even mockers of humanity’s perishable, day-long life, such as Menippus and all his kind. Of them all, reflect that they have long lain there. What, then, is terrible in this for them? And what of those whose very names are wholly unknown?

One thing here is worth much: to live out your life with truth and justice, gracious toward liars and the unjust.

48. When you wish to gladden yourself, call to mind the excellences of those who live with you: the energy of one, the modesty of another, another’s generosity, and something else in another. For nothing gladdens us so much as the images of the virtues shining through the characters of those who share our lives, gathered together as thickly as may be. Therefore keep them ready to hand.

49. Surely you are not aggrieved that you weigh only so many pounds and not three hundred? Then neither be aggrieved that you must live only so many years and no more. As you cherish the portion of substance marked off for you, so too cherish the portion of time.

50. Try to persuade them; yet act even against their will whenever the reason of justice leads that way. But if someone uses force to withstand you, pass over into gracious acceptance and freedom from distress; make use of the obstruction for another virtue, and remember that your impulse was made with reservation and that you were not reaching for the impossible. What, then, were you reaching for? An impulse of a certain kind. And this you attain: that toward which we were moved has come to pass.

51. The lover of fame takes another’s activity for his own good; the lover of pleasure, his own passive feeling; but the one who has understanding, his own action.

52. You are free to form no judgment about this, and not to trouble your soul; for things themselves have no nature capable of producing our judgments.

53. Train yourself to stay close to what another is saying, without inserting thoughts of your own, and, as far as possible, enter the speaker’s soul. What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee.

54. If the sailors spoke ill of the man steering them, or the sick of the man treating them, would he attend to anything else? How else could he himself bring about the safety of those aboard, or the health of those under his care?

55. How many of those with whom I entered the cosmos have already gone away.

56. To those with jaundice, honey tastes bitter; to those bitten by a rabid dog, water is terrifying; and to little children, a ball is beautiful. Why, then, am I angry? Or do you think delusion has less power than bile has in the jaundiced, or venom in one bitten by a rabid dog?

57. No one will prevent you from living according to the reason of your own nature; nothing will happen to you contrary to the reason of the common nature.

58. What sort of people they are whom they wish to please; for what things they strive to prevail, and through what actions. How swiftly the age will cover everything—and how much it has covered already.

1. What is vice? It is what you have often seen. And whatever happens, keep this ready at hand: this is what you have often seen. Everywhere, up and down, you will find the same things—the things that fill histories ancient, middle, and recent; the things that now fill cities and households. Nothing new: all familiar, and all short-lived.

2. The principles live. For how else can they die, unless the impressions that answer to them are extinguished—impressions it is always in your power to kindle again? I am able to form the judgment about this that I ought to form. If I am able, why am I troubled? What lies outside my mind has no bearing at all upon my mind. Learn this, and you stand upright. You are free to come alive again. Look once more upon things as you used to look upon them: in this consists coming alive again.

3. The empty bustle of a procession; dramas on a stage; flocks, herds, spear-fights; a little bone tossed to puppies; a morsel of bread into fishponds; the toils and burden-bearing of ants; the scurryings of startled flies; little puppets jerked by strings. Amid all this, then, you must stand with goodwill and without disdain, yet follow closely this truth: each person’s worth is the worth of the things upon which he has set his zeal.

4. We must follow what is said word by word, and what is done impulse by impulse: in the latter case, seeing at once toward what aim the act is referred; in the former, watching closely what is meant.

5. Is my mind sufficient for this, or not? If it is sufficient, I use it for the task as an instrument given me by the nature of the Whole. If it is not, then either I yield the task to someone able to accomplish it better—unless some other duty forbids—or I do it as I can, taking to my side someone who, with the service of my ruling faculty, can achieve what is now timely and useful for the community. For whatever I may do, whether by myself or with another, must strain toward this alone: what serves the common good and accords with it.

6. How many once crowned with hymns have already been surrendered to oblivion; and how many who sang their praises have long since passed away.

7. Do not be ashamed to receive help. Your charge is to perform the duty that falls to you, like a soldier in an assault upon the walls. What, then, if you are lame and cannot scale the battlement alone, but can do it with another?

8. Do not let the future trouble you. You will come to meet it, if need be, bearing the same reason that you now employ upon the present.

9. All things are interwoven with one another, and the bond is sacred; scarcely anything is alien to anything else. For they have been marshalled together, and together they adorn one ordered world. There is one cosmos made of all things, one god through all things, one substance and one law—one reason shared by all rational creatures—and one truth, if indeed there is also one perfection for creatures of one kind who partake of the same reason.

10. Everything embodied in matter vanishes with all speed into the substance of the Whole; every cause is with all speed taken back into the reason of the Whole; and the memory of everything is with all speed buried in eternity.

11. For a rational creature, the act according to nature and the act according to reason are one and the same.

12. Upright—or being set upright.

13. As the limbs of the body are in beings united, so rational beings, though separate, stand in the same relation: they were fashioned for one common work. This thought will strike you more deeply if you often say to yourself: “I am a member of the system formed by rational beings.” But if, by a change of letter, you call yourself merely a part, you do not yet love human beings from the heart; doing good does not yet gladden you in its own right. You still do it simply as a duty, not yet as doing good to yourself.

14. Let whatever will assail from without whatever is capable of suffering from that assault. Those things, if they choose, may complain when they have suffered. But I, unless I judge what has happened to be an evil, have not yet been harmed; and it is in my power not to judge it so.

15. Whatever anyone may do or say, I must be good—as though gold, or emerald, or purple were forever saying this: “Whatever anyone may do or say, I must be emerald and keep my own color.”

16. The ruling faculty does not trouble itself; by which I mean, it does not frighten itself... into desire. If anyone else can make it afraid or grieve it, let him do so; for the faculty itself will not, by its own judgment, turn itself toward such changes. Let the little body take care, if it can, that it suffers nothing; and if it does suffer, let it say so. But the little soul that feels fear and grief—the faculty that judges these matters as a whole—will suffer nothing, for you will not force it into such a judgment. In itself the ruling faculty is free of need, unless it creates a need for itself; and in the same way it is untroubled and unhindered, unless it troubles and hinders itself.

17. Happiness is a good spirit—or a good indwelling divinity. What, then, are you doing here, impression? Go away, by the gods, as you came; I have no need of you. You have come according to your ancient custom. I am not angry with you. Only depart.

18. Does someone fear change? What can come to be without change? And what is dearer or more akin to the nature of the Whole? Can you yourself bathe unless the wood undergoes change? Can you be nourished unless the food undergoes change? Can anything else useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see, then, that your own changing is of the same kind, and equally necessary to the nature of the Whole?

19. Through the substance of the Whole, as through a winter torrent, all bodies pass—grown together with the Whole and working with it, as our limbs work with one another. How many Chrysippuses, how many Socrateses, how many Epictetuses eternity has already swallowed down. Let the same thought arise in you concerning every human being and every thing whatsoever.

20. One thing alone distracts me: that I may myself do something the constitution of a human being does not will, or do it in a way it does not will, or do what it does not will now.

21. Near is your forgetting of all things; near, all things’ forgetting of you.

22. It is proper to a human being to love even those who stumble. This becomes possible when it occurs to you that they are your kin; that they go wrong through ignorance and against their will; that before long both you and they will be dead; and, above all, that they have not harmed you—for they have not made your ruling faculty worse than it was before.

23. The nature of the Whole, from the substance of the Whole as from wax, has now molded a little horse; then, melting it down, it used the same material for a little tree; next for a little man; next for something else. And each of these held its shape for the briefest time. There is nothing dreadful for the little box in being taken apart, any more than in being put together.

24. The scowl upon a face is deeply against nature. When it appears again and again, the expression dies within, or at last is quenched, so that it cannot be kindled at all. Try to grasp from this very fact that it is against reason. For if even the awareness of going wrong is lost, what reason remains for living?

25. Everything you see will, in a moment, be changed by the nature that governs the Whole. From its substance she will make other things, and from their substance still others, so that the world may be forever young.

26. Whenever someone wrongs you, consider at once what he took to be good or evil when he did the wrong. Once you see that, you will pity him; you will neither be astonished nor angry. For either you still suppose the same thing to be good as he does, or something of the same kind—and then you must forgive him—or you no longer suppose such things to be good and evil, and then it will be easier to be gracious to one whose sight has gone astray.

27. Do not picture what is absent as already yours. Instead, reckon up the finest things among those that are present, and, in gratitude for them, remind yourself how eagerly they would be sought if they were not here. Yet guard yourself at the same time: by taking such delight in them, do not grow accustomed to prize them so highly that, if ever they are absent, you are thrown into turmoil.

28. Gather yourself into yourself. The rational ruling mind has it in its nature to suffice for itself when it acts justly, and by that very act to possess serenity.

29. Erase the impression. Halt the puppet-play. Draw a boundary around the present span of time. Recognize what is happening, whether to you or to another. Divide and analyze the thing before you into cause and matter. Think of your final hour. Leave the wrong committed by that man there, where the wrongdoing arose.

30. Let your understanding extend alongside the words being spoken. Let your mind enter into what is being done, and into the one who does it.

31. Brighten yourself with simplicity, with reverence, and with indifference toward all that lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow God. He says that “all things are by convention, while in truth there are only the elements”; but it is enough to remember that all things stand by convention. Very few things, then.

32. On death: dispersal, if there are atoms; if there is unity, either extinction or migration.

33. On pain: what cannot be borne carries us off; what lingers can be borne. The understanding preserves its own serenity by withdrawing its judgment, and the ruling mind has become no worse. As for the parts afflicted by pain, let them pronounce upon it, if they can.

34. On fame: look into their minds—what sort of minds they are, what things they shun, what things they pursue. And consider how, just as dunes driven one upon another conceal those that came before, so in life what came earlier is swiftly covered by what is borne in after it.

35. “Then for one whose understanding is magnificent, whose vision embraces all time and all substance, do you think human life can seem a great thing?”“Impossible,” he said.“Then such a man will not consider death anything dreadful either?”“Not in the least.”

36. “It is kingly to do good and be spoken of badly.”

37. It is shameful that the face should obey, taking form and beauty as the understanding commands, while the understanding does not give form and beauty to itself by its own command.

38. For one must not be angry with things: they care nothing for it.

39. May you grant joysboth to the deathless gods and to us.

40. To reap life like a fruitful ear of grain:one comes to be, another does not.

41. If the gods have neglected me and my children,even this has its reason.

42. For the good is with me,and so is justice.

43. One must not join in lamentation,nor groan in sympathy.

44. “But I would answer him with a just argument: ‘You do not speak well, sir, if you think that a man of even the slightest worth should calculate the risk of living or dying, rather than consider this alone whenever he acts: whether his actions are just or unjust, the deeds of a good man or a bad one.’”

45. “For this, men of Athens, is the truth: wherever a man has stationed himself because he judges it the best place, or wherever his commander has stationed him, there, as I see it, he must remain and face the danger, counting neither death nor anything else before disgrace.”

46. “But, my good man, consider whether nobility and goodness may be something other than saving and being saved. Perhaps the man who is truly a man should let go of this concern for living however long a time, and should not cling fondly to life. Entrusting these matters to God, and believing the women when they say that not one of us can escape destiny, he should thereafter consider how he may live in the best way the time he is to live.”

47. Survey the courses of the stars as though you ran their circuits with them, and continually contemplate the elements changing into one another. Images such as these cleanse away the grime of life upon the ground.

48. And when your thought turns to human beings, you should look also upon the things of earth as though from some height above: herds, armies, farms, marriages, separations, births, deaths, the clamor of law courts, deserted lands, varied nations of foreigners, festivals, lamentations, marketplaces—the whole medley, ordered into one world out of opposites.

49. Look back upon what has gone before, upon the countless transformations of ruling powers. You may also foresee what is to come: it will be wholly of the same kind and cannot depart from the rhythm of what is happening now. And so it is all one whether you study human life for forty years or for ten thousand. What more will you see?

50. What springs from earth returns to earth;what blossoms from ethereal seedhas passed again to heaven’s sphere.

51. Or this: the loosening of the reciprocal entanglements among the atoms, and a scattering of this kind among the elements that cannot suffer.

52. With food and drink and sorceriesthey turn the channel from its course, so as not to die.But the wind that blows from God we must endure,with toils that draw no lamentation.

53. “More accomplished in horsemanship”—but not more companionable, nor more reverent, nor better ordered amid events, nor more gracious toward the oversights of those nearby.

54. Wherever a work can be brought to completion in accordance with the reason shared by gods and human beings, there is nothing to fear. For wherever benefit may be gained through an activity that proceeds successfully and advances in keeping with our constitution, no harm is to be suspected there.

55. Everywhere and without cease, it is yours to be reverently content with the present conjunction of events, to deal justly with the people now before you, and to bring all your skill to the present impression, so that nothing unexamined may slip inside.

56. Do not cast about among the ruling minds of others. Look instead straight toward the end to which nature leads you: the nature of the Whole through what befalls you, and your own through what is to be done by you. What each must do follows from its constitution. Now all other things have been constituted for the sake of rational beings—as in every other case the lesser exists for the sake of the greater—and rational beings for one another.

The social, then, is foremost in the human constitution. Second is resistance to the body’s persuasions. For it belongs to rational and intelligent movement to set its own bounds and never be overcome by movement either of sensation or of impulse. Both of those are animal; but intelligent movement claims primacy and will not be mastered by them. Rightly so, since by nature it knows how to use them all. Third in the rational constitution is freedom from rash assent and deception.

Let the ruling mind, holding fast to these, finish its course straight ahead; then it possesses what is its own.

57. As one already dead, who until this moment has not lived, live the remainder, this surplus granted you, according to nature.

58. Love only what befalls you and is spun together with your life. What could be more fitting?

59. At every event, keep before your eyes those to whom the same things happened, and who then were aggrieved, astonished, full of complaint. And now—where are they? Nowhere. What then? Do you too wish to be like them? Why not leave alien changes of temper to those who cause and undergo such changes, and devote yourself wholly to the question of how to use these events? For you will use them well, and they will become material for you. Only attend, and resolve to be beautiful in your own eyes in everything you do; and remember both truths: what you do is not indifferent, but that on which the action is exercised is indifferent.

60. Dig within. Within is the spring of the good, forever able to well up, if forever you dig.

61. The body too should be firmly composed, not scattered loose either in motion or at rest. Just as the mind preserves an intelligent and seemly bearing in the face, something of the same kind should be required of the whole body. Yet all this must be maintained without affectation.

62. The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing: it must stand ready and unfallen against whatever strikes, even what could not be foreseen.

63. Continually pause to consider: who are these people whose testimony you desire, and what sort of ruling minds do they possess? Then you will neither blame those who go astray unwillingly nor require their confirming voice, once you have looked into the sources of their judgments and impulses.

64. “Every soul,” he says, “is deprived of truth against its will.” So too of justice, self-command, goodwill, and every virtue of that kind. It is utterly necessary to remember this without cease; for then you will be gentler toward everyone.

65. In the face of every pain, have this ready at hand: it is not shameful, nor does it make the governing intelligence worse; for it does not corrupt it either as rational or as social. And with most pains let the saying of Epicurus come to your aid: pain is neither unbearable nor everlasting, if you remember its limits and do not enlarge it by adding opinion.

Remember also that many things which are the same as pain escape our notice as such, though we chafe at them—for example drowsiness, oppressive heat, and loss of appetite. So whenever one of these displeases you, say to yourself: “You are surrendering to pain.”

66. See that you never feel toward the inhuman as the inhuman feel toward humankind.

67. How do we know whether Telauges may not have had a better disposition than Socrates? It is not enough that Socrates died a more celebrated death, debated more adroitly with the sophists, endured the whole night in the frost with greater fortitude, appeared more nobly resolved to refuse when ordered to arrest the man of Salamis, and “swaggered in the streets”—a report one might very well pause over, if indeed it was true.

What must be examined is this: what sort of soul did Socrates have? Could he be content with being just in his relations with human beings and devout in his relations with the gods—neither idly indignant at human vice nor enslaved to anyone’s ignorance; neither receiving what was apportioned from the Whole as something alien nor enduring it as unbearable; neither letting his mind be drawn into sympathy with the sufferings of his scrap of flesh?

68. Nature has not blended you into the bodily compound so completely that you are forbidden to set your own boundary and make what is yours subject to yourself. Remember this always, and remember also that a happy life rests on very few things. And because you have given up hope of becoming a dialectician and a student of nature, do not therefore despair of being free, self-respecting, social, and obedient to God. For it is entirely possible to become a godlike human being and be recognized by no one.

69. To live out your life unforced, in the fullness of a glad heart—even if everyone shouts whatever they please, even if wild beasts tear apart the little limbs of this lump of matter grown around you. Amid all this, what prevents the mind from preserving itself in calm, in true judgment of what surrounds it, and in readiness to use what is laid before it? Thus judgment may say to what encounters it: “This is what you are in essence, though in common opinion you may appear otherwise”; and use may say to what falls in its way: “I was seeking you. For whatever is present is always material for my rational and civic virtue, and, altogether, for the art proper to a human being or a god.” Everything that happens is at home with god or human being: it is neither novel nor hard to handle, but familiar and fruitful.

70. The perfection of character consists in this: to pass each day as though it were the last, neither fevered nor benumbed nor playing a part.

71. The gods are immortal, yet they do not chafe at having, throughout so vast an eternity, always and inevitably to endure so many people of such a kind—so base in their multitudes. More than that: they care for them in every way. But you, who are on the point of coming to an end, lose heart—and you yourself are one of the base?

72. It is absurd not to flee your own vice—which is possible—yet to flee the vice of others—which is impossible.

73. Whatever the rational and social faculty finds to be neither intelligent nor social, it reasonably judges beneath itself.

74. When you have done someone good and another has received that good, what third thing beyond these do you still seek—as fools do: to have the reputation of doing good, or to gain a return?

75. No one wearies of being benefited, and to benefit another is an action according to nature. So do not weary of being benefited in the very act by which you benefit another.

76. The nature of the whole set itself toward the making of the cosmos. Now, either everything that comes to be comes about by consequence, or else even the sovereign things toward which the governing principle of the cosmos directs its own impulse are without reason. Remembering this will make you calmer in many things.

1. Let this too lead you away from vanity: you can no longer claim to have lived your whole life—or even your life from youth onward—as a philosopher. To many others, and to yourself as well, it has become plain that you are far from philosophy. You have become entangled, then, so that it is no longer easy for you to win the reputation of a philosopher; your station, too, stands in the way. So if you have truly seen where the matter lies, let go of what people will think of you, and be content if, for whatever remains of your life, however much it may be, you live as your nature wills. Consider, then, what it wills, and let nothing else distract you. For by experience you know how many paths you have wandered without finding the good life anywhere—not in arguments, not in wealth, not in reputation, not in enjoyment: nowhere. Where, then, is it? In doing what human nature seeks. And how will you do that? By holding convictions from which your impulses and actions arise. What convictions? Those concerning goods and evils: that nothing is good for a human being unless it makes him just, self-controlled, courageous, and free; and nothing evil unless it makes him the opposite of these.

2. At every action ask yourself: How does this stand with me? Will I regret it? A little while, and I am dead, and everything has vanished from the scene. What more do I seek, if the work now before me is the work of a rational and social creature, living under the same law as god?

3. Alexander, Gaius, and Pompey—what were they beside Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? For these men saw things themselves, their causes and their materials, and their ruling minds were self-sufficient; but the others—how many things demanded their care, and to how many were they enslaved.

4. They will do the same things none the less, even if you burst apart.

5. First, do not be troubled: everything comes to pass according to the nature of the Whole, and in a little while you will be no one, nowhere, as Hadrian and Augustus are no longer. Then fix your gaze upon the matter and see it for what it is; remember that you must be a good human being, and what human nature requires, and do it without turning aside. Speak as seems most just to you—only with goodwill, modesty, and without pretence.

6. The nature of the Whole has this for its work: to transfer what is here to there, to transform it, to lift it from here and carry it there. Everything is change; yet the distributions are equitable. Everything is familiar—there is no cause to fear some novelty.

7. Every nature is content with itself when its course runs well. A rational nature runs well when it assents to no impression that is false or uncertain; when it directs its impulses solely toward works for the common good; when it confines desire and aversion to what is in our power alone; and when it welcomes everything allotted by the common nature. For it is a part of that nature, as the nature of a leaf is part of the plant’s nature—except that the leaf’s nature is part of a nature without perception or reason, and liable to hindrance, while human nature is part of a nature unhindered, intelligent, and just, since it apportions to each an equal and merited share of time, substance, cause, activity, and circumstance. But take care: do not look in every case for equality between one single thing and another; compare rather the sum of all that belongs to one with the whole gathered sum belonging to the other.

8. You have no leisure to read. But you do have leave to curb arrogance; you do have leave to rise above pleasures and pains; you do have leave to stand beyond petty fame; you do have leave not to rage at the insensible and ungrateful—and more, to care for them.

9. Let no one hear you complain again of life at court—not even you yourself.

10. Regret is a kind of self-reproach for having let something useful pass by. But the good must be something useful, and the good and noble man must care for it. Yet no good and noble man would regret having let a pleasure pass by. Pleasure, therefore, is neither useful nor good.

11. What is this thing in itself, in its own constitution? What in it is substance and material, and what is causal? What does it do within the cosmos, and for how long does it subsist?

12. When you find it hard to rise from sleep, remind yourself that to render social acts accords with your constitution and with human nature, while sleep is shared even by irrational animals. And what accords with each being’s nature is more its own, more native to it—and, indeed, more pleasing.

13. Continually, and with every impression if possible, examine its nature, its effect upon you, and its logic.

14. Whenever you meet someone, say to yourself at once: What convictions does this man hold about goods and evils? For if he holds certain convictions about pleasure and pain and what produces each, about fame and obscurity, death and life, it will not seem wonderful or strange to me if he acts in certain ways; and I shall remember that he is compelled to act so.

15. Remember: just as it is shameful to be startled when the fig tree bears figs, so it is when the cosmos bears those things it was made to bear. It is shameful, too, for a physician to be startled when a man has fallen into fever, or for a helmsman when a contrary wind has risen.

16. Remember that to change your position and follow the one who sets you right is no less an act of freedom. For the action is yours, fulfilled according to your own impulse and judgment—and therefore according to your own mind.

17. If it lies with you, why do you do it? If it lies with another, whom do you blame—the atoms or the gods? Either is madness. No one is to be blamed. If you can, set him right; if you cannot do that, then set the matter itself right; and if you cannot do even that, what use remains in blame? Nothing should be done without purpose.

18. What dies does not fall outside the cosmos. If it remains here and changes here, here too it is dissolved into the everlasting elements—the elements of the cosmos and of you. And they too change, and do not murmur.

19. Each thing came into being for something—a horse, a vine. Why are you astonished? The Sun too will say, “I came into being for some work,” and so will the other gods. For what, then, did you come into being? For pleasure? See whether the thought can endure.

20. Nature has aimed at each thing’s ending no less than at its beginning and the course between, like one who tosses up a ball. What good, then, comes to the little ball as it rises, or what evil as it descends—or even when it has fallen? What good comes to a bubble while it holds together, or what evil when it dissolves? And the same holds for a lamp.

21. Turn it inside out and look at what it is—what it becomes when it has grown old, when it has fallen sick, when it has prostituted itself. Short-lived alike are the praiser and the praised, the rememberer and the remembered; and all this in one corner of this region, where not even everyone agrees, nor does anyone agree even with himself. And the whole earth is a point.

22. Attend to the thing before you—or to the action, or the judgment, or what the words signify. You suffer this justly: you would rather become good tomorrow than be good today.

23. Am I doing something? I do it, referring the act to the good of humankind. Does something befall me? I receive it, referring it to the gods and to the fountain of all things, from which every event is spun together.

24. As bathing appears to you—oil, sweat, filth, slimy water, everything nauseating—so is every part of life and every substance beneath it.

25. Lucilla buried Verus, then Lucilla; Secunda buried Maximus, then Secunda; Epitynchanus buried Diotimus, then Epitynchanus; Antoninus buried Faustina, then Antoninus. Everything is so. Celer buried Hadrian, then Celer. And those men of piercing intellect, or prophetic sight, or swollen pride—where are they? Such piercing minds as Charax, Demetrius the Platonist, Eudaemon, and any other like them. All creatures of a day, long dead: some not remembered even briefly; some transformed into legends; some already faded even out of legend. Remember, then, that your little compound must either be scattered, or your little breath extinguished, or else removed and assigned its place elsewhere.

26. A human being’s gladness is to do what belongs to a human being. And what belongs to a human being is goodwill toward one’s own kind, disdain for the movements of the senses, discrimination among persuasive impressions, contemplation of the nature of the Whole and of all that comes to pass in accordance with it.

27. Three relations: one to what causally surrounds us; one to the divine cause, from which all things befall all; and one to those who share our life.

28. Pain is an evil either to the body—then let the body declare it—or to the soul. But the soul can preserve its own clear sky and calm, and refuse the judgment that pain is evil. For every judgment, impulse, desire, and aversion is within, and no evil climbs up into that citadel.

29. Erase your impressions, continually saying to yourself: It is now in my power that there be in this soul no wickedness, no desire, no disturbance of any kind; but, seeing everything as it is, I use each thing according to its worth. Remember this authority of yours, given by nature.

30. In the Senate and before anyone at all, speak with decorum, not display; let your speech be sound.

31. The court of Augustus: wife, daughter, descendants, forebears, sister, Agrippa, kinsmen, household, friends, Areius, Maecenas, physicians, priests—the death of an entire court. Then pass on to the others... not the death of one man, but of whole lines, such as the Pompeys. And there is that inscription placed upon tombs: “The last of his line.” Consider how intensely those before them strove to leave some successor, and yet someone must inevitably be the last. Here again, the death of an entire line.

32. Life must be composed one action at a time; and if each action achieves what is its own, so far as it can, be content. That it should achieve its own no one can prevent.“But something external will stand in the way.”Nothing can stand in the way of acting justly, temperately, and with due reason.“But perhaps some other exercise of action will be obstructed.”Yet through welcoming the obstacle itself, and through an understanding turn toward what is given, another action is immediately set in its place—one that fits the composition of which we speak.

33. Receive without conceit; release without resistance.

34. If ever you have seen a severed hand or foot, or a head cut off and lying somewhere apart from the rest of the body, that is what a person makes of himself, so far as he can, when he refuses what befalls him and tears himself away, or when he does something against the common good. You have cast yourself out somewhere from the unity of nature: you grew as a part, but now you have cut yourself off. Yet here is the exquisite thing: you can unite yourself again. To no other part has God granted that, once divided and cut away, it may come together again. Consider the goodness with which he has honored the human being: he made it depend upon the person not to be torn from the Whole in the first place, and, once torn away, to return again, grow together, and recover the station of a part.

35. As with the other powers that the nature of the Whole has allotted to each rational being, so too we have received this power from her. For just as she turns around everything that obstructs and opposes her, weaves it into fate’s order, and makes it a part of herself, so the rational creature can make every obstacle material for itself and use it for whatever purpose it originally set in motion.

36. Do not let the image of your whole life confound you. Do not embrace in a single thought all the painful things, in kind and number, that have probably occurred and will occur. With each present thing, ask yourself: What in this task is unbearable, past endurance? You will blush to confess it. Then remind yourself that neither the future nor the past weighs upon you, but always the present; and this is reduced to littleness if you circumscribe it alone and put your mind to the test, should it claim that it cannot withstand even this, stripped bare.

37. Can it be that Panthea or Pergamus now sits beside the coffin of Verus? Or Chabrias or Diotimus beside Hadrian’s? Absurd. And if they sat there, would the dead perceive it? And if they perceived it, would they take pleasure in it? And if they took pleasure, would the mourners therefore be immortal? Was it not fated for them too first to become old women and old men, and then to die? And once they had died, what were the dead to do afterward? All this is grease and gore in a bag.

38. “If you can see keenly, then look,” he says, “judging with the wisest judgments.”

39. In the constitution of the rational creature I see no virtue that rises in revolt against justice; but against pleasure I see self-mastery.

40. If you remove your judgment concerning what seems to grieve you, you yourself stand in the safest place.“What is this self?”Reason.“But I am not reason.”So be it. Then let reason itself not grieve itself; and if something else in you fares badly, let that form its own judgment about itself.

41. An obstruction of perception is an evil for animate nature. An obstruction of impulse is likewise an evil for animate nature. There is also something else that obstructs, and is an evil to, the vegetative constitution. Just so, then, an obstruction of mind is an evil for an intelligent nature. Now apply all these things to yourself. Does pain or pleasure touch you? Perception will see to it. Has an obstacle arisen against your impulse? If you launched the impulse without reservation, the harm is already yours as a rational being; but if you include the common good, you have not yet been harmed or obstructed. Yet no one else is accustomed to obstruct what belongs to the mind itself: neither fire, nor iron, nor tyrant, nor abuse, nor anything whatever touches it, once it has become “a sphere, rounded and steadfast.”

42. I am not worthy of causing myself grief; for I have never willingly caused grief to another.

43. One thing delights one person, another thing another. My delight is to keep my governing faculty sound: turning away from no human being and from nothing that befalls humanity, but looking upon and receiving everything with kindly eyes, and using each thing according to its worth.

44. Look: grant this present time to yourself. Those who pursue posthumous fame all the more fail to reckon that the people to come will be just such people as those they find burdensome now—and they too will die. What, in the end, is it to you if those people echo with such voices or hold such an opinion of you?

45. Take me up and cast me wherever you will. There I shall keep my own daimon gracious and serene—that is, content, if its condition and activity follow the order of its own constitution. Is this thing truly worth my soul’s being in a bad state because of it, and becoming worse than itself: abased, craving, enslaved, terrified? What will you find that is worth such a price?

46. Nothing can befall a human being that is not a human eventuality; nor an ox what is not proper to an ox, nor a vine what is not proper to a vine, nor a stone what is not proper to a stone. If, then, what befalls each is both customary and natural to it, why be resentful? The common nature has brought you nothing you cannot bear.

47. If you are grieved by something external, it is not the thing that troubles you, but your judgment about it; and it is in your power to erase that judgment now. But if something in your own disposition grieves you, who prevents you from correcting your belief? Likewise, if you grieve because you are not doing some particular thing that appears sound to you, why not act rather than grieve?“But something stronger stands in the way.”Then do not grieve, for the cause of its not being done does not lie with you.“But life is not worth living if this is not done.”Then depart from life with goodwill, as even the one who does the deed must die, and be gracious at the same time toward those who stand in your way.

48. Remember that the governing faculty becomes unconquerable when, gathered into itself, it is content with itself and does nothing it does not will—even if its resistance is irrational. What, then, when it also judges a matter with reason and circumspection? For this reason the mind freed from passions is a citadel: a human being has no stronger refuge, and whoever takes shelter there is thereafter beyond capture. One who has not seen this is ignorant; one who has seen it and does not take shelter is unfortunate.

49. Say nothing more to yourself than the first impressions announce. You have been told that someone speaks ill of you. That is what was announced; it was not announced that you have been harmed. I see that the child is ill. I see that; I do not see that the child is in danger. Remain always, then, with the first impressions, and add nothing from within yourself, and nothing happens to you. Or rather, add what belongs to one who recognizes each thing that comes to pass within the cosmos.

50. A cucumber is bitter? Throw it away.Bramble bushes in the road? Go around them.That is enough. Do not add: “Why did such things ever arise in the cosmos?” For a student of nature will laugh at you, just as a carpenter and a shoemaker would laugh if you faulted them because you saw shavings and offcuts from the things being made in their workshops. They, however, have somewhere to throw these remnants, while the nature of the whole has nothing outside itself. The wonder of its craft is this: having bounded itself, it transforms into itself everything within it that seems to be decaying, aging, and becoming useless; and from these very things it fashions other things, young again, so that it needs neither substance from outside nor a place into which to cast what has rotted. It is content, then, with its own space, its own material, and its own art.

51. Do not drag out your actions, muddle your conversations, wander in your impressions, let your soul be wholly drawn tight or leap outward, or fill your life with business.“They kill us, carve up our flesh, hound us with curses.”What has any of this to do with the mind’s remaining pure, sane, temperate, and just? It is as if someone stood beside a clear and sweet spring and reviled it: the spring does not cease to bubble up with drinkable water. Even if he casts mud into it, even dung, it will quickly scatter and wash them away, and will not be stained at all. How, then, will you possess an ever-flowing spring and not a well? If at every hour you guard yourself in freedom, with goodwill, simplicity, and reverence.

52. One who does not know that there is a cosmos does not know where he is. One who does not know toward what end the cosmos is naturally constituted knows neither who he is nor what the cosmos is. And one who omits any one of these things could not say toward what end he himself was born. What, then, do you make of the person who flees or pursues the praise of those who clap—people who know neither where they are nor who they are?

53. Do you wish to be praised by someone who curses himself three times an hour? Do you wish to please someone who does not please himself? And does one please himself who repents of nearly everything he does?

54. No longer merely breathe in concert with the air surrounding you; now also think in concert with the intelligence that surrounds all things. For the power of intelligence is no less poured everywhere and diffused through all things for one willing to draw it in than the power of air is for one able to breathe.

55. In general, vice does no harm to the cosmos; in a particular case, one person’s vice does no harm to another. It is harmful only to the one who has also been granted release from it as soon as he himself wills.

56. To my faculty of choice, my neighbor’s faculty of choice is just as indifferent as his little breath and scrap of flesh. For even though we came into being above all for one another, each of our governing faculties has its own sovereignty. Otherwise my neighbor’s vice would have been an evil for me—which God did not see fit, lest my misfortune should lie in another’s hands.

57. The sun seems to have poured itself abroad, and everywhere indeed it has been poured, yet it has not poured itself away. For this pouring is a tension outward; hence its gleams are called rays, from their reaching out. What sort of thing a ray is you may see if you watch sunlight entering a shadowed house through some narrow opening: it reaches in a straight line and, as it were, braces itself against whatever solid body it encounters, which shuts off the air beyond. There it comes to a stand, and neither slips down nor falls. Such, then, must be the pouring and diffusion of the mind: never a spilling-away, but a tension outward; meeting the obstacles before it with no violent or headlong pressure, yet not falling either, but standing fast and shining upon whatever receives it. For that which does not let the light pass through will itself deprive itself of its radiance.

58. Whoever fears death fears either the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if you no longer have sensation, you will perceive no evil either; and if you acquire another kind of sensation, you will be another kind of living being and will not cease to live.

59. Human beings have come into being for one another; so either teach them or bear with them.

60. An arrow moves in one way, the mind in another. Yet even when the mind is on its guard, and even when it turns this way and that in inquiry, it moves no less directly forward and toward what lies before it.

61. Enter into each person’s ruling faculty, and let every other person enter into your own.

1. Whoever does wrong commits impiety. For the nature of the Whole fashioned rational creatures for one another, so that they might benefit one another according to their worth and never do harm; whoever transgresses her purpose plainly commits impiety against the eldest of the gods. For the nature of the Whole is the nature of all beings, and beings stand in kinship with everything that exists.

Moreover, whoever lies commits impiety against this same goddess. Her name is Truth, and she is the first cause of all truths. The willing liar, then, commits impiety insofar as he deceives and thereby does wrong; the unwilling liar, insofar as he is out of harmony with the nature of the Whole, and makes disorder by contending with the nature of the cosmos. For anyone carried of himself toward what is contrary to the truth is in conflict: nature had already given him the first grounds of understanding, but by neglecting them he has now become unable to distinguish falsehoods from truths.

And indeed, whoever pursues pleasures as goods and flees pains as evils commits impiety. Such a person must often reproach the common nature for distributing things contrary to merit among the base and the virtuous, since the base are often surrounded by pleasures and possess what produces them, while the virtuous encounter pain and what produces it. Again, whoever fears pains will one day fear something destined to occur within the cosmos—and that is already impious. Whoever pursues pleasures will not refrain from wrongdoing—and that is manifestly impious.

Toward those things to which the common nature is impartial—for she would not make both if she were not equally disposed toward both—those who wish to follow nature must, being of one mind with her, be impartial as well. Whoever, then, is not equally disposed toward pain and pleasure, death and life, fame and obscurity—things which the nature of the Whole employs impartially—plainly commits impiety.

By saying that the common nature employs these things impartially, I mean that they occur impartially, in due succession, to all that comes to be and follows after, through a certain primordial impulse of providence. From some first beginning, by this impulse, she set forth toward the present ordering of the world, conceiving certain formative principles of what was to be and defining generative powers for substances, transformations, and successions of this kind.

2. It would have been the part of a finer man to depart from humankind without ever tasting falsehood, any hypocrisy, luxury, or conceit. Yet to breathe one’s last when at least one has had one’s fill of them is the second-best voyage. Or have you chosen to sit close beside vice? Has experience not yet persuaded you to flee this pestilence? For the corruption of the mind is a pestilence far more truly than any such imbalance and alteration of this surrounding air. The latter is a pestilence of living creatures insofar as they are creatures; the former, of human beings insofar as they are human.

3. Do not disdain death; welcome it, since it too is one of the things nature wills. For dissolution itself is like being young and growing old, growing and coming to one’s prime, bringing forth teeth, beard, and grey hairs, begetting, carrying a child, giving birth, and all the other natural activities that the seasons of life bring.

It is therefore the course of a human being who has reasoned well not to meet death thoughtlessly, impulsively, or disdainfully, but to await it as one of nature’s activities. Just as you now await the moment when the child will emerge from your wife’s womb, so await the hour when your little soul will fall from this sheath.

But if you also want a simple, heartening support, what will make you readiest for death is a close consideration of the things you are about to leave and of the characters with which your soul will no longer be entangled. You must not take offense at them in the least, but rather care for them and bear with them gently—while remembering that your departure will not be from people who hold the same convictions as you. This alone, if anything could, would draw you the other way and hold you in life: if you were permitted to live among people who had made the same convictions their own. But now you see how exhausting the discord of life together is, enough to make you say:

“Come sooner, Death,before I too forget myself.”

4. Whoever goes astray goes astray against himself; whoever does wrong wrongs himself, by making himself bad.

5. Often the one who does not act does wrong, not only the one who acts.

6. Enough: the present judgment that grasps what is, the present action directed toward the common good, and the present disposition content with everything that comes to pass from the cause outside us.

7. Erase the impression;halt the impulse;extinguish desire;keep the governing mind in its own power.

8. One soul is distributed among irrational creatures, and one intelligent soul apportioned among rational beings—just as there is one earth for all things earthy, and we all who have sight and soul see by one light and breathe one air.

9. All things that share in something common hasten toward their own kind. Everything earthy inclines toward earth; everything liquid flows together; what is airy does likewise, so that barriers—and force—are needed to keep it apart. Fire rises because of the elemental fire, yet every fire here is so ready to kindle together with any other that all matter even slightly drier is easily ignited, because less of what hinders ignition has been mixed into it.

Accordingly, everything that shares in a common intelligent nature hastens toward its kind in the same way—or more. For the more excellent it is than other things, the readier it is to mingle and merge with what is its own. Thus, already among irrational creatures there appeared swarms and herds, the nurturing of young, and semblances of love. For souls were now present, and in the higher order the power of gathering together was found intensified, as it was not among plants or stones or timber.

Among rational creatures there are communities, friendships, households, and assemblies—and in wars, treaties and truces. Among beings higher still, though in a way far separated, a unity has arisen such as that among the stars. Thus ascent to what is higher could create fellow-feeling even among things far apart.

See, then, what is happening now. Rational beings alone have now forgotten their earnest movement and convergence toward one another; here alone no confluence can be seen. Yet even as they flee, they are caught and enclosed—for nature prevails. Watch closely, and you will see what I mean: one could sooner find something earthy touching nothing earthy than find a human being wholly severed from humankind.

10. A human being bears fruit, and so does a god, and so does the cosmos; each bears its fruit in its proper season. If common usage has worn the word down by applying it chiefly to the vine and things like it, that makes no difference. Reason, too, has fruit both common and its own, and from it arise other fruits of the same kind as reason itself.

11. If you can, instruct them; if not, remember that kindness was given you for this. The gods themselves are kind to such people, and in some pursuits they even work beside them—toward health, toward wealth, toward reputation: so gracious are they. You may do the same. Or tell me, who prevents you?

12. Work hard—not as one afflicted, nor as one who wants pity or admiration. Desire one thing only: to move and to come to rest as civic reason requires.

13. Today I escaped every constriction—or rather, I cast every constriction out. For it was not outside me, but within, in my judgments.

14. All things are the same: familiar through experience, fleeting in time, foul in their matter. Everything now is as it was in the days of those we buried.

15. Things stand outside the doors, each by itself, knowing nothing about itself and making no pronouncement. What, then, pronounces upon them? The ruling mind.

16. The evil and the good of a rational, civic creature lie not in what it undergoes but in what it does—just as its virtue and vice lie not in what it undergoes but in what it does.

17. For a stone flung upward, there is no evil in falling and no good in rising.

18. Pass within, into their ruling minds, and you will see what sort of judges you fear—and what sort of judges they are even of themselves.

19. All things are in transformation; you yourself are in unceasing alteration and, in some measure, decay—and so is the entire cosmos.

20. Another's error must be left where it is.

21. The ending of an activity, the cessation of an impulse or a judgment—a kind of death—is nothing evil. Turn now to the stages of life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every change among these is also a death. Is there anything terrible in that? Turn now to your life under your grandfather, then under your mother, then under your father; and as you discover many other dissolutions, changes, and endings, ask yourself: Was there anything terrible in them? So too the ending, cessation, and transformation of your whole life is nothing terrible.

22. Hasten to your own ruling mind, to the ruling mind of the Whole, and to this person's. To your own, that you may make it a mind of justice; to the Whole's, that you may remember again whose part you are; to this person's, that you may discern whether ignorance or considered purpose is at work, and at the same time reckon that his mind is kindred to yours.

23. As you yourself are a constituent part of a civic order, so let every action of yours contribute to civic life. Any action of yours, then, that bears no reference—whether directly or remotely—to the communal end tears your life apart, does not allow it to remain one, and is seditious: like someone in a people who, for his own part, breaks away from its concord.

24. Children's rages and children's games, and “little breaths carrying corpses”—so that the vision of the Descent among the Dead strikes home more vividly.

25. Go to the quality of the cause, mark it off from the material, and behold it; then bound the time as well—the longest for which this thing, qualified as it is, can by nature subsist.

26. You have endured ten thousand sufferings because you were not content to let your ruling mind do the things for which it was formed. But enough.

27. Whenever another reproaches or hates you, or people give voice to anything of that kind, approach their little souls; pass within and see what sort of people they are. You will see that you need not wrench yourself about over whatever opinion of you they may hold. Yet you must bear them goodwill, for by nature they are friends. The gods, moreover, help them in every way—through dreams, through oracles—at least toward those very things on which they set their hearts.

28. The cycles of the cosmos are the same, up and down, from age to age. Either the mind of the Whole directs its impulse toward each single thing—and if so, welcome what its impulse brings—or it made one primal impulse, and all the rest follows in consequence. Why, then, strain against it? The Whole—whether it is God, all is well; whether it is chance, in some fashion atoms or indivisible particles, do not you too act at random.

Soon earth will cover us all; then earth herself will change, and those things will change into others without end, and those again without end. Whoever considers the surging waves of change and alteration, and the swiftness of everything mortal, will hold it all in contempt.

29. A torrent is the cause of all things: it carries everything away. Human being, what are you doing? Do what nature now requires. Set out, if the way is given, and do not look around to see whether anyone will know. Do not hope for Plato's republic, but be satisfied if the smallest thing advances, and consider the outcome of that small thing as no small matter.

How paltry are these little political men who, in their own estimation, practice philosophy in public life—full of mucus. For who will change their doctrines? And without a change of doctrines, what else is there but the slavery of people groaning while pretending to obey?

Go on now, tell me of Alexander and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum. I will follow them if they saw what universal nature willed and schooled themselves accordingly. But if they played tragic heroes, no one has sentenced me to imitate them. Philosophy's work is simple and modest; do not lead me away into pompous vanity.

30. “Look from above” upon ten thousand herds and ten thousand rites; upon voyages of every kind through storms and calms; upon the differences among those coming to be, living together, and passing away. Consider also the life lived long ago by others, the life that will be lived after you, and the life now being lived among foreign peoples: how many do not even know your name, how many will very soon forget it, how many who perhaps praise you now will very soon condemn you—and how neither remembrance nor fame nor anything else whatever is worth accounting much.

31. Undisturbed calm toward what occurs from the cause outside you; justice in what is done through the cause within you—that is, impulse and action coming to rest in this alone: acting for the common good, because this is according to your nature.

32. You can strip away many needless things that trouble you, all of them resting wholly in your judgment, and at once secure a vast expanse for yourself: embrace the whole cosmos in your understanding, contemplate everlasting time, and consider the swift transformation of each particular thing—how brief the span from birth to dissolution, how boundless the time before birth, and how the time after dissolution is boundless in the same way.

33. Everything you see will very swiftly pass away; and those who watched these things passing away will very swiftly pass away themselves. And the man who dies in extreme old age will be brought to the same state as the man who died before his time.

34. What are their ruling minds? What have they set their hearts upon, and for the sake of what do they love and honor? Imagine that you see their little souls stripped bare. When they suppose that their blame can harm or their praise confer a benefit—what presumption!

35. Loss is nothing other than change. In this the nature of the Whole delights, and in accordance with it all things come to pass well. From eternity they came to pass in the same manner, and to infinity other things of this kind will be. What, then, are you saying? That all things have always come to pass badly, and all things will always be bad? That among so many gods no power was ever found capable of setting them right, but the cosmos stands condemned to be held fast in unceasing evils?

36. The rottenness of the matter underlying each thing: water, dust, little bones, grease. Or again: marble is earth’s hardened crust, gold and silver its sediments; clothing is little hairs, purple is blood—and everything else is of the same kind. The breathlike substance too is another such thing, changing from these forms into these forms.

37. Enough of this wretched life, this grumbling and aping. Why are you troubled? What is new in any of this? What drives you out of yourself? The cause? Look at it. But is it the matter? Look at that. Outside these there is nothing. And now, at long last, become simpler and kinder toward the gods as well.

38. To survey these events for a hundred years is the same as to survey them for three hundred.

39. If he has done wrong, the evil lies there, in him. And perhaps he has not done wrong.

40. Either all things flow from one intelligent spring and befall as parts of one body—and the part must not find fault with what comes to pass for the sake of the whole—or there are atoms, and nothing but a welter and a scattering. Why, then, are you troubled? Say to your ruling mind: “You are dead; you have decayed; you have turned beast; you play a part, run with the herd, and graze.”

41. Either the gods have no power, or they have power. If they have none, why do you pray? But if they have power, why not pray instead that they grant you neither to fear any of these things, nor to desire any of them, nor to grieve over any of them—rather than pray that one of them may not be present, or may be present? For surely, if they can work with human beings, they can work with them toward these ends as well. But perhaps you will say: “The gods have left these things in my power.” Then is it not better to use what is in your power with freedom than to struggle over what is not in your power with servility and abasement? And who told you that the gods do not assist us even in what is up to us? Begin, then, to pray about these things, and you will see.

This man prays: “How may I sleep with that woman?”You: “How may I not desire to sleep with her?”

Another: “How may I be rid of that man?”You: “How may I not need to be rid of him?”

Another: “How may I avoid losing my little child?”You: “How may I not fear to lose him?”

Turn your prayers around in this way altogether, and watch what happens.

42. Epicurus says: “During my illness, my conversations were not about the sufferings of this poor body, nor, as he puts it, did I chatter about such matters with those who came to see me. I continued instead to reason about nature’s first principles, dwelling especially on this: how the understanding, though it shares in such movements of the flesh, remains untroubled and preserves its own good. Nor, he says, did I give the doctors an opening to strut as though they were accomplishing something; my life went on well and nobly.”

So let it be with you as it was with him in illness, if you fall ill, and in any other circumstance. For never to desert philosophy, whatever may befall, and never to join in the nonsense of the unlearned man who does not study nature—this is common to every school. Attend solely to what is being done now, and to the instrument through which you do it.

43. Whenever you collide with someone’s shamelessness, ask yourself at once: “Can there be a world without shameless people?” There cannot. Then do not demand the impossible. This man too is one of those shameless people who must exist in the world. Keep the same thought ready to hand for the scoundrel, the faithless man, and anyone who goes wrong in any way. For as soon as you remind yourself that it is impossible for this breed of men not to exist, you will be more kindly disposed toward each one of them.

It is useful also to consider at once what virtue nature has given a human being to meet this error. Against the unfeeling man she has given gentleness as an antidote, and against another, some other power. In general, it is open to you to teach the wanderer a better way; for everyone who goes wrong misses the end set before him and has gone astray.

And how have you been harmed? You will find that none of the people who provoke you has done anything capable of making your understanding worse; yet it is there that all your evil and harm have their being. And what evil or strange thing has happened if the uneducated man acts as the uneducated do? See whether you ought rather to blame yourself for failing to expect that he would commit this error. Your reason gave you grounds for reflecting that he was likely to go wrong in this way; yet you forgot, and now you marvel that he did.

Above all, when you reproach a man for faithlessness or ingratitude, turn back upon yourself. For plainly the error is yours: either you trusted that a man with such a disposition would keep faith, or, when you gave a kindness, you did not give it wholeheartedly, in such a way as to gather the whole fruit from the act itself, there and then.

What more do you want, human being, after doing good? Is it not enough that you have done something in accordance with your own nature? Do you seek payment for it besides—as though the eye demanded a reward for seeing, or the feet for walking? Just as these were made for a certain end and, by acting according to their own constitution, obtain what is their own, so too the human being, born to benefit others, whenever he does some beneficent act or otherwise helps toward common ends, has done what he was constituted to do, and has what is his own.

1. Will you ever, O soul, be good and simple and one and naked, more plainly seen than the body wrapped around you? Will you ever taste the disposition that loves and cherishes? Will you ever be full and without need, longing for nothing, desiring nothing—neither living nor lifeless—for the enjoyment of pleasures? Neither time in which to enjoy them longer; nor place or country or temperate air; nor harmony among human beings? Instead, will you be content with your present condition and rejoice in everything now present, and fully persuade yourself that all things are present for you from the gods, that all is well with you and will be well—all that is dear to them and all that they intend to give for the preservation of the perfect living being: good and just and beautiful, begetting all things, holding them together, encompassing them, and gathering back into itself what is dissolved, for the birth of other things like them? Will you ever be such as to share one commonwealth with gods and human beings, neither finding fault with them in anything nor being condemned by them?

2. Observe what your nature requires of you insofar as you are governed by nature alone; then do it and accept it, unless your nature as a living creature is to be made worse. Next, you must observe what your nature as a living creature requires of you, and accept all of that, unless your nature as a rational living creature is to be made worse. And the rational is, by that very fact, also civic. Use these as your measures, and busy yourself with nothing beyond them.

3. Everything that happens either happens in such a way that you are naturally able to bear it, or in such a way that you are not naturally able to bear it. If, then, it happens in a way you are naturally able to bear, do not chafe at it, but bear it as you were born able to bear it. If it happens in a way you are not naturally able to bear, do not chafe at that either; once it has consumed you, it will itself be spent. Remember, however, that you are naturally able to bear everything which it lies within your own judgment to make bearable and endurable, by conceiving that to do so is advantageous to you or is your proper work.

4. If he is mistaken, teach him kindly and show him what he has failed to see. But if you cannot, blame yourself—or not even yourself.

5. Whatever happens to you was being prepared for you from eternity, and the interweaving of causes was spinning together from all eternity both your existence and the conjunction of this event with it.

6. Whether there are atoms or Nature, let this first be established: I am a part of the whole governed by Nature; and next, I stand in a relation of kinship to the parts of the same kind as myself. For when I remember these things, then, insofar as I am a part, I shall not be discontented with anything allotted from the whole: nothing that benefits the whole is harmful to the part. For the whole contains nothing that does not benefit itself. All natures have this in common, but the nature of the cosmos has this further power: no cause outside it can compel it to generate anything harmful to itself.

By remembering, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be well pleased with everything that comes about. And insofar as I stand in a relation of kinship to the parts of my own kind, I shall do nothing unsocial; rather, I shall aim at my kindred, direct my every impulse toward the common benefit, and turn it away from the contrary. When these things are carried through in this way, life must flow well—just as you would conceive the life of a citizen to flow well when he proceeds through actions beneficial to his fellow citizens and welcomes whatever the city allots him.

7. The parts of the whole—all that are by nature contained within the cosmos—must perish; but let “perish” here signify “undergo alteration.” Now if this is by nature both evil and necessary for them, the whole could not be conducted well while its parts pass into alteration and are variously constituted for destruction. For did Nature herself undertake to harm her own parts, making them liable to evil and bound by necessity to fall into it, or did it escape her notice that such things were happening? Both are incredible.

And even if someone were to leave Nature aside and explain these things simply as their natural condition, it would still be ridiculous to say at once that the parts of the whole naturally change, and yet to be astonished or vexed as though at something happening contrary to nature—especially when each thing is dissolved into the very things from which it was composed. For there is either a scattering of the elements from which it was compounded, or a turning of what is solid into the earthy and of what is breathlike into the airy, so that these too are taken back into the reason of the whole, whether the whole is consumed by fire in recurring cycles or renewed through everlasting exchanges.

And do not imagine that the solid and the breathlike in you are what you received at your first birth. All this took in its influx only yesterday or the day before, from the food you ate and the air you drew. What changes, then, is what your body has received, not what your mother bore. But suppose that original matter binds you very closely to your individual character: in truth, I think, that has no bearing on what is now being said.

8. Give yourself these names: good, reverent, truthful, discerning, consenting, transcendent. Take care never to be renamed; and if you lose these names, return to them quickly. Remember that “discerning” was meant to signify for you a knowledge that distinguishes each thing and admits no intrusive thought; “consenting,” your willing acceptance of what is allotted by the common Nature; and “transcendent,” the elevation of the thinking part above every smooth or rough stirring of the flesh, above the little thing called reputation, above death, and above all such things.

If, then, you preserve yourself in these names without craving to be called by them by others, you will become another person and enter another life. For to remain such as you have been until now, and to be torn and stained in such a life, belongs to one utterly without feeling, one clinging slavishly to life, like those half-devoured fighters with beasts who, covered in wounds and gore, nevertheless plead to be kept for the next day, only to be thrown, in that same condition, before the same claws and bites.

Set yourself aboard, then, these few names. If you can remain upon them, remain as though you had migrated to islands of the blessed. But if you perceive that you are falling away and cannot hold mastery, go boldly into some corner where you will master yourself—or else depart from life altogether, not in anger, but simply, freely, and reverently, having achieved at least this one thing in life: to leave it in this way.

Yet to remember these names, it will greatly help you to remember the gods, and that they do not wish to be flattered, but wish all rational beings to become like themselves: the fig tree to do the work of a fig tree, the dog of a dog, the bee of a bee, and the human being of a human being.

9. Mime, war, panic, stupor, slavery. Day by day those sacred doctrines of yours will be erased, all that you imagine without attending to nature and then let pass. You must look at and do everything in such a way that the task imposed by circumstance is fulfilled, the work of contemplation is active at the same time, and the self-assurance born of knowledge concerning each thing is preserved—unnoticed, not concealed. For when will you enjoy simplicity? When dignity? When the knowledge of each thing: what it is in its essence, what place it holds in the cosmos, how long it is naturally fitted to endure, what it is compounded from, to whom it can belong, and who can give it and take it away?

10. A spider exults in catching a fly; a man, in catching a little hare; another, a sprat in his net; another, little boars; another, bears; another, Sarmatians. Are not these all robbers, if you examine their doctrines?

11. Acquire a contemplative method for seeing how all things change into one another; attend to it continuously, and train yourself together with it in this field—for nothing is so productive of greatness of soul. The body has been stripped away: reflecting that in no time at all he must leave all these things behind and depart from humankind, he has surrendered his whole self—to justice in the actions that are his own, and, in all that happens otherwise, to the nature of the Whole. What anyone will say or suppose about him, or do against him, he does not even admit into his mind. These two things suffice him: that his present action be just, and that he love what is now allotted to him. He has let go of every occupation and fevered pursuit, and wants nothing but to complete a straight course through the law and, as he completes that straight course, to follow God.

12. What need is there of suspicion, when you can examine what must be done? If you see it clearly, proceed toward it graciously, without turning aside. If you do not see clearly, pause and use the best advisers. And if other things obstruct you in this, advance with measured judgment by the resources now at hand, holding to what appears just. To attain that is best, since falling away from it is indeed failure. At leisure yet agile, radiant yet composed, is the one who follows reason in everything.

13. On waking from sleep, ask yourself at once: Will it make any difference to you if what is just and good is condemned by another? It will make no difference. Have you forgotten what those who bluster in praise and blame of others are like in bed, what they are like at table; what things they do, what they shun, what they pursue; what they steal, what they seize—not with hands and feet, but with the most precious part of themselves, the part from which, whenever it wills, arise faithfulness, reverence, truth, law, and a good guardian-spirit?

14. To nature, who gives all and takes all back, the educated and reverent person says: “Give what you will; take back what you will.” He says this not in rash defiance, but only in obedience and goodwill toward her.

15. This remnant of time is little. Live as on a mountain. For it makes no difference whether there or here, if one lives everywhere as a citizen in the cosmos. Let people see, let them behold and learn of a true human being, living according to nature. If they cannot bear him, let them kill him; for that is better than living as they do.

16. No longer discuss at all what sort of person the good man ought to be. Be such a person.

17. Keep before your imagination the whole of eternity and the whole of substance, and know that every particular thing is, beside substance, a millet-seed; beside time, a single turn of the drill.

18. As you attend to each thing before you, conceive it already dissolving, already in change, passing as it were into decay or dispersal—or undergoing whatever form of death belongs to the nature of each.

19. What they are like eating, sleeping, copulating, defecating, and all the rest; and then what they are like when lording it over men and strutting, or growing angry and rebuking others from their height. Yet a little while ago, to how many were they slaves, and for what things! And in a little while they will be among such things again.

20. What the nature of the Whole brings to each is to each one’s benefit—and it benefits each at the very time she brings it.

21. Earth is in love with rain,and the majestic aether is in love;the cosmos, too, is in love with makingwhatever is to come to be.

So I say to the cosmos: “I share your love.” Is this not also the sense in which people say, “This loves to happen”?

22. Either you live here, and by now are accustomed to it; or you go elsewhere, and this was what you wished; or you die, and your service is complete. Beyond these, there is nothing. So be of good heart.

23. Let it always be evident to you that the country is like this too, and that everything here is the same as everything on a mountaintop, by the shore, or wherever you please. For you will find Plato’s words exactly fulfilled: “Fencing himself within a fold on a mountain,” he says, “and milking bleatings.”

24. What is this governing faculty of mine? What am I now making of it, and to what use am I now putting it? Is it empty of understanding? Is it severed and torn away from fellowship? Is it glued and blended into this scrap of flesh, so that it sways as the flesh sways?

25. One who flees his master is a fugitive. But the law is master; therefore the lawbreaker is a fugitive. And so too one who grieves or rages or fears does not wish that something should have happened, be happening, or happen hereafter among the things ordained by the governor of all—the governor who is law, allotting to each what falls to each. Therefore one who fears or grieves or rages is a fugitive.

26. He released seed into a womb and withdrew; then another cause took it up, labored upon it, and completed a child. From what a thing, what a thing! Again: he sent food down the throat; then another cause took it up and made sensation and impulse, made life entire and strength—and how many other things, and of what kinds! Contemplate, then, what is coming to be under such a veil; and behold the power just as we behold the power that weighs downward and the power that bears upward—not with our eyes, yet no less vividly.

27. Continually conceive how everything now coming to be came to be in the same way before, and conceive that it will come to be again. Set before your eyes whole dramas and scenes of one pattern, all that you have known from your own experience or from the history of earlier times: the entire court of Hadrian, the entire court of Antoninus, the entire court of Philip, Alexander, Croesus. For all those things were of the same kind; only the actors were different.

28. Picture everyone who grieves or is displeased at anything as like the piglet under sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like it, too, is the man who, alone upon his little bed, silently laments. Picture our bondage, and remember that to the rational creature alone it has been granted to follow what comes to pass willingly; merely to follow is necessary for all.

29. Pause over each part of everything you do, and ask yourself whether death is terrible because it deprives you of this.

30. Whenever you stumble against someone’s fault, turn at once and reckon what fault like it you commit yourself—for instance, judging money to be a good, or pleasure, or a little fame, and so on by kind. For when you bring this to bear, you will quickly forget your anger, once it also strikes you that he is under compulsion. What else can he do? Or, if you can, take away what compels him.

31. When you see Satyrion, picture the Socraticus who bore the name before him—or Eutyches or Hymen; when you see Euphrates, picture Eutychion or Silvanus; for Alciphron, picture Tropaeophorus; when you see Severus, picture Crito or Xenophon; and when you look upon yourself, picture one of the Caesars—and so, in each case, the corresponding figure. Then let this thought strike you too: Where, then, are those men? Nowhere—or somewhere or other. In this way you will continually see human things as smoke and nothingness, above all if you also remember that what has once changed will never again exist throughout infinite time. Why, then, strain yourself? Why is it not enough for you to pass this brief span with grace and good order?

32. What material, what subject for action you flee! For what are all these things but exercises for reason, once it has looked upon the things of life with precision and in accordance with nature? Stay, then, until you have made even these your own, as the strong stomach makes all food its own, as a bright fire makes flame and radiance from whatever you cast into it.

33. Let no one be able to say truthfully of you that you are not sincere or that you are not good; rather, let whoever forms such an opinion of you be false. All this rests with you—for who prevents you from being good and sincere? Only decide that you will live no longer if you are not to be such a person; for reason itself does not choose life for one who is not.

34. What is the soundest thing that can be done or said with the material now before you? Whatever it may be, you are free to do or say it; do not make the excuse that you are hindered.

You will not cease groaning until you come to feel that, as luxury is to those who live for pleasure, so to you is the doing—upon whatever material is offered and befalls—of what belongs to the human constitution. For you must regard as enjoyment every act you are free to perform in accordance with your own nature; and everywhere you are free.

A cylinder, indeed, is not everywhere allowed to move with its own motion; neither is water, nor fire, nor anything else governed by nature or by an irrational soul, for many things obstruct and withstand them. But mind and reason can travel through everything that opposes them, as their nature and their will direct. Set before your eyes this ease with which reason will be borne through all things—as fire upward, a stone downward, a cylinder down a slope—and seek nothing further. For the remaining hindrances either belong to the little corpse of a body, or else, without judgment and the surrender of reason itself, neither crush nor injure nor do any harm at all. Otherwise the sufferer would at once be made bad. In every other constituted thing, whenever something bad happens to it, the thing affected becomes worse because of it; but here—if one may say so—the human being becomes even better and more praiseworthy by making right use of what befalls.

Remember, in sum, that nothing harms the citizen by nature which does not harm the city, nor does anything harm the city which does not harm the law; and none of these so-called strokes of misfortune harms the law. What does not harm the law, then, harms neither city nor citizen.

35. For one bitten by true doctrines, even the briefest familiar saying is enough to recall him to freedom from grief and fear, such as:

“Leaves—the wind scatters some to the ground;so too the generation of men.”

Little leaves, too, are your children; little leaves are those who cry out with convincing voices and acclaim you, or, on the other side, curse you, or quietly blame and mock you; little leaves, likewise, are those to whom your fame hereafter will pass. For all these “come forth in the season of spring”; then the wind casts them down; and afterward the woodland grows others in their place. Brief duration is common to all, yet you flee and pursue everything as though it were to last forever. In a little while you too will close your eyes, and soon another will mourn the one who carried you to burial.

36. A healthy eye must see everything visible and not say, “I want green things”; for that is the mark of an ailing eye. Healthy hearing and smell must be ready for everything audible and odorous; a healthy stomach must meet every food as a mill meets everything it was made to grind. So too a healthy understanding must be ready for everything that happens. But the understanding that says, “May my children be kept safe,” and, “May everyone praise whatever I do,” is an eye seeking green things, or teeth seeking what is tender.

37. No one is so favored by fortune that, as he dies, some will not stand beside him welcoming the evil that has occurred. He was earnest and wise: yet at the very end will there not be someone saying to himself, “At last we shall breathe freely after this schoolmaster. He was harsh to none of us, but I sensed that he silently condemned us”? So much for the earnest man. But in our own case, how many other reasons there are for which many long to be rid of us.

You will consider this, then, as you die, and depart more easily, reasoning: “I am leaving a life in which my very companions—those for whom I struggled so much, prayed, and took thought—these very people wish me gone, perhaps hoping thereby for some different ease.” Why, then, should anyone cling to a longer stay here?

Yet do not on this account leave them with less goodwill. Preserve your own character: remain friendly, benevolent, gracious. Nor leave as though being torn away. Rather, just as in one who dies a gentle death the little soul is easily drawn from the body, so should your departure from these people be. Nature bound and blended you with them; but now she is dissolving the bond. I am dissolved from them as from my own kin, yet without pulling against it, without compulsion. For this too is one of the things in accordance with nature.

38. With everything anyone does, train yourself, so far as possible, to seek within yourself: To what end does this person refer his action? But begin with yourself, and examine yourself first.

39. Remember: the puppeteer is that hidden presence within. That is the active power, that is life, that—if it must be said—is the human being. Never let your image of it include the vessel-like casing wrapped around it, or these organs moulded about it. For they are like an adze, differing only in being naturally joined to us. Without the cause that moves and controls them, these parts are no more useful than the shuttle to the weaver, the reed-pen to the writer, and the whip to the charioteer.

1. The properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, articulates itself, makes itself whatever it wills; it harvests the fruit it bears itself—for the fruits of plants, and their counterparts in animals, are harvested by others. It attains its own end wherever the boundary of life overtakes it. It is not as in a dance, a play, or the like, where the whole action is left incomplete if something interrupts it; at every part, and wherever it is caught, it brings what it has undertaken to fullness and self-sufficiency, so that it can say: “I have all that is mine.” Moreover, it ranges through the whole cosmos, the void surrounding it, and its form; it reaches into the infinity of time, embraces and comprehends the periodic rebirth of all things, and beholds that those after us will see nothing new, nor did those before us see anything beyond what we see: in a certain sense, a person of forty, if possessed of any understanding at all, has seen everything that has been and everything that will be, by reason of their likeness. It belongs to the rational soul also to love one’s neighbors, to be truthful and self-respecting, and to value nothing above itself—which is also the property of law. And so there is no difference between right reason and the reason of justice.

2. You will look down on a beguiling song, a dance, and the pancratium if you divide the melodious voice into each of its notes and ask yourself, at every one, whether you are its inferior—for the question will shame you. Do the corresponding thing with a dance, movement by movement and pose by pose, and likewise with the pancratium. In general, then—virtue and the works of virtue excepted—remember to hurry to the separate parts and, by dividing things up, arrive at disdain for them; and carry this same practice over into the whole of life.

3. What a soul is this: ready, if it must now be released from the body, either to be extinguished, dispersed, or to endure. But let this readiness arise from its own judgment—not from mere defiant formation, as with the Christians, but with reflection and dignity, and so as to persuade another, without theatrical display.

4. Have I done something for the common good? Then I have benefited. Let this thought always meet you ready to hand, and never cease from it.

5. What is your craft? To be good. And how is this achieved except through principles—some concerning the nature of the Whole, others concerning the particular constitution of the human being?

6. Tragedies were first produced as reminders of what befalls us: that such things naturally happen in this way, and that what delights you upon the stage must not distress you upon the greater stage. For you see that these things must reach their ending so, and that even those who cry aloud,

“Ah, Cithaeron!”

bear them. Some useful things, too, are said by the playwrights—above all, this:

“Though the gods neglect both me and my two children,this too has its reason.”

And again:

“One must not rage against events.”

And:

“To reap life like a fruitful ear of grain.”

And all sayings of that kind.

After tragedy came Old Comedy, which possessed a schoolmaster’s freedom of speech and, by its very plainness of utterance, gave a not unhelpful reminder against vanity. Diogenes, too, used it for something like this purpose. Consider, after that, what Middle Comedy was, and then what purpose New Comedy was adopted to serve, as it gradually flowed away into artistry founded on imitation. It is well known that these poets also say some useful things; but what goal did the whole design of such poetry and playmaking ever have in view?

7. How luminously clear it is that no setting for life is so well suited to philosophy as this one in which you now find yourself.

8. A branch cut from the branch adjoining it cannot but be cut also from the whole tree. Just so, a human being severed from one human being has fallen away from the whole community. Now, another person cuts off a branch; but a human being separates himself from his neighbor by hatred and aversion, unaware that he has thereby cut himself away from the whole commonwealth at the same time. Yet there is this gift from Zeus, who formed the community: we are able to grow together again with the branch beside us and once more become parts that complete the whole. If such division happens often, however, it makes the part that withdraws difficult to reunite and difficult to restore. In every respect, the branch that grew together from the first and remained sharing one life and breath is not like the one grafted back after being cut away—whatever the gardeners may say.

To grow from the same stock, but not to share the same creed.

9. Those who stand in your way as you advance according to right reason will be no more able to turn you from sound action than they should be able to drive you from goodwill toward them. Guard yourself with equal care in both: not only in steadiness of judgment and action, but also in gentleness toward those who try to hinder you or otherwise treat you harshly. For anger with them is weakness too, no less than abandoning the action and surrendering in fright. Both are deserters alike: the one who shrinks back, and the one who becomes estranged from his natural kinsman and friend.

10. No nature is inferior to art—for the arts themselves imitate nature. If this is so, the nature most perfect and all-embracing of all could not fall short of art’s resourceful skill. And every art makes lesser things for the sake of greater; therefore universal Nature does so too. From this arises justice, and from justice the remaining virtues have their foundation. For justice will not be preserved if we set differing values upon indifferent things, or if we are easily deceived, impulsive, and changeable.

11. The things whose pursuit and avoidance throw you into turmoil do not come to you; rather, in a manner, you go to them yourself. Then let your judgment about them grow quiet, and they will remain motionless too; and you will be seen neither pursuing nor fleeing.

12. A soul: a sphere true to its own form, when it neither reaches outward toward anything, nor races inward; neither coils itself nor sinks down, but shines with the light by which it sees the truth of all things and the truth within itself.

13. Will someone despise me? That is for him to see to. But I shall see to it that I am not found doing or saying anything worthy of contempt. Will he hate me? That is for him to see to. But I shall remain kindly and well-disposed toward everyone—and toward this very man, ready to show him where he has gone astray, not reproachfully, nor as if making a display of my forbearance, but genuinely and graciously, like Phocion of old, if indeed his manner was not a pose. For such must be the inward state: the gods must behold a human being disposed to resent nothing and make no tragedy of anything. What evil can touch you, if you yourself are now doing what belongs to your nature and welcoming what is timely now for the nature of the Whole—a human being intent upon becoming, by whatever means, an instrument of the common good?

14. Despising one another, they court one another’s favor; wishing to rise above one another, they bow and scrape before one another.

15. How rotten and counterfeit is the man who says, “I have resolved to deal candidly with you.” What are you doing, man? This needs no announcement. It will reveal itself; it should be written on your forehead. At once your voice should ring with it; at once it should stand out in your eyes, just as the beloved knows everything at once in the lover’s gaze. In a word, the candid and good man should be like a strong scent: whoever stands near him must perceive it as soon as he approaches, whether he wishes to or not. A studied simplicity is a hidden blade. Nothing is uglier than a wolf’s friendship. Flee that above all. The good, candid, kindly man bears all this in his eyes, and it does not escape notice.

16. To live life in the noblest way—the power for this lies in the soul, if one is indifferent to things indifferent. And one will be indifferent if one contemplates each of them both part by part and as a whole, remembering that none of them implants in us a judgment about itself, nor comes against us. The things themselves remain still; it is we who beget judgments about them and, as it were, inscribe them within ourselves—though we may leave them unwritten and, if one slips in unnoticed, erase it at once. Remember, too, that such watchfulness will last only a little while, and then life will be over. Yet what difficulty is there in these things? If they accord with nature, rejoice in them, and they will be easy for you. If they are contrary to nature, seek what accords with your own nature and hasten toward it, even if it brings no glory; for everyone is forgiven for seeking his own good.

17. Whence each thing has come; from what underlying elements each is formed; into what it changes; what it will be when changed; and how it will suffer no evil.

18. First: what my relation is to them; that we came into being for one another; and that, by another reckoning, I came into being to stand at their head, as the ram stands over a flock or the bull over a herd. But begin from higher ground, from this: if there are not atoms, then there is a Nature governing the Whole; and if so, the lesser exist for the sake of the better, and the better for one another.

Second: what sort of people they are at table, in bed, and in all else; above all, what compulsions their doctrines lay upon them—and with what conceit they perform these very acts.

Third: if they do these things rightly, there is no cause for indignation; if not rightly, plainly they act unwillingly and in ignorance. For every soul is unwillingly deprived of truth, just as it is unwillingly deprived of treating each person according to his worth. At any rate, people resent hearing themselves called unjust, ungrateful, grasping, or in any way offenders against their neighbors.

Fourth: you too commit many wrongs and are another such as they. Even if you refrain from certain wrongs, you still possess the disposition capable of producing them, though cowardice, concern for reputation, or some similar evil may keep you from like offenses.

Fifth: you have not even grasped that they are doing wrong. Many things are done as part of some larger management; and, in general, one must first learn a great deal before making a well-grounded pronouncement upon another’s action.

Sixth: whenever you are excessively indignant or distressed, remember that human life is a moment, and in a little while we shall all be laid out dead.

Seventh: it is not their actions that trouble us; those actions lie within their own ruling minds. It is our judgments. Remove, then—resolve to cast away—the judgment that this is something terrible, and the anger is gone. How will you remove it? By reasoning that it is not shameful to you. For unless the shameful alone is evil, you too must inevitably commit many wrongs and become a robber and every kind of villain.

Eighth: how much harsher are the anger and grief these things provoke than the very things at which we are angry and grieved.

Ninth: kindness is invincible, if it is genuine and not a sneer or a pretense. For what can the most insolent man do to you if you remain kind to him and, when occasion offers, gently counsel him and quietly teach him better at the very moment he tries to do you harm? “No, child. We were born for something else. I shall not be harmed; it is you who are harmed, child.” Show him, with tact and from the whole view, that this is so: that not even bees act as he does, nor any creatures born to live in herds. But you must do it neither ironically nor reproachfully, but affectionately, with no sting in your soul—not as if lecturing him, nor to make some bystander admire you, but as though you were alone with him, even if others happen to be standing around.

Remember these nine precepts as gifts received from the Muses, and begin at last to be a human being while you are alive. Yet you must guard as carefully against flattering them as against becoming angry with them: both are contrary to fellowship and lead to harm. When anger rises, keep ready the thought that rage is not manly; rather, gentleness and mildness, being more human, are also more virile. It is the gentle man who has strength, sinew, and courage, not the indignant and discontented. The nearer gentleness is to freedom from passion, the nearer it is to power. Just as grief belongs to weakness, so does anger: in both, men have been wounded and have yielded.

And, if you wish, receive a tenth gift from the Leader of the Muses: to expect bad men never to go wrong is madness, for it desires the impossible. But to permit them to be such toward others while expecting them never to wrong you is unfeeling and tyrannical.

19. Four turnings of the ruling mind must above all be watched continually; and whenever you detect one, wipe it away, saying over each: “This impression is unnecessary”; “This dissolves fellowship”; “What you are about to say does not come from yourself”—and regard speaking what does not come from yourself as among the most monstrous of things. The fourth is that for which you reproach yourself: because this means that the diviner part within you has been defeated and bows beneath the baser, mortal portion—the body and its gross pleasures.

20. All in you that is breath and fire, however much has been mingled into you, is by nature upward-borne; yet, obedient to the ordering of the Whole, it is held here within the compound. And all in you that is earth and water, though by nature downward-borne, has nevertheless been raised and stands in a position not naturally its own. Thus even the elements obey the Whole: once assigned their place, they remain bound there under compulsion until from that same source the signal again gives leave for their dissolution.

Is it not dreadful, then, that your rational part alone should disobey and resent its appointed place? And yet nothing violent is laid upon it, but only what accords with its own nature; still it will not bear this, but rushes the opposite way. For its movement toward injustice, self-indulgence, anger, grief, and fear is nothing other than a revolt from nature. And whenever the ruling mind takes offense at anything that happens, then too it deserts its own station; for it was fashioned for holiness and reverence toward the divine no less than for justice. These also belong to the form of fellowship—indeed, they are prior even to just deeds.

21. “One who does not always have one and the same aim in life cannot remain one and the same throughout life.” But this saying is not enough unless you add what that aim must be. For just as people do not hold a like conception of every sort of thing that the majority somehow judges good, but only of certain goods—namely, those held in common—so the aim you set must be communal and civic. Whoever directs every impulse of his own toward this aim will render all his actions harmonious and, in this respect, will always remain the same.

22. The mountain mouse and the house mouse—and the latter’s terror and frantic scurrying.

23. Socrates called the opinions of the multitude Lamias—bogeys for children.

24. At public spectacles the Spartans would place seats for visitors in the shade; they themselves sat wherever chance allowed.

25. When Perdiccas asked why Socrates would not come to him, Socrates said: “So that I may not perish by the worst of deaths”—that is, by receiving kindness and being unable to return it.

26. Among the writings of the Epicureans stood this precept: continually call to mind some figure from the past who made virtue his practice.

27. The Pythagoreans said: At dawn, look up into the heavens, that we may remember those bodies which forever accomplish their work along the same paths and in the same manner—and remember their order, their purity, their nakedness; for no veil lies before a star.

28. Socrates, with only the sheepskin wrapped about him, when Xanthippe took his cloak and went out—and what Socrates said to his companions when, ashamed at seeing him dressed so, they drew away.

29. In writing and reading, you will not begin to lead before you have been led. Far more is this true in life.

30. A slave you were born; you have no share in reasoned speech.

31. And my own dear heart laughed.

32. They will rail against virtue, uttering bitter words.

33. To seek a fig in winter is the act of a madman. Such is the man who seeks his child when the child is granted him no longer.

34. When kissing your child, Epictetus said, you should say inwardly: “Tomorrow, perhaps, he will die.”

“Those are words of ill omen.”

“Nothing,” he said, “is ill-omened in naming a work of nature—or else it is ill-omened to say that the ears of grain will be reaped.”

35. Sour grape, ripe cluster, raisin: all are transformations—not into what is not, but into what is not yet.

36. There can be no robber of the power to choose. This is Epictetus’ saying.

37. “We must,” he said, “discover an art of giving assent; and in the sphere of impulses we must preserve attentiveness, so that they may be made with reservation, may serve fellowship, and may accord with worth. We must abstain from desire altogether, and employ aversion toward none of the things that are not up to us.”

38. “The contest, then,” he said, “is no casual matter, but whether we are to be mad or not.”

39. Socrates said:

“What do you want: to have the souls of rational beings, or of irrational?”

“Of rational beings.”

“What kind of rational beings—sound or corrupt?”

“Sound.”

“Why, then, do you not seek them?”

“Because we have them.”

“Why, then, do you fight and quarrel?”

1. All those things you pray to reach by some roundabout course you can have already, if you do not begrudge them to yourself. And this means: leave the whole past behind, entrust the future to providence, and direct the present alone toward holiness and justice. Toward holiness, so that you may love what is allotted—for nature was bringing it to you, and you to it. Toward justice, so that freely and without entanglement you may speak the truth and do what accords with law and with worth. Let neither another’s vice obstruct you, nor supposition, nor voice, nor even any sensation of the little parcel of flesh grown around you; what suffers will see to itself. If, then, whenever you come to the point of departure, you leave all else behind and honor only your governing faculty and the divine within you; if you fear not that you must someday cease to live, but that you may never have begun to live according to nature—you will be a human being worthy of the cosmos that gave you birth. You will cease to be a stranger in your homeland, marveling as though unexpected at what happens every day, hanging upon this thing and that.

2. God sees every governing faculty stripped bare of its material vessels and husks and refuse. For with his own intelligence alone he touches only what has streamed and been channeled from himself into them. If you too accustom yourself to doing this, you will strip away much of your distraction. For surely one who does not look at the scraps of flesh wrapped around a person will hardly busy himself gazing at clothing and house and reputation, and at all such costume and stage scenery.

3. There are three things of which you are composed: a little body, a little breath, and mind. Of these, the first two are yours only insofar as you must care for them; the third alone is yours in the sovereign sense. So if you separate from yourself—that is, from your thought—whatever others do or say; whatever you yourself have done or said; whatever troubles you as still to come; whatever belongs involuntarily to the body enclosing you or the breath born with it; and whatever the encircling whirl outside sweeps spinning round—so that your power of intelligence, released from all that fate has woven with it, may live by itself, pure and unbound, doing what is just, willing what comes to pass, and speaking the truth—if, I say, you separate from this governing faculty all that attachment has fastened to it, and all that lies beyond the present in time or has passed away; if you make yourself like the sphere of Empedocles,

round, rejoicing in the solitude surrounding it,

and train yourself to live only what you are living—that is, the present—then you will be able to live out what remains until death undisturbed, graciously, and at peace with your own indwelling divinity.

4. I have often wondered how each person loves himself more than anyone else, yet sets less value on his own judgment of himself than on the judgment of others. At any rate, if a god appearing beside him, or a wise teacher, were to command him to conceive and think nothing inwardly that he would not at the same time utter aloud, he would not endure it for even one day. So much more do we stand in awe of what our neighbors will think of us than of ourselves.

5. How could the gods, after ordering all things well and with love for humankind, have overlooked this alone: that some human beings, exceptionally good, who had as it were made the greatest number of covenants with the divine, and through holy works and sacred observances had long grown intimate with it, should, once dead, never come into being again, but be utterly extinguished? Yet if this is indeed how things are, know well that, had they needed to be otherwise, the gods would have made them so. For if it were just, it would also be possible; and if it accorded with nature, nature would have brought it about. From its not being so—if indeed it is not so—let yourself be assured that it ought not to have been so. You see yourself that, in pressing this inquiry beyond bounds, you are pleading a case against the god; but we would not argue so with the gods unless they were supremely good and just. And if they are, they would not have allowed anything in the ordering of the world to remain unjustly and irrationally neglected.

6. Train yourself even in the things you despair of mastering. For the left hand, though unskilled in other tasks through lack of practice, holds the reins more firmly than the right: in this it has been trained.

7. In what condition death should find you, in body and in soul;the brevity of life;the measureless abyss of eternity behind and before;the frailty of all matter.

8. To behold causal principles stripped of their husks;the ends to which actions are referred;what pain is;what pleasure is;what death is;what reputation is;who is not himself the cause of his own busyness;how no one is obstructed by another;that all is supposition.

9. In the use of your principles, you must be like a pankratiast, not a gladiator. For the gladiator lays aside the sword he uses, and it is taken from him; the other always has his hand, and needs only to close it into a fist.

10. See the things themselves, dividing each into matter, cause, and end.

11. How great the power a human being possesses: to do nothing but what God is about to praise, and to welcome whatever God may allot him, as the next consequence of nature.

12. Blame neither the gods, for they do no wrong either willingly or unwillingly; nor human beings, for they do no wrong except unwillingly. Therefore blame no one.

13. How ridiculous, and how foreign to the world, is the person who marvels at anything that happens in life.

14. Either the necessity of fate and an order not to be transgressed; or providence that may be won to mercy; or an unguided welter of chance. If, then, necessity cannot be transgressed, why resist? If it is providence admitting of supplication, make yourself worthy of help from the divine. But if it is a welter without a guide, be glad that in such a storm you have within yourself a mind that can guide. And even if the storm carries you away, let it carry away the little flesh, the little breath,

15. the rest; it will not carry away the mind. What? The light of a lamp shines until it is quenched and does not lose its radiance beforehand—yet will the truth, justice, and self-command within you be quenched before your own end?

16. When someone gives you the impression that he has gone wrong: But how do I know that this is a wrong? And even if he has gone wrong, how do I know he has not condemned himself? If so, it is like tearing at his own face.

To wish that a bad person should not go wrong is like wishing that a fig tree should bear no milky sap in its figs, that infants should not whimper, that a horse should not neigh, and that all other necessary things should not occur. What else can someone with such a disposition do? If you have the vigor, then cure the disposition.

17. If it is not fitting, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it. Let your impulse be always to see, in every case, what precisely the thing is that produces the impression in you, and to unfold it by dividing it into its cause, its matter, its reference, and the span of time within which it must come to an end.

18. Perceive at last that you have within yourself something stronger and more divine than the things that stir your passions and, in a word, jerk you about like a puppet. What is my mind now? Fear? Suspicion? Desire? Something else of that kind?

19. First: nothing at random, nothing without a reference. Second: refer what you do to no end but the common good.

20. Before long you will be no one, nowhere; and so will everything you now behold, and everyone now alive. For all things are born to change, to turn, and to perish, so that others may arise in succession.

21. All is judgment—and the judgment is in your power. Then cast it away whenever you choose, and, as for one who has rounded the headland, there is calm: all is steady, and the bay has no waves.

22. Any single activity, when it ceases at the proper time, suffers no evil in the very fact of ceasing; nor has the one who performed that action suffered any evil in the very fact that it ceased. In the same way, the system composed of all our actions—which is life—suffers no evil if it ceases at the proper time, in the very fact of ceasing; nor is the one who brings this sequence to a timely close thereby placed in an evil condition.

Nature gives the proper time and the boundary: sometimes one’s own nature, as in old age, but in every case the nature of the whole. Through the change of its parts, the entire cosmos remains forever young and in its prime. Whatever benefits the whole is always beautiful and seasonable. Thus the ending of life is no evil for anyone, because it is no disgrace, being both beyond our choice and not contrary to fellowship; and it is a good if it is timely for the whole, benefits it, and is borne along with it. For in this way a person too is borne by God: one who is borne along the same course as God and whose purpose carries him toward the same ends.

23. Keep these three things ready at hand. First, regarding what you do: do nothing at random or otherwise than Justice herself would have acted. Regarding what happens from without: it comes either by chance or by providence; and chance must not be blamed, nor providence accused.

Second: consider what each thing is from seed until it receives a soul, and from receiving a soul until it gives that soul back; from what elements it is compounded, and into what it is dissolved.

Third: if you were suddenly lifted high above the earth and looked down upon human affairs and all their teeming variety, you would disdain them, seeing at the same moment how vast is the host surrounding them, of beings dwelling in air and ether. And however often you were lifted up, you would see the same things: sameness of kind, brevity of life. And over these things—our pride.

24. Cast out the judgment: you are saved. Who, then, prevents you from casting it out?

25. Whenever you are distressed at something, you have forgotten that all things come to pass according to the nature of the whole; that the wrongdoing belongs to another; and, besides, that everything now happening has always happened so, will happen so, and is happening everywhere at this moment. You have forgotten how close the kinship is between one human being and the whole human race: no fellowship of a little blood or seed, but a fellowship of mind.

You have forgotten, too, that each person’s mind is a god and has flowed from there; that nothing belongs to anyone, but your little child, your little body, and even your little soul have come from there; that all is judgment; and that each person lives only the present—and this alone is what he loses.

26. Continually call to mind those who were excessively indignant over something; those who reached their height amid the greatest fame, calamities, enmities, or fortunes of whatever kind. Then pause and ask: Where is all that now? Smoke and ash and a tale—or not even a tale.

Let every such example occur to you as well: Fabius Catullinus on his estate, Lusius Lupus in his gardens, Stertinius at Baiae, Tiberius on Capri, Velius Rufus—and, in general, all the fuss of preferring one place of residence to another. Think how paltry everything is for which our efforts are strained, and how much more philosophical it is, with the material given you, to present yourself plainly as just, self-controlled, and a follower of the gods. For pride that prides itself on freedom from pride is the most unbearable pride of all.

27. To those who ask, “Where have you seen the gods, or from what evidence have you grasped that they exist, that you revere them so?” First, they are visible even to the eyes. And further, I have not seen my own soul either, yet I honor it. So too with the gods: from the effects of their power, which I experience at every moment, I grasp that they exist, and I stand in awe of them.

28. The salvation of life is to see each thing through and through: what its matter is, and what its cause; to do what is just with your whole soul, and to speak what is true. What remains but to delight in living, joining one good thing to another, and leaving not even the smallest interval between?

29. One light of the sun, though divided by walls, mountains, and ten thousand other things. One common substance, though divided among ten thousand bodies, each with its own qualities. One soul, though divided among ten thousand natures and their individual bounds. One rational soul, though it seems to have been separated.

Now the other parts of what has been named—breaths and insensible substrates, for example—are alien and unrelated to one another; yet even these are held together by the power that unites them and by their gravitation in the same directions. But mind reaches in a special way toward what shares its nature and joins with it, and its feeling for fellowship cannot be shut out.

30. What is it you seek? To go on existing? But is it to keep sensing? To keep impelling yourself? Growing? Then ceasing once again? Using your voice? Thinking? Which of these seems to you worth longing for? But if each is easy to disdain, advance to the last thing: to follow reason and God. Yet at war with this is the honoring of those things, and the grief that death will deprive one of them.

31. How tiny a portion of boundless, fathomless eternity is allotted to each of us—for in an instant it vanishes into the everlasting. How tiny a portion of the whole substance; how tiny a portion of the whole soul; on how tiny a clod of the whole earth you creep. Bearing all this in mind, imagine nothing great but this: to act as your own nature leads, and to undergo whatever the common nature brings.

32. How does the ruling faculty use itself? In this lies everything. The rest, whether within choice or beyond choice, is dead matter and smoke.

33. The most powerful spur to disdain death is that even those who judged pleasure to be good and pain evil nevertheless disdained it.

34. For one to whom only the timely is good; to whom the accomplishment of more actions in accord with right reason stands equal with fewer; and to whom it makes no difference whether he beholds the cosmos for a longer or a shorter time—for him, not even death is fearful.

35. Human being, you have lived as a citizen in this great city. What difference does it make to you whether for five years or fifty? For what accords with the laws is equal for everyone. What, then, is terrible if no tyrant or unjust judge sends you away from the city, but the very nature that brought you into it—as though the magistrate who engaged a comic actor were to release him from the stage?

“But I did not perform the five acts, only three.”

“Well performed. Yet in life, the three are the whole drama.”

For the one who once caused your composition and now causes your dissolution determines where the completion lies; you are responsible for neither. Depart, then, in good grace, for the one who releases you is gracious too.