Meditations, Book 10
Marcus Aurelius · Greek original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 10 tests moral names through present activity, using cosmic belonging and mortality to challenge dependence on favorable conditions.
Book 10 repeatedly asks whether an account of the good life has become an activity. Its opening questions address a soul still seeking unity, affection, and freedom from conditions imposed on the world. The six moral names at 10.8 turn that aspiration into standards whose value does not depend on recognition, while 10.16 compresses the pressure into the demand to be what one discusses. These repeated moves give the book a practical center without proving that its entries form one deliberately composed sequence. Proper activity is defined through several connected scales. Nature, animal life, and rational life form a hierarchy in which rationality is immediately civic. Membership in the cosmic whole supplies a reason for acceptance, and kinship with its other parts supplies a reason for beneficial action. The later distinction between reason and its bodily tools intensifies the demand for directed agency, but the doubtful predicate at 10.38 and the compressed construction at 10.7 limit how confidently a systematic account of personal identity can be built from these notes. Death and repeated change challenge the external conditions on which action might wait. Historical courts become comparable scenes, individuals become seeds or leaves, and the audience of praise disappears with its object. Retreat images likewise test the hope that another place would solve the present problem. Yet the second paragraph of 10.31 and the long exercise at 10.33 return the speaker to current material: difficulty can be used rather than merely escaped. Reasoned practice includes counsel when unclear and appropriate action under obstruction. The voice ranges from loving accord with the cosmos to coercive and brutal images of slavery, sacrifice, and the arena. Its explicit departure language should remain part of that severity rather than vanish into a comforting paraphrase. At the same time, correction must be kind, inquiry begins with oneself, and even imagining others relieved by one’s death must leave goodwill intact. The recurrence of these qualifications prevents inward independence from becoming a simple repudiation of others. The practical issue is how to act and part as a member of a shared order, with several textual and interpretive uncertainties still visible.
10.1
Ἔσῃ ποτὲ ἆρα, ὦ ψυχή, ἀγαθὴ καὶ ἁπλῆ καὶ μία καὶ γυμνή, φανερωτέρα τοῦ περικειμένου σοι σώματος; γεύσῃ ποτὲ ἆρα τῆς φιλητικῆς καὶ στερκτικῆς διαθέσεως; ἔσῃ ποτὲ ἆρα πλήρης καὶ ἀνενδεὴς καὶ οὐδὲν ἐπιποθοῦσα οὐδὲ ἐπιθυμοῦσα οὐδενὸς οὔτε ἐμψύχου οὔτε ἀψύχου πρὸς ἡδονῶν ἀπολαύσεις; οὐδὲ χρόνου, ἐν ᾧ ἐπὶ μακρότερον ἀπολαύσεις; οὐδὲ τόπου ἢ χώρας ἢ ἀέρων εὐκρασίας; οὐδὲ ἀνθρώπων εὐαρμοστίας; ἀλλὰ ἀρκεσθήσῃ τῇ παρούσῃ καταστάσει καὶ ἡσθήσῃ τοῖς παροῦσι πᾶσι καὶ συμπείσεις σεαυτὴν ὅτι πάντα σοι παρὰ τῶν θεῶν πάρεστι, πάντα σοι εὖ ἔχει καὶ εὖ ἕξει, ὅσα φίλον αὐτοῖς καὶ ὅσα μέλλουσι δώσειν ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ τοῦ τελείου ζῴου, τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ δικαίου καὶ καλοῦ καὶ γεννῶντος πάντα καὶ συνέχοντος καὶ περιέχοντος καὶ περιλαμβάνοντος διαλυόμενα εἰς γένεσιν ἑτέρων ὁμοίων; ἔσῃ ποτὲ ἆρα τοιαύτη, οἵα θεοῖς τε καὶ ἀνθρώποις οὕτως συμπολιτεύεσθαι ὡς μήτε μέμφεσθαί τι αὐτοῖς μήτε καταγινώσκεσθαι ὑπ’ αὐτῶν;
Will you ever, soul, be good, simple, one, and naked, more visible than the body wrapped around you? Will you ever taste a loving and affectionate disposition? Will you ever be full and without need, longing for nothing and desiring nothing, alive or lifeless, for the enjoyment of pleasures? Not even time in which to enjoy them longer? Nor a place or country or temperate air? Nor people who fit in with you? Will you instead be content with your present condition, delighted with everything present, and convince yourself that everything comes to you from the gods; that all is well with you, and will be well, whatever pleases them and whatever they will give to preserve the complete living being, good and just and beautiful, which generates everything, holds it together, surrounds it, and embraces what dissolves so that other things like it may come to be? Will you ever be such that you share civic life with gods and human beings without either finding fault with them or being condemned by them?
Commentary
The soul’s hoped-for sufficiency culminates in shared civic life rather than isolation. The repeated questions expose a condition still being sought. Unity, openness, affection, and freedom from need are tested against particular dependencies: pleasure, extra time, favorable surroundings, and accommodating people. The theological turn places present circumstances within the preservation of the cosmic living being. The last question makes coexistence with gods and humans the outcome of this discipline, joining inward coherence to a social relation.
10.2
Παρατήρει τί σου ἡ φύσις ἐπιζητεῖ ὡς ὑπὸ φύσεως μόνον διοικουμένου· εἶτα ποίει αὐτὸ καὶ προσίεσο, εἰ μὴ χεῖρον μέλλει διατίθεσθαί σου ἡ ὡς ζῴου φύσις. ἑξῆς δὲ παρατηρητέον τί ἐπιζητεῖ σου ἡ ὡς ζῴου φύσις, καὶ πᾶν τοῦτο παραληπτέον, εἰ μὴ χεῖρον μέλλει διατίθεσθαι ἡ ὡς ζῴου λογικοῦ φύσις· ἔστι δὲ τὸ λογικὸν εὐθὺς καὶ πολιτικόν. τούτοις δὴ κανόσι χρώμενος μηδὲν περιεργάζου.
Watch what your nature asks of you as a being governed by nature alone. Then do it and allow it, unless your nature as an animal will be made worse. Next watch what your nature as an animal asks of you, and accept all of it unless your nature as a rational animal will be made worse. What is rational is also, at once, civic. Use these rules and do not meddle further.
Commentary
Natural impulses are assessed by progressively more specific forms of life. What nature alone requires is permitted unless it worsens animal life; animal requirements are admitted unless they worsen rational life. The hierarchy therefore subjects one level to another instead of treating any natural appetite as sufficient authority. The immediate addition of civic to rational specifies the final criterion: the most exacting human test already includes relation to others.
10.3
Πᾶν τὸ συμβαῖνον ἤτοι οὕτω συμβαίνει ὡς πέφυκας αὐτὸ φέρειν ἢ ὡς οὐ πέφυκας αὐτὸ φέρειν. εἰ μὲν οὖν συμβαίνει σοι ὡς πέφυκας φέρειν. μὴ δυσχέραινε, ἀλλ’ ὡς πέφυκας φέρε. εἰ δὲ ὡς μὴ πέφυκας φέρειν, μὴ δυσχέραινε· φθαρήσεται γάρ σε ἀπαναλῶσαν. μέμνησο μέντοι ὅτι πέφυκας φέρειν πᾶν, περὶ οὗ ἐπὶ τῇ ὑπολήψει ἐστὶ τῇ σῇ φορητὸν καὶ ἀνεκτὸν αὐτὸ ποιῆσαι κατὰ φαντασίαν τοῦ συμφέρειν ἢ καθήκειν σεαυτῷ τοῦτο ποιεῖν.
Everything that happens happens either in a way you are naturally able to bear or in a way you are not. If, then, it happens to you in a way you can naturally bear, do not resent it, but bear it as you can. If in a way you cannot naturally bear, do not resent it: it will perish when it has consumed you. Remember, though, that you can naturally bear anything your own judgment can make bearable and endurable, by representing it to yourself as beneficial or fitting for you to do so.
Commentary
Endurance is argued from the limits of suffering and the judgments that give it a practical purpose. The initial division distinguishes what can be borne from what will consume the sufferer. Its second branch is deliberately severe: the event’s end is tied to the person’s destruction, not to a promised recovery. The final reminder returns to judgment and the reasons of benefit or duty that can make a burden endurable. These are the speaker’s grounds for bearing it, not a guarantee of unlimited bodily capacity.
10.3.1 The destructive event is the grammatical subject of its own eventual perishing. The participle takes the sufferer as its object, while the future verb predicts the event’s end after that consumption. The printed text supplies no adverb promising a quick conclusion. This structure explains the severity of the second branch and prevents a comforting addition from replacing its actual claim.
10.4
Εἰ μὲν σφάλλεται, διδάσκειν εὐμενῶς καὶ τὸ παρορώμενον δεικνύναι. εἰ δὲ ἀδυνατεῖς, σεαυτὸν αἰτιᾶσθαι ἢ μηδὲ σεαυτόν.
If someone is mistaken, teach them kindly and show what they have overlooked. If you cannot, blame yourself—or not even yourself.
Commentary
Correction should be kind, while unsuccessful correction need not end in blame. The first response to error is to show the overlooked point. If the speaker cannot do that, accusation turns toward himself, but the final alternative checks even this reaction. The sentence thus separates the obligation to attempt instruction from certainty about whose fault its failure would be.
10.5
Ὅ τι ἄν σοι συμβαίνῃ, τοῦτό σοι ἐξ αἰῶνος προκατεσκευάζετο καὶ ἡ ἐπιπλοκὴ τῶν αἰτίων συνέκλωθε τήν τε σὴν ὑπόστασιν ἐξ ἀιδίου καὶ τὴν τούτου σύμβασιν.
Whatever happens to you was being prepared for you from eternity. From everlasting, the interweaving of causes was spinning together both your existence and this event.
Commentary
The person and the event are represented as products of one causal weaving. The image does not picture a finished individual encountering an unrelated accident. Both personal existence and the particular occurrence are spun together in an indefinite prior preparation. Its consolatory force rests on that common origin; the brief assertion does not demonstrate the full causal chain or describe how an individual could know it.
10.6
Εἴτε ἄτομοι εἴτε φύσις, πρῶτον κείσθω ὅτι μέρος εἰμὶ τοῦ ὅλου ὑπὸ φύσεως διοικουμένου· ἔπειτα, ὅτι ἔχω πως οἰκείως πρὸς τὰ ὁμογενῆ μέρη. τούτων γὰρ μεμνημένος, καθότι μὲν μέρος εἰμί, οὐδενὶ δυσαρεστήσω τῶν ἐκ τοῦ ὅλου ἀπονεμομένων· οὐδὲν γὰρ βλαβερὸν τῷ μέρει ὃ τῷ ὅλῳ συμφέρει. οὐ γὰρ ἔχει τι τὸ ὅλον ὃ μὴ συμφέρει ἑαυτῷ, πασῶν μὲν φύσεων κοινὸν ἐχουσῶν τοῦτο, τῆς δὲ τοῦ κόσμου προσειληφυίας τὸ μηδὲ ὑπό τινος ἔξωθεν αἰτίας ἀναγκάζεσθαι βλαβερόν τι ἑαυτῇ γεννᾶν.
κατὰ μὲν δὴ τὸ μεμνῆσθαι ὅτι μέρος εἰμὶ ὅλου τοῦ τοιούτου, εὐαρεστήσω παντὶ τῷ ἀποβαίνοντι, καθόσον δὲ ἔχω πως οἰκείως πρὸς τὰ ὁμογενῆ μέρη, οὐδὲν πράξω ἀκοινώνητον, μᾶλλον δὲ στοχάσομαι τῶν ὁμογενῶν καὶ πρὸς τὸ κοινῇ συμφέρον πᾶσαν ὁρμὴν ἐμαυτοῦ ἄξω καὶ ἀπὸ τοὐναντίου ἀπάξω. τούτων δὲ οὕτως περαινομένων ἀνάγκη τὸν βίον εὐροεῖν, ὡς ἂν καὶ πολίτου βίον εὔρουν ἐπινοήσειας προιόντος διὰ πράξεων τοῖς πολίταις λυσιτελῶν καὶ ὅπερ ἂν ἡ πόλις ἀπονέμῃ, τοῦτο ἀσπαζομένου.
Whether atoms or nature, first let this stand: I am a part of the whole governed by nature. Then: I have a relation of kinship to the parts of the same kind. Remembering this, inasmuch as I am a part, I will be displeased with nothing allotted by the whole; for nothing beneficial to the whole is harmful to the part. The whole contains nothing that fails to benefit itself. All natures have this in common, and the nature of the cosmos has this further privilege: no external cause can force it to produce anything harmful to itself.
So, insofar as I remember that I am a part of such a whole, I will be pleased with everything that results. Insofar as I have a relation of kinship to the parts of the same kind, I will do nothing unsocial; instead, I will aim at the interests of my kind, direct every impulse of my own toward the common benefit, and turn it away from the opposite. When these things are accomplished in this way, life must flow well, just as you would conceive a citizen’s life flowing well when it advances through actions that benefit the citizens and welcomes whatever the city allots.
Commentary
Membership in the whole and kinship with its parts support two complementary duties. Being a part supplies the reason for accepting what the whole allots; being related to other parts supplies the reason for directing action toward common benefit. The citizen analogy brings both into one imagined life. The opening atoms-or-nature formula is not fully reconciled with the immediate assertion of a nature-governed whole, so the practical argument should not be mistaken for a completed reconciliation of cosmologies.
10.6.1, 10.6.2 The initial cosmological alternative remains in tension with the nature-governed whole asserted immediately after it. The argument goes on to reason from membership and kinship. Those practical premises are clear, but the terse opening does not explain how its use of nature changes across the alternatives. The commentary therefore follows the given order without supplying an unstated premise that would turn atoms and purposive nature into an already reconciled system.
10.7
Τοῖς μέρεσι τοῦ ὅλου, ὅσα φύσει περιέχεται ὑπὸ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀνάγκη φθείρεσθαι· λεγέσθω δὲ τοῦτο σημαντικῶς τοῦ ἀλλοιοῦσθαι. εἰ δὲ φύσει κακόν τε καὶ ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι τοῦτο αὐτοῖς, οὐκ ἂν τὸ ὅλον καλῶς διεξάγοιτο τῶν μερῶν εἰς ἀλλοίωσιν ἰόντων καὶ πρὸς τὸ φθείρεσθαι διαφόρως κατεσκευασμένων. πότερον γὰρ ἐπεχείρησεν ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ τὰ ἑαυτῆς μέρη κακοῦν καὶ περιπτωτικὰ τῷ κακῷ καὶ ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἔμπτωτα εἰς τὸ κακὸν ποιεῖν, ἢ ἔλαθεν αὐτὴν τοιάδε τινὰ γινόμενα; ἀμφότερα γὰρ ἀπίθανα.
εἰ δέ τις καὶ ἀφέμενος τῆς φύσεως κατὰ τὸ πεφυκέναι ταῦτα ἐξηγοῖτο, καὶ ὣς γελοῖον ἅμα μὲν φάναι πεφυκέναι τὰ μέρη τοῦ ὅλου μεταβάλλειν, ἅμα δὲ ὡς ἐπί τινι τῶν παρὰ φύσιν συμβαίνοντι θαυμάζειν ἣ δυσχεραίνειν, ἄλλως τε καὶ τῆς διαλύσεως εἰς ταῦτα γινομένης, ἐξ ὧν ἕκαστον συνίσταται. ἤτοι γὰρ σκεδασμὸς στοιχείων, ἐξ ὧν συνεκρίθη, ἢ τροπὴ τοῦ μὲν στερεμνίου εἰς τὸ γεῶδες, τοῦ δὲ πνευματικοῦ εἰς τὸ ἀερῶδες, ὥστε καὶ ταῦτα ἀναληφθῆναι εἰς τὸν τοῦ ὅλου λόγον, εἴτε κατὰ περίοδον ἐκπυρουμένου εἴτε ἀιδίοις ἀμοιβαῖς ἀνανεουμένου.
καὶ τὸ στερέμνιον δὲ καὶ τὸ πνευματικὸν μὴ φαντάζου τὸ ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης γενέσεως· πᾶν γὰρ τοῦτο ἐχθὲς καὶ τρίτην ἡμέραν ἐκ τῶν σιτίων καὶ τοῦ ἑλκομένου ἀέρος τὴν ἐπιρροὴν ἔλαβεν· τοῦτο οὖν ὃ ἔλαβε μεταβάλλει, οὐχ ὃ ἡ μήτηρ ἔτεκεν. ὑπόθου δ’ ὅτι ἐκείνῳ σε λίαν προσπλέκει τῷ ἰδίως ποιῷ, οὐδὲν ὄντι οἶμαι πρὸς τὸ νῦν λεγόμενον.
The parts of the whole, all that the cosmos naturally contains, must perish—let this word signify alteration. If this is both naturally bad and necessary for them, the whole cannot be well conducted when its parts proceed to alteration and their constitution conflicts with perishing. Did nature herself set out to harm her own parts and make them liable to evil and bound to fall into evil? Or did she fail to notice such things happening? Neither is credible.
Even if someone set nature aside and explained these things as simply natural occurrences, it would still be absurd both to say that the parts of the whole naturally change and to be surprised or resentful as though something contrary to nature were happening—especially when their dissolution is into the things from which each is composed. For it is either a scattering of the elements from which it was combined, or a change of the solid into the earthy and the breath-like into the airy, so that these too are taken up into the reason of the whole, whether the whole burns up periodically or renews itself through everlasting exchanges.
Do not imagine the solid and the breath-like as what was there from your first coming to be. All this received its inflow yesterday and the day before from food and the air drawn in. What it received, then, is what changes, not what your mother bore. Suppose that it binds you closely to that thing with its particular character: I think this has no bearing on what is now being said.
Commentary
The argument against fearing dissolution depends on placing bodily change within an ongoing natural process. Perishing is first expressly redescribed as alteration. Calling that necessary alteration an evil would, the speaker argues, charge nature with deliberate injury or oversight. A second route sets aside that personified explanation and appeals to what the parts naturally do. Food and breath then make transformation present in ordinary bodily maintenance. The final compressed sentence about individual character remains uncertain and should not carry a settled theory of personal identity.
10.7.1 The adverse reading of διαφόρως is supported by a lexical possibility and the conditional argument. LSJ records difference both as variety and as disagreement, including an adverse relation expressed with πρός. Reading conflict here makes the alleged evil of perishing run against the parts’ constitution. Reading various ways of perishing remains possible; the print attests the wording rather than deciding between those senses.
10.7.3 The final supposition leaves its subject and the attachment of individual character uncertain. The print retains the difficult pronouns and datives rather than presenting the smoother verbal construction noted in its apparatus. The current English supplies it as the grammatical subject and links the closing dismissal to the proposed attachment. Neither choice establishes that the preceding account of bodily replacement settles the identity of the person.
10.8
Ὀνόματα θέμενος σαυτῷ ταῦτα· ἀγαθός, αἰδήμων, ἀληθής, ἔμφρων, σύμφρων, ὑπέρφρων, πρόσεχε μήποτε μετονομάζῃ, κἂν ἀπολλύῃς ταῦτα τὰ ὀνόματα, [καὶ] ταχέως ἐπάνιθι ἐπ’ αὐτά. μέμνησο δὲ ὅτι τὸ μὲν ἔμφρων ἐβούλετό σοι σημαίνειν τὴν ἐφ’ ἕκαστα διαληπτικὴν ἐπίστασιν καὶ τὸ ἀπαρενθύμητον· τὸ δὲ σύμφρων τὴν ἑκούσιον ἀπόδεξιν τῶν ὑπὸ τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως ἀπονεμομένων· τὸ δὲ ὑπέρφρων τὴν ὑπέρτασιν τοῦ φρονοῦντος μορίου ὑπὲρ λείαν ἣ τραχεῖαν κίνησιν τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τὸ δοξάριον καὶ τὸν θάνατον καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα.
ἐὰν οὖν διατηρῇς σεαυτὸν ὲν τούτοις τοῖς ὀνόμασι μὴ γλιχόμενος τοῦ ὑπ’ ἄλλων κατὰ ταῦτα ὀνομάζεσθαι, ἔσῃ ἕτερος καὶ εἰς βίον εἰσελεύσῃ ἕτερον. τὸ γὰρ ἔτι τοιοῦτον εἶναι οἷος μέχρι νῦν γέγονας, καὶ ἐν βίῳ τοιούτῳ σπαράσσεσθαι καὶ μολύνεσθαι, λίαν ἐστὶν ἀναισθήτου καὶ φιλοψύχου καὶ ὁμοίου τοῖς ἡμιβρώτοις θηριομάχοις, οἵτινες μεστοὶ τραυμάτων καὶ λύθρου παρακαλοῦσιν ὅμως εἰς τὴν αὔριον φυλαχθῆναι, παραβληθησόμενοι τοιοῦτοι τοῖς αὐτοῖς ὄνυξι καὶ δήγμασιν.
ἐμβίβασον οὖν σαυτὸν εἰς τὰ ὀλίγα ταῦτα ὀνόματα, κἂν μὲν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν μένειν δύνῃ, μένε ὥσπερ εἰς μακάρων τινὰς νήσους μετῳκισμένος· ἐὰν δὲ αἴσθῃ ὅτι ἐκπίπτεις καὶ οὐ περικρατεῖς, ἄπιθι θαρρῶν εἰς γωνίαν τινά, ὅπου κρατήσεις, ἢ καὶ παντάπασιν ἔξιθι τοῦ βίου, μὴ ὀργιζόμενος, ἀλλὰ ἁπλῶς καὶ ἐλευθέρως καὶ αἰδημόνως, ἕν γε τοῦτο μόνον πράξας ἐν τῷ βίῳ τὸ οὕτως ἐξελθεῖν.
πρὸς μέντοι τὸ μεμνῆσθαι τῶν ὀνομάτων μεγάλως συλλήψεταί σοι τὸ μεμνῆσθαι θεῶν καὶ ὅτιπερ οὐ κολακεύεσθαι οὗτοι θέλουσιν, ἀλλὰ ἐξομοιοῦσθαι ἑαυτοῖς τὰ λογικὰ πάντα καὶ εἶναι τὴν μὲν συκῆν τὰ συκῆς ποιοῦσαν, τὸν δὲ κύνα τὰ κυνός, τὴν δὲ μέλισσαν τὰ μελίσσης, τὸν δὲ ἄνθρωπον τὰ ἀνθρώπου.
Having given yourself these names—good, modest, truthful, thoughtful, like-minded, high-minded—take care never to acquire different names. And if you lose these names, [and] return to them quickly. Remember that thoughtful was meant to signify your discriminating attention to each thing and your freedom from careless thinking; like-minded, your willing acceptance of what common nature allots; high-minded, the thinking part’s elevation above the smooth or rough movements of the flesh, above petty fame and death and all such things.
If, then, you keep yourself within these names, without hankering to be called by them by others, you will be a different person and enter a different life. To remain as you have been until now, torn and fouled in such a life, is the mark of someone utterly unfeeling and clinging to life, like the half-eaten beast-fighters who, covered in wounds and gore, still beg to be kept alive until tomorrow, only to be thrown, in that condition, before the same claws and bites.
Set yourself, then, within these few names. If you can remain in them, remain as though you had migrated to some Islands of the Blessed. But if you sense that you are slipping away and cannot hold your ground, go confidently to some corner where you can hold it, or even leave life altogether, without anger, but simply, freely, and modestly—having done at least this one thing in life: to leave it in this way.
To remember these names, it will greatly help you to remember the gods, and that they do not want flattery but want all rational beings to become like themselves, and want the fig tree to do a fig tree’s work, the dog a dog’s, the bee a bee’s, and the human being a human being’s.
Commentary
Moral names are useful only when they direct conduct independently of being awarded by others. The six names become standards to recover after failure, and three receive local definitions. The second section explicitly rejects dependence on outside acclaim, then uses the brutal arena comparison to expose attachment to an unreformed life. Remaining, retreating, and leaving life are presented as increasingly severe alternatives in the ancient self-address. The close returns to the gods and the characteristic work of different beings, making action rather than flattery the measure of fidelity.
10.8.1 The local definitions govern the three coordinated names ending in -φρων. The English compounds preserve a visible relationship while assigning different tasks: discriminating attention, willing accord with universal nature, and elevation above bodily movements and fame. Like-minded therefore does not mean agreement with whichever people surround the speaker, and high-minded is not permission for social arrogance. The definitions constrain these English names more reliably than their isolated modern connotations.
10.8.1 The bracketed conjunction belongs to the source’s instruction to recover the moral names. Leopold brackets the second καί before the quick return. The English preserves it as a marked conjunction while leaving the return itself unqualified. This distinction keeps the editorial deletion visible without making the entire recovery instruction doubtful.
10.8.3 The pleasant relocation image and the severe departure alternatives serve the same demand for moral steadiness. The Islands of the Blessed compare successful constancy to a changed place of residence. When that constancy fails, a corner of retreat is offered before departure from life. The progression and its demand to act without anger are part of the ancient self-rebuke. Treating the islands as a promised afterlife or deleting the explicit last alternative would replace the passage’s actual structure.
10.8.4 The two divine wishes should be coordinated without making every example a rational being. The first wish concerns the likeness of rational creatures to the gods. The next concerns the characteristic work of fig tree, dog, bee, and human. Their relation supports an analogy of proper activity, but it does not identify the plant and animals as members of the rational class just named.
10.9
Μῖμος, πόλεμος, πτοία, νάρκα, δουλεία· καθ’ ἡμέραν ἀπαλείψεταί σου τὰ ἱερὰ ἐκεῖνα δόγματα, ὁπόσα ἀφυσιολογήτως φαντάζῃ καὶ παραπέμπεις. δεῖ δὲ πᾶν οὕτω βλέπειν καὶ πράσσειν ὥστε καὶ τὸ πρακτικὸν ἅμα συντελεῖσθαι καὶ ἅμα τὸ θεωρητικὸν ἐνεργεῖσθαι καὶ τὸ ἐκ τῆς περὶ ἑκάστων ἐπιστήμης αὔθαδες σῴζεσθαι λανθάνον, οὐχὶ κρυπτόμενον. πότε γὰρ ἁπλότητος ἀπολαύσεις; πότε δὲ σεμνότητος; πότε δὲ τῆς ἐφ’ ἑκάστου γνωρίσεως, τί τε ἐστὶ κατ’ οὐσίαν καὶ τίνα χώραν ἔχει ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ καὶ ἐπὶ πόσον πέφυκεν ὑφίστασθαι καὶ ἐκ τίνων συγκέκριται καὶ τίσι δύναται ὑπάρχειν καὶ τίνες δύνανται αὐτὸ διδόναι τε καὶ ἀφαιρεῖσθαι;
Playacting, war, panic, numbness, slavery. Day by day those sacred principles of yours will be erased, all those you conceive and let pass without understanding nature. You must look at and do everything in such a way that practical activity is accomplished, contemplation is active at the same time, and the self-confidence that comes from knowledge of each thing is preserved, unnoticed but not concealed. For when will you enjoy simplicity? When dignity? When the knowledge of each thing: what it is in its substance, what place it has in the cosmos, how long it naturally persists, what it is composed of, whom it can belong to, and who can give it or take it away?
Commentary
Principles need an active understanding of nature if they are to survive ordinary disturbance. The abrupt opening list and its relation to the threatened erasure are textually awkward. The clearer injunction joins practical accomplishment with contemplation in the same act of attention. Confidence should remain unobtrusive without becoming a concealment project. The closing questions turn a desired simplicity into specific inquiries about substance, place, duration, composition, possession, and transfer.
10.9.1 The negative adverb is printed, while the opening construction remains unsettled. Leopold retains ἀφυσιολογήτως and places a positive alternative in the apparatus. The English takes the relative clause with the preceding principles and keeps the abrupt list separate. The clearer subsequent demand to combine action and contemplation does not authorize silently reversing that adverb or supplying a missing relation for the list.
10.10
Ἀράχνιον μυῖαν θηρᾶσαν μέγα φρονεῖ, ἄλλος δὲ λαγίδιον, ἄλλος δὲ ὑποχῇ ἀφύην, ἄλλος δὲ συίδια, ἄλλος δὲ ἄρκτους, ἄλλος Σαρμάτας. οὗτοι γὰρ οὐ λῃσταί, ἐὰν τὰ δόγματα ἐξετάζῃς;
A little spider is proud after catching a fly; someone else, a little hare; another, small fry in a net; another, piglets; another, bears; another, Sarmatians. Are these not robbers, if you examine their principles?
Commentary
The catalogue of captures strips conquest of its exceptional claim to pride. The list expands from a spider’s prey to a named human people while retaining the same structure of acquisition. Its final question judges the hunters by their governing principles, not merely by the size or prestige of what they capture. The comparison is deliberately abrasive: military success enters a sequence of predation instead of receiving an automatic moral exemption.
10.10.1 The named people appear as the final object in a deliberately leveling hunting sequence. The passage itself names Sarmatians but gives no campaign, date, commander, or individual captive. Its argument can therefore be read as a challenge to pride in conquest without assigning it to a particular event in the emperor’s life. The small spider and its prey initiate the comparison that the final political object intensifies.
10.11
Πῶς εἰς ἄλληλα πάντα μεταβάλλει, θεωρητικὴν μέθοδον κτῆσαι καὶ διηνεκῶς πρόσεχε καὶ συγγυμνάσθητι περὶ τοῦτο τὸ μέρος· οὐδὲν γὰρ οὕτως μεγαλοφροσύνης ποιητικόν. ἐξεδύσατο τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐννοήσας ὅτι ὅσον οὐδέπω πάντα ταῦτα καταλιπεῖν ἀπιόντα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων δεήσει, ἀνῆκεν ὅλον ἑαυτὸν δικαιοσύνῃ μὲν εἰς τὰ ὑφ’ ἑαυτοῦ ἐνεργούμενα, ἐν δὲ τοῖς ἄλλοις συμβαίνουσι τῇ τῶν ὅλων φύσει. τί δ’ ἐρεῖ τις ἢ ὑπολήψεται περὶ αὐτοῦ ἢ πράξει κατ’ αὐτοῦ, οὐδ’ εἰς νοῦν βάλλεται, δύο τούτοις ἀρκούμενος, εἰ αὐτὸς δικαιοπραγεῖ τὸ νῦν πρασσόμενον καὶ φιλεῖ τὸ νῦν ἀπονεμόμενον ἑαυτῷ· ἀσχολίας δὲ πάσας καὶ σπουδὰς ἀφῆκε καὶ οὐδὲν ἄλλο βούλεται ἢ εὐθεῖαν περαίνειν διὰ τοῦ νόμου καὶ εὐθεῖαν περαίνοντι ἕπεσθαι τῷ θεῷ.
Acquire a method for contemplating how everything changes into everything else; attend to this continually and train yourself in this field. Nothing does so much to produce greatness of mind. Such a person has shed the body. Recognizing that very soon he must leave all these things and depart from human beings, he has given himself wholly to justice in what he himself does, and, in everything else that happens, to the nature of the whole. What someone will say or suppose about him, or do against him, does not even enter his mind. He is content with these two things: that he himself does justly what he is now doing, and loves what is now allotted to him. He has let go of every preoccupation and ambition, and wants nothing else than to travel a straight course through the law and to follow the god who travels a straight course.
Commentary
Contemplating change is meant to release attention for justice and acceptance in the present. The opening demands repeated training rather than a single recognition of mortality. The ensuing third-person example has shed the body in an imaginative sense and relinquished anxiety about others’ appraisal. His two sufficient concerns are acting justly now and loving what is allotted now. The straight-course image binds those concerns to law and god; it is not merely a picture of individual determination.
10.12
Τίς ὑπονοίας χρεία παρὸν σκοπεῖν τί δεῖ πραχθῆναι, κἂν μὲν συνορᾷς, εὐμενῶς, ἀμεταστρεπτὶ ταύτῃ χωρεῖν· ἐὰν δὲ μὴ συνορᾷς, ἐπέχειν καὶ συμβούλοις τοῖς ἀρίστοις χρῆσθαι· ἐὰν δὲ ἕτερά τινα πρὸς ταῦτα ἀντιβαίνῃ, προιέναι κατὰ τὰς παρούσας ἀφορμὰς λελογισμένως, ἐχόμενον τοῦ φαινομένου δικαίου; ἄριστον γὰρ κατατυγχάνειν τούτου, ἐπεί τοι ἥ γε ἀπόπτωσις ἀπὸ τούτου ἐστίν. σχολαῖόν τι καὶ ἅμα εὐκίνητόν ἐστι καὶ φαιδρὸν ἅμα καὶ συνεστηκὸς ὁ τῷ λόγῳ κατὰ πᾶν ἑπόμενος.
What need is there of guesswork when you can consider what must be done, and, if you see it clearly, proceed that way kindly and without turning back? If you do not see it, pause and use the best advisers. If other things obstruct these steps, advance thoughtfully with the resources available, holding to what appears just. To attain this is best, since even failure is a falling away from this. Whoever follows reason in everything is at once unhurried and readily moved, cheerful and composed.
Commentary
Reasoned action includes pausing for counsel when the proper course is unclear. Guesswork is contrasted with inspection, but clarity is not presumed. When it is absent, suspension and consultation become appropriate; when impediments arise, the speaker works with available resources while retaining justice as the aim. The compressed sentence about failure remains difficult. The concluding pairs prevent rational steadiness from being confused with either inertia or agitation.
10.12.1 Guesswork follows the conjectural sense of the opening noun. LSJ records suspicion and conjecture alongside suggestion and deeper meaning. In this context, direct consideration, suspended judgment, and counsel support the selected conjectural sense. This does not make every uncompleted judgment a fault; the passage expressly allows the uncertainty that calls for advisers.
10.12.1 The relation of failure to justice is compressed in the governing text. The print places the difficult falling-away clause after the recommendation to attain what is just. Its apparatus records replacements and expansions, but the English retains the compact relation instead of adopting them. The commentary can identify justice as the practical reference point without pretending that the final wording is unproblematic.
10.13
Πυνθάνεσθαι ἑαυτοῦ εὐθὺς ἐξ ὕπνου γενόμενον· μήτι διοίσει σοι, ἐὰν ὑπὸ ἄλλου ψέγηται τὰ δίκαια καὶ καλῶς ἔχοντα; οὐ διοίσει. μήτι ἐπιλέλησαι ὅτι οὗτοι οἱ ἐν τοῖς περὶ ἄλλων ἐπαίνοις καὶ ψόγοις φρυαττόμενοι τοιοῦτοι μὲν ἐπὶ τῆς κλίνης εἰσί, τοιοῦτοι δὲ ἐπὶ τῆς τραπέζης, οἷα δὲ ποιοῦσιν, οἷα δὲ φεύγουσιν, οἷα δὲ διώκουσιν, οἷα δὲ κλέπτουσιν, οἷα δὲ ἁρπάζουσιν, οὐ χερσὶ καὶ ποσίν, ἀλλὰ τῷ τιμιωτάτῳ ἑαυτῶν μέρει, ὃ γίνεται ὅταν θέλῃ, πίστις, αἰδώς, ἀλήθεια, νόμος, ἀγαθὸς δαίμων;
As soon as you wake, ask yourself: will it make any difference to you if someone else blames what is just and right? It will not. Have you forgotten what those people who swagger over their praise and blame of others are like in bed and at table—what they do, what they avoid, what they pursue, what they steal, what they seize, not with hands and feet but with the most honored part of themselves, which, whenever it wishes, becomes trustworthiness, modesty, truth, law, a good guardian spirit?
Commentary
The morning exercise tests the authority granted to those who blame what is just. The question concerns the effect of another’s blame on the speaker, not a power to change the justice of the action. The critics’ ordinary conduct and acquisitive motives then undermine the authority of their judgments. Yet the final list of virtues identifies a capacity in the very faculty being misused; the passage does not describe them as lacking all possibility of change.
10.13.1 The opening concerns blame of just things under the printed reading. Leopold selects ψέγηται and records forms of coming-to-be in the apparatus. The resulting question asks what difference another’s blame makes to the addressed person. It should not be turned into a general question about who performs a just action by importing the alternative verb.
10.14
Τῇ πάντα διδούσῃ καὶ ἀπολαμβανούσῃ φύσει ὁ πεπαιδευμένος καὶ αἰδήμων λέγει· δὸς ὃ θέλεις· ἀπόλαβε ὃ θέλεις. λέγει δὲ τοῦτο οὐ καταθρασυνόμενος, ἀλλὰ πειθαρχῶν μόνον καὶ εὐνοῶν αὐτῇ.
To nature, who gives everything and takes it back, the educated and modest person says: give what you wish; take back what you wish. This is said without defiance, simply in obedience and goodwill toward her.
Commentary
Assent to nature is distinguished from a defiant performance of indifference. The paired requests give nature equal permission to bestow and reclaim. The explanatory sentence specifies the speaker’s manner: education and modesty should yield obedience with goodwill. The same words would lose their intended force if spoken as a challenge designed to display invulnerability.
10.15
Ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ὑπολειπόμενον τοῦτο. ζῆσον ὡς ἐν ὄρει· οὐδὲν γὰρ διαφέρει ἐκεῖ ἢ ὧδε, ἐάν τις πανταχοῦ ὡς ἐν πόλει τῷ κόσμῳ. ἰδέτωσαν, ἱστορησάτωσαν οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἄνθρωπον ἀληθινὸν κατὰ φύσιν ζῶντα. εἰ μὴ φέρουσιν, ἀποκτεινάτωσαν· κρεῖττον γὰρ ἢ οὕτως ζῆν.
What remains is little. Live as though on a mountain; for it makes no difference whether there or here, if everywhere you live in the cosmos as in a city. Let people see and observe a true human being living according to nature. If they cannot bear it, let them kill you. That is better than living like this.
Commentary
Living within the cosmic city makes ethical location more important than physical retreat. The mountain image is immediately qualified by the possibility of civic membership everywhere. The speaker then imagines an audience observing a life according to nature and authorizes it, harshly, to kill if it cannot bear that example. The concluding comparison leaves its this compressed. The passage holds public visibility and independence from approval together; it does not make a change of scenery sufficient for virtue.
10.15.1 The final demonstrative leaves the disfavored manner of living broadly indicated. The preceding sentences place a natural life before hostile observers, but οὕτως does not name a particular vice in the final comparison. The English retains the broad this rather than inserting hypocrisy, compromise, or the observers’ way of life. The command to kill has those observers as its subject and is distinct from the departure alternatives elsewhere in the book.
10.16
Μηκέθ’ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.
No more discussion at all of what a good man should be like. Be one.
Commentary
The maxim presses an account of goodness toward its enactment. Discussion of the good man is displaced by the demand to become one. Its brevity enacts the impatience it expresses. This does not erase the many exercises in discrimination elsewhere in the book; it challenges discussion that postpones the conduct under discussion.
10.17
Τοῦ ὅλου αἰῶνος καὶ τῆς ὅλης οὐσίας συνεχῶς φαντασία καὶ ὅτι πάντα τὰ κατὰ μέρος, ὡς μὲν πρὸς οὐσίαν, κεγχραμίς, ὡς δὲ πρὸς χρόνον, τρυπάνου περιστροφή.
Continually picture all time and all substance: every individual thing, compared with substance, is a fig seed; compared with time, one turn of a drill.
Commentary
Two small-scale images separately measure an individual thing against substance and time. The seed supplies the material comparison, while the drill’s rotation supplies a brief movement for the temporal one. Keeping the comparisons distinct avoids turning the image into a single claim about physical size. Their purpose is proportional: what seems extensive from within an individual life is set against the whole.
10.17.1 The material comparison names a fig seed rather than a millet grain. LSJ’s primary sense for κεγχραμίς is the seed of a fig, though the entry also records other uses. The related form does not justify replacing it with the distinct grain word. Its smallness supplies one scale comparison; the separate drill image supplies the other.
10.18
Εἰς ἕκαστον τῶν ὑποκειμένων ἐφιστάντα ἐπινοεῖν αὐτὸ ἤδη διαλυόμενον καὶ ἐν μεταβολῇ καὶ οἷον σήψει ἢ σκεδάσει γινόμενον ἢ καθότι ἕκαστον πέφυκεν ὥσπερ θνῄσκειν.
Attend to each thing before you and conceive it as already dissolving and changing, as though decaying or scattering, or in whatever way each thing is naturally dying, so to speak.
Commentary
The object before the observer is to be imagined already within its dissolution. The exercise does not wait for decay to become visibly dominant. It directs attention to present alteration through possible forms such as rotting or scattering, while leaving each thing its own natural mode of ending. The final qualification marks dying as an analogy broad enough to apply beyond living organisms.
10.19
Οἷοί εἰσιν ἐσθίοντες, καθεύδοντες, ὀχεύοντες, ἀποπατοῦντες, τὰ ἄλλα· εἶτα οἷοι ἀνδρονομούμενοι καὶ γαυρούμενοι ἢ χαλεπαίνοντες καὶ ἐξ ὑπεροχῆς ἐπιπλήττοντες, πρὸ ὀλίγου δὲ ἐδούλευον πόσοις καὶ δι’ οἷα· καὶ μετ’ ὀλίγον ἐν τοιούτοις ἔσονται.
What they are like as they eat, sleep, mate, defecate, and the rest! Then what they are like as they put on lordly airs and exalt themselves, or rage and rebuke from a height! A little while ago, how many people they served as slaves, and for what things! And before long they will be in such a condition again.
Commentary
Bodily dependence and former servility expose the instability of imperious display. The opening juxtaposes ordinary physical functions with the elevated posture of those who reprimand others. A short backward and forward glance then frames their present arrogance between periods of dependence. The doubtful verb rendered as lordly airs must remain qualified, but the surrounding contrast between exaltation and servility is clear.
10.19.1 Lordly airs interprets a doubtful transmitted verb, not a securely reconstructed one. LSJ registers imperious behavior and marks the form as doubtful in this passage. Leopold retains it while reporting replacement participles. The current English uses the lexical sense within the clear surrounding sequence of exaltation and rebuke; it does not adopt either alternative or infer a modern identity category from the word’s male association.
10.20
Συμφέρει ἑκάστῳ ὃ φέρει ἑκάστῳ ἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις, καὶ τότε συμφέρει ὅτε ἐκείνη φέρει.
What the nature of the whole brings to each benefits each, and it benefits them at the time she brings it.
Commentary
The allotted event is evaluated together with its timing. The repeated bringing and benefiting connect nature’s distribution to the individual recipient. The second clause then denies that benefit can be detached from the time of arrival. This compact assertion depends on the book’s confidence in universal nature; it supplies no independent method for deciding that a particular painful occurrence is advantageous.
10.21
ʽἘρᾷ μὲν ὄμβρου γαῖα, ἐρᾷ δὲ ὁ σεμνὸς αἰθήρ,ʼ ἐρᾷ δὲ ὁ κόσμος ποιῆσαι ὃ ἂν μέλλῃ γίνεσθαι. λέγω οὖν τῷ κόσμῳ ὅτι σοὶ συνερῶ. μήτι δὲ οὕτω κἀκεῖνο λέγεται, ὅτι· φιλεῖ τοῦτο γίνεσθαι;
“The earth loves rain, and the solemn sky loves.” The cosmos loves to make whatever is going to happen. So I say to the cosmos: I share your love. Is it not in this sense too that we say, “This likes to happen”?
Commentary
The language of love links natural occurrence with the speaker’s willing participation. A short poetic image leads from earth and sky to a cosmos that loves what it brings about. The speaker then answers in the first person by sharing that love. The final idiom moves between liking and customary occurrence. It is a verbal exercise in assent, while the incomplete sky clause should remain incomplete rather than acquire a new object through commentary.
10.21.1 The sky’s love remains without an expressed object, and the last idiom preserves the verbal play. The quoted clause contains no object after the sky’s loving verb. Completing it from a longer poetic passage would therefore add content not supplied by this excerpt. At the end, likes to happen lets the love-language remain audible while the idiomatic force concerns customary occurrence. The wording makes the play visible at a cost in ordinary English fluency.
10.22
Ἤτοι ἐνταῦθα ζῇς καὶ ἤδη εἴθικας· ἢ ἔξω ὑπάγεις καὶ τοῦτο ἤθελες· ἢ ἀποθνῄσκεις καὶ ἀπελειτούργησας. παρὰ δὲ ταῦτα οὐδέν. οὐκοῦν εὐθύμει.
Either you live here and are already used to it; or you go elsewhere, and that was what you wanted; or you die, and your service is finished. There is nothing beyond these. So be cheerful.
Commentary
Three possible outcomes are redescribed as familiar life, desired departure, or completed service. The short alternatives remove a fourth imagined position from which the speaker could stand outside his situation altogether. Staying and going elsewhere receive their own grounds for acceptance before death appears as the end of service. The concluding cheerfulness is the demanded response to that frame, not a prediction that each outcome will be pleasant.
10.23
Ἐναργὲς ἔστω ἀεὶ τὸ ὅτι τοιοῦτο ἐκεῖνο ὁ ἀγρός ἐστι καὶ πῶς πάντα ἐστὶ τὰ αὐτὰ ἐνθάδε τοῖς ἐν ἄκρῳ τῷ ὄρει ἢ ἐπὶ τοῦ αἰγιαλοῦ ἢ ὅπου θέλεις. ἄντικρυς γὰρ εὑρήσεις τὰ τοῦ Πλάτωνος· ʽσηκὸν ἐν ὄρει, φησί, περιβαλλόμενος καὶ βδάλλων βληχήματα.ʼ
Always see clearly that this is what that country retreat amounts to, and how everything here is the same as on a mountain peak, beside the seashore, or wherever you wish. You will find exactly what Plato says: “building a fold on a mountain,” he says, “and milking the bleating flocks.”
Commentary
The country retreat is tested against the claim that the same human conditions are present here. The opening demonstratives make the precise identification difficult, but the following comparison of present place, mountain, and seashore is clear. The quoted pastoral image is invoked to make the point vivid. It does not establish that withdrawal by itself changes the agent’s moral position, and the commentary need not supply an extended Platonic context to settle the damaged opening.
10.23.1 The country-retreat identification is provisional because the demonstratives are difficult. Leopold prints the same compressed beginning as the pin, with alternative arrangements in the apparatus. The English relates the imagined retreat to the present conditions, supported by the ensuing sameness of places. That contextual support does not eliminate the uncertainty in the opening syntax or justify reconstructing it silently.
10.24
Τί ἐστί μοι τὸ ἡγεμονικόν μου καὶ ποῖόν τι αὐτὸ ἐγὼ ποιῶ νῦν καὶ πρὸς τί ποτε αὐτῷ νῦν χρῶμαι; μήτι κενὸν νοῦ ἐστι; μήτι ἀπόλυτον καὶ ἀπεσπασμένον κοινωνίας; μήτι προστετηκὸς καὶ ἀνακεκραμένον τῷ σαρκιδίῳ, ὥστε τούτῳ συντρέπεσθαι;
What is my ruling faculty to me? What sort of thing am I now making it, and for what am I now using it? Is it empty of understanding? Is it released and torn away from fellowship? Is it stuck to and mingled with the little flesh, so that it changes along with it?
Commentary
The ruling faculty is examined through its present use and through two opposed forms of misrelation. The questions make the speaker responsible for what he is making of the faculty now. It may become detached from fellowship, or so fused with flesh that it changes with bodily movements. These are distinct failures: avoiding bodily domination does not justify social detachment. Understanding and use are tested together.
10.25
Ὁ τὸν κύριον φεύγων δραπέτης· κύριος δὲ ὁ νόμος καὶ ὁ παρανομῶν ⟨οὖν⟩ δραπέτης. ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁ λυπούμενος ἢ ὀργιζόμενος ἢ φοβούμενος οὐ βούλεταί τι γεγονέναι ἢ γίνεσθαι ἢ γενήσεσθαι τῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ τὰ πάντα διοικοῦντος τεταγμένων, ὅς ἐστι νόμος, νέμων ὅσα ἑκάστῳ ἐπιβάλλει. ὁ ἄρα φοβούμενος ἢ λυπούμενος ἢ ὀργιζόμενος δραπέτης.
Whoever flees the master is a runaway slave. The master is the law; therefore whoever breaks the law is also a runaway. But someone who grieves or is angry or afraid also does not want something to have happened, to be happening, or to happen among the things ordained by what governs everything—which is law, allotting to each what falls to each. So whoever is afraid or grieves or is angry is a runaway slave.
Commentary
Resistance to allotted events is represented through the coercive image of a runaway slave. Law is identified as master and as the power that distributes what belongs to each. Fear, anger, and grief are then treated as refusals of some past, present, or future allotment. The metaphor makes the demand for assent exceptionally severe. Its force depends on cosmic law’s authority in the argument; reducing it to a neutral image of changing plans would lose the historical power relation.
10.25.1 The supplied inferential particle makes the lawbreaker conclusion explicit. The printed addition belongs to the step from law as master to lawbreaking as flight. English therefore represents the inference already included in the pin. It is not a new explanation added to soften the slavery metaphor, which continues unchanged through the emotional cases.
10.26
Σπέρμα εἰς μήτραν ἀφεὶς ἀπεχώρησε καὶ λοιπὸν ἄλλη αἰτία παραλαβοῦσα ἐργάζεται καὶ ἀποτελεῖ βρέφος· ἐξ οἵου οἷον; πάλιν· τροφὴν διὰ φάρυγγος ἀφῆκε καὶ λοιπὸν ἄλλη αἰτία παραλαβοῦσα αἴσθησιν καὶ ὁρμὴν καὶ τὸ ὅλον ζωὴν καὶ ῥώμην καὶ ἄλλα (ὅσα καὶ οἷα;) ποιεῖ. ταῦτα οὖν ἐν τοιαύτῃ ἐγκαλύψει γινόμενα θεωρεῖν καὶ τὴν δύναμιν οὕτως ὁρᾶν, ὡς καὶ τὴν βρίθουσαν καὶ τὴν ἀνωφερῆ ὁρῶμεν, οὐχὶ τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ἧττον ἐναργῶς.
Someone released seed into a womb and went away; then another cause took over, worked, and completed a baby. From what a thing, what a result! Again: someone let food down the throat; then another cause took over and produced sensation, impulse, and, in a word, life and strength and other things—how many and of what kinds! Contemplate these things happening in such concealment, and see their power as we see the downward pull and the upward movement: not with our eyes, but no less clearly.
Commentary
Hidden processes are approached through their effects rather than direct visibility. Reproduction and nourishment both pass from an initiating action to a cause that continues the work beyond observation. The rhetorical questions emphasize the disproportion between initial material and developed powers. Downward and upward motion then model how such powers can be apprehended without seeing the causes themselves. The passage offers an ancient explanatory analogy rather than naming modern biological or physical mechanisms.
10.27
Συνεχῶς ἐπινοεῖν πῶς πάντα τοιαῦτα, ὁποῖα νῦν γίνεται, καὶ πρόσθεν ἐγίνετο, καὶ ἐπινοεῖν γενησόμενα· καὶ ὅλα δράματα καὶ σκηνὰς ὁμοειδεῖς, ὅσα ἐκ πείρας τῆς σῆς ἢ τῆς πρεσβυτέρας ἱστορίας ἔγνως, πρὸ ὀμμάτων τίθεσθαι, οἷον αὐλὴν ὅλην Ἁδριανοῦ καὶ αὐλὴν ὅλην Ἀντωνίνου καὶ αὐλὴν ὅλην Φιλίππου, Ἀλεξάνδρου, Κροίσου· πάντα γὰρ ἐκεῖνα τοιαῦτα ἦν, μόνον δι’ ἑτέρων.
Continually consider how everything now happening also happened before, and conceive it happening again. Set before your eyes whole dramas and scenes of the same kind, as many as you have learned from your own experience or earlier history: the whole court of Hadrian, the whole court of Antoninus, the whole court of Philip, Alexander, Croesus. All those things were the same, only through different people.
Commentary
Historical repetition concerns comparable roles and scenes enacted by different people. The exercise combines personal memory and earlier history, presenting entire courts as dramas to be set before the mind. Its last qualification prevents sameness from meaning the literal return of the same individuals. The list supplies examples of resemblance across time without requiring a reconstructed episode from each ruler’s life.
10.28
Φαντάζου πάντα τὸν ἐφ’ ᾡτινιοῦν λυπούμενον ἢ δυσαρεστοῦντα ὅμοιον τῷ θυομένῳ χοιριδίῳ καὶ ἀπολακτίζοντι καὶ κεκραγότι· ὅμοιος καὶ ὁ οἰμώζων ἐπὶ τοῦ κλινιδίου μόνος σιωπῇ. τὴν ἔνδεσιν ἡμῶν καὶ ὅτι μόνῳ τῷ λογικῷ ζῴῳ δέδοται τὸ ἑκουσίως ἕπεσθαι τοῖς γινομένοις, τὸ δὲ ἕπεσθαι ψιλὸν πᾶσιν ἀναγκαῖον.
Picture anyone who grieves or is displeased at anything as like the piglet being sacrificed, kicking and squealing. The person who groans alone and silently on the little bed is like it too. Our entanglement—and that the rational animal alone has been given the power to follow events willingly, while merely following is necessary for all.
Commentary
The capacity claimed for reason is willing participation in what otherwise must still be undergone. The sacrificed animal and the silent sufferer make resistance appear in both noisy and private forms. After an abrupt fragment, the passage singles out rational life for voluntary following, while unavoidable following belongs to all. The contrast concerns the manner of meeting events, not an ability to escape their occurrence. The fragment should not be silently turned into a complete command to make that contrast smoother.
10.28.1 The fragment about entanglement is separated from the preceding groaning sentence in the print. The full stop leaves an accusative expression without a fresh governing verb. The English retains the fragment before continuing to the distinction between willing and compulsory following. Supplying a new instruction to contemplate it would be intelligible as a repair, but is not the same as translating an expressed imperative.
10.29
Κατὰ μέρος ἐφ’ ἑκάστου ὧν ποιεῖς ἐφιστάνων ἐπερώτα σεαυτὸν εἰ ὁ θάνατος δεινὸν διὰ τὸ τούτου στέρεσθαι.
Attend separately to each thing you do, and ask yourself whether death is terrible because it deprives you of this.
Commentary
Fear of death is tested against particular activities rather than an undivided image of life. The speaker must examine each thing separately and ask whether losing this makes death terrible. The small demonstrative repeatedly returns a large fear to a concrete instance. The passage asks for an evaluation; it does not supply an inventory of activities or declare in advance that all of them are worthless.
10.30
Ὅταν προσκόπτῃς ἐπί τινος ἁμαρτίᾳ, εὐθὺς μεταβὰς ἐπιλογίζου τί παρόμοιον ἁμαρτάνεις· οἷον, ἀργύριον ἀγαθὸν εἶναι κρίνων ⟨ἢ⟩ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἢ τὸ δοξάριον καὶ κατ’ εἶδος. τούτῳ γὰρ ἐπιβάλλων ταχέως ἐπιλήσῃ τῆς ὀργῆς, συμπροσπίπτοντος τοῦ ὅτι βιάζεται· τί γὰρ ποιήσει; ἤ, εἰ δύνασαι, ἄφελε αὐτοῦ τὸ βιαζόμενον.
Whenever someone’s error offends you, immediately turn to consider what similar error you make—for example, judging money to be good, or pleasure, or petty fame, and so on by kind. Attending to this, you will quickly forget your anger, as it also occurs to you that the person is under compulsion. What else can they do? Or, if you can, remove what compels them.
Commentary
Recognition of a similar error in oneself can turn anger into an attempt to help. The comparison concerns shared kinds of misvaluation, such as treating money or reputation as good, rather than the claim that both people committed an identical act. Seeing the other as constrained by such judgments makes resentment less sustainable. The final conditional instruction preserves an active response, although the voice of its participle leaves what is to be removed grammatically uncertain.
10.30.1 The final participle permits different accounts of what corrective action removes. The selected middle interpretation takes the object as the compelling factor; the passive alternative makes it what in the person is constrained. The preceding claim that the wrongdoer is under compulsion supports the practical movement toward relief but does not settle the participle’s voice. The addition before pleasure is separate from this issue and remains represented in the list.
10.31
Σατυρίωνα ἰδὼν Σωκρατικὸν φαντάζου ἢ Εὐτύχην ἢ Ὑμένα, καὶ Εὐφράτην ἰδὼν Εὐτυχίωνα ἢ Σιλουανὸν φαντάζου, καὶ Ἀλκίφρονα Τροπαιοφόρον φαντάζου, καὶ Σευῆρον ἰδὼν Κρίτωνα ἢ Ξενοφῶντα φαντάζου, καὶ εἰς σεαυτὸν ἀπιδὼν τῶν Καισάρων τινὰ φαντάζου, καὶ ἐφ’ ἑκάστου τὸ ἀνάλογον. εἶτα συμπροσπιπτέτω σοι· ποῦ οὖν ἐκεῖνοι; οὐδαμοῦ ἢ ὁπουδή. οὕτως γὰρ συνεχῶς θεάσῃ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα καπνὸν καὶ τὸ μηδέν, μάλιστα ἐὰν συμμνημονεύσῃς ὅτι τὸ ἅπαξ μεταβαλὸν οὐκέτι ἔσται ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ χρόνῳ. τί οὖν ἐντείνῃ; τί δ’ οὐκ ἀρκεῖ σοι τὸ βραχὺ τοῦτο κοσμίως διαπερᾶσαι;
Οἵαν ὕλην καὶ ὑπόθεσιν φεύγεις· τί γάρ ἐστι πάντα ταῦτα ἄλλο πλὴν γυμνάσματα λόγου ἑωρακότος ἀκριβῶς καὶ φυσιολόγως τὰ ἐν τῷ βίῳ; μένε οὖν, μέχρι ἐξοικειώσῃς σεαυτῷ καὶ ταῦτα, ὡς ὁ ἐρρωμένος στόμαχος πάντα ἐξοικειοῖ, ὡς τὸ λαμπρὸν πῦρ, ὅ τι ἂν ἐμβάλῃς, φλόγα ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ αὐγὴν ποιεῖ.
When you see Satyrion, picture Socraticus or Eutyches or Hymen; when you see Euphrates, picture Eutychion or Silvanus; when Alciphron, picture Tropaeophorus; when you see Severus, picture Crito or Xenophon; when you look at yourself, picture one of the Caesars. Make the corresponding comparison in each case. Then let this also occur to you: where are they now? Nowhere, or somewhere or other. In this way you will continually see human affairs as smoke and nothing, especially if you also remember that what has once changed will never exist again in limitless time. Why, then, strain yourself? Why is it not enough for you to pass through this little span with order?
What material and opportunity you are avoiding! For what are all these things but exercises for reason that has looked closely, with an understanding of nature, at the things of life? Remain, then, until you have made these things your own as well, as a strong stomach assimilates everything, as a bright fire makes flame and radiance from whatever you throw into it.
Commentary
Remembering vanished predecessors leads back to using the present circumstances. The name pairings and the comparison with a Caesar place the speaker among replaceable human figures. The question about their whereabouts undermines the urgency of present display without establishing a precise account of the afterlife. A new paragraph then reverses the temptation to flee: the very circumstances being rejected can exercise reason. Stomach and fire model assimilation rather than an escape from all difficult material.
10.31.1 The name pairings can perform their function without invented biographies. The pin places Crito before Xenophon in the Severus comparison and leaves several names unexplained. The printing agrees with that sequence, even where its apparatus reports rearrangement. The exercise asks the speaker to imagine analogous predecessors and their disappearance; it does not provide enough information to assign a fully documented life to every name.
10.31.1 Recurring kinds of event need not mean the return of the same individual configuration. Chapter 27 explicitly changes the people enacting comparable scenes. Here the statement that what has changed will not exist again stresses the disappearance of an individual instance. Reading those scales together can clarify the practical exercises, while leaving the work’s larger cosmological commitments undecided.
10.32
Μηδενὶ ἐξέστω εἰπεῖν ἀληθεύοντι περὶ σοῦ ὅτι οὐχ ἁπλοῦς ἢ ὅτι οὐκ ἀγαθός, ἀλλὰ ψευδέσθω, ὅστις τούτων τι περὶ σοῦ ὑπολήψεται. πᾶν δὲ τοῦτο ἐπὶ σοί· τίς γὰρ ὁ κωλύων ἀγαθὸν εἶναί σε καὶ ἁπλοῦν; σὺ μόνον κρῖνον μηκέτι ζῆν, εἰ μὴ τοιοῦτος ἔσῃ· οὐδὲ γὰρ αἱρεῖ λόγος μὴ τοιοῦτον ὄντα.
Let no one truthfully say of you that you are not simple or not good. Let whoever supposes either of these things about you be wrong. All this is up to you: who prevents you from being good and simple? Only decide to live no longer if you are not going to be like this; for reason does not urge you to live in such a condition either.
Commentary
The speaker is responsible for making accusations of badness false through his own conduct. The opening permits critics to speak but refuses them truthful grounds for denying goodness and simplicity. The claim of agency is followed by an extreme condition on continued life. The final appeal to reason is elliptic and must remain qualified. Its placement makes the rebuke a demand for moral change, while preserving the explicit ancient departure language rather than translating it away.
10.32.1 The active verb can make reason the persuading subject rather than a chooser of the person. LSJ records the construction in which reason persuades, including infinitival complements. The English reads the omitted living action from the preceding clause. That account is grammatically defensible without being the only construal: a disowning or rejecting interpretation has different implications. The apparatus also records omission of the final clause, but the pin includes it and so does the translation.
10.33
Τί ἐστι τὸ ἐπὶ ταύτης τῆς ὕλης δυνάμενον κατὰ τὸ ὑγιέστατον πραχθῆναι ἢ ῥηθῆναι; ὅ τι γὰρ ἂν τοῦτο ᾖ, ἔξεστιν αὐτὸ πρᾶξαι ἢ εἰπεῖν καὶ μὴ προφασίζου ὡς κωλυόμενος.
Οὐ πρότερον παύσῃ στένων πρὶν ἢ τοῦτο πάθῃς, ὅτι οἷόν ἐστι τοῖς ἡδυπαθοῦσιν ἡ τρυφή; τοιοῦτό σοι τὸ ἐπὶ τῆς ὑποβαλλομένης καὶ ὑποπιπτούσης ὕλης ποιεῖν τὰ οἰκεῖα τῇ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου κατασκευῇ· ἀπόλαυσιν γὰρ δεῖ ὑπολαμβάνειν πᾶν ὃ ἔξεστι κατὰ τὴν ἰδίαν φύσιν ἐνεργεῖν.
πανταχοῦ δὲ ἔξεστι. τῷ μὲν οὖν κυλίνδρῳ οὐ πανταχοῦ δίδοται φέρεσθαι τὴν ἰδίαν κίνησιν οὐδὲ τῷ ὕδατι οὐδὲ πυρὶ οὐδὲ τοῖς ἄλλοις ὅσα ὑπὸ φύσεως ἢ ψυχῆς ἀλόγου διοικεῖται· τὰ γὰρ διείργοντα καὶ ἐνιστάμενα πολλά· νοῦς δὲ καὶ λόγος διὰ παντὸς τοῦ ἀντιπίπτοντος οὕτως πορεύεσθαι δύναται ὡς πέφυκε καὶ ὡς θέλει.
ταύτην τὴν ῥᾳστώνην πρὸ ὀμμάτων τιθέμενος, καθ’ ἣν ἐνεχθήσεται ὁ λόγος διὰ πάντων ὡς πῦρ ἄνω, ὡς λίθος κάτω, ὡς κύλινδρος κατὰ πρανοῦς, μηκέτι μηδὲν ἐπιζήτει· τὰ γὰρ λοιπὰ ἐγκόμματα ἤτοι τοῦ σωματίου ἐστὶ τοῦ νεκροῦ, ἢ χωρὶς ὑπολήψεως καὶ τῆς αὐτοῦ τοῦ λόγου ἐνδόσεως οὐ θραύει οὐδὲ ποιεῖ κακὸν οὐδ’ ὁτιοῦν.
ἐπεί τοι καὶ ὁ πάσχων αὐτὸς κακὸς ἂν εὐθὺς ἐγίνετο· ἐπὶ γοῦν τῶν ἄλλων κατασκευασμάτων πάντων, ὅ τι ἂν κακόν τινι αὐτῶν συμβῇ, παρὰ τοῦτο χεῖρον γίνεται αὐτὸ τὸ πάσχον, ἐνταῦθα δέ, εἰ δεῖ εἰπεῖν, καὶ κρείττων γίνεται ὁ ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἐπαινετώτερος, ὀρθῶς χρώμενος τοῖς προσπίπτουσιν. ὅλως δὲ μέμνησο ὅτι τὸν φύσει πολίτην οὐδὲν βλάπτει ὃ πόλιν οὐ βλάπτει, οὐδέ γε πόλιν βλάπτει ὃ νόμον οὐ βλάπτει· τούτων δὲ τῶν καλουμένων ἀκληρημάτων οὐδὲν βλάπτει νόμον. ὃ τοίνυν νόμον οὐ βλάπτει, οὔτε πόλιν οὔτε πολίτην.
What can be done or said in the soundest way with this material? Whatever it is, you can do it or say it; do not plead obstruction as an excuse.
You will not stop groaning until you experience this: what indulgence is to the lovers of pleasure, doing what fits the human constitution with the material presented and encountered must be to you. For you must regard as enjoyment every activity that is possible according to your own nature.
And it is possible everywhere. A cylinder is not allowed to move with its own movement everywhere, nor water, nor fire, nor the other things governed by nature or an irrational soul: many things separate and obstruct them. But mind and reason can pass through everything that opposes them in the way they naturally act and wish to act.
Set before your eyes this ease with which reason will pass through everything, like fire upward, a stone downward, a cylinder down a slope, and seek nothing further. The remaining obstacles either concern the dead little body, or, without judgment and the yielding of reason itself, neither shatter it nor do any harm at all.
Otherwise the sufferer himself would immediately become bad. With all other constructed things, at least, when something bad happens to any of them, the thing affected becomes worse as a result. Here, though, if one may say so, the human being becomes even better and more praiseworthy through using events rightly. In general, remember that nothing harms the citizen by nature which does not harm the city, and nothing harms the city which does not harm the law. None of these so-called misfortunes harms the law. So what does not harm law harms neither city nor citizen.
Commentary
Obstacles become occasions for rational action when success is measured by right use of the available material. The opening asks what can be said or done soundly now, then calls for enjoyment in such activity. Natural movements supply comparisons but also a contrast: physical objects can be blocked in ways reason’s proper use need not be. The final section makes improvement depend on using events rightly and joins citizen, city, and law. It is the moral agent’s activity that the argument protects, not a promise that every external project will succeed.
10.33.4 The claim of improvement depends on right use of events, not on suffering alone. The participial qualification is crucial: the human agent becomes better by using what arrives rightly. Earlier sections allow bodily impediments while distinguishing moral damage that requires reason’s yielding. The final chain concerning law, city, and citizen therefore rests on the passage’s account of natural civic agency; it is not an empirical denial of every injury to actual residents.
10.34
Τῷ δεδευμένῳ ὑπὸ τῶν ἀληθῶν δογμάτων ἀρκεῖ καὶ τὸ βραχύτατον καὶ ἐν μέσῳ κείμενον εἰς ὑπόμνησιν ἀλυπίας καὶ ἀφοβίας, οἷον· ʽφύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει· ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεή.ʼ φυλλάρια δὲ καὶ τὰ τεκνία σου, φυλλάρια δὲ καὶ ταῦτα τὰ ἐπιβοῶντα ἀξιοπίστως καὶ ἐπευφημοῦντα ἢ ἐκ τῶν ἐναντίων καταρώμενα ἢ ἡσυχῇ ψέγοντα καὶ χλευάζοντα, φυλλάρια δὲ ὁμοίως καὶ τὰ διαδεξόμενα τὴν ὑστεροφημίαν. πάντα γὰρ ταῦτα ʽἔαρος ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρῃʼ. εἶτα ἄνεμος καταβέβληκεν· ἔπειθ’ ὕλη ἕτερα ἀντὶ τούτων φύει. τὸ δὲ ὀλιγοχρόνιον κοινὸν πᾶσιν, ἀλλὰ σὺ πάντα ὡς αἰώνια ἐσόμενα φεύγεις καὶ διώκεις. μικρὸν καὶ καταμύσεις, τὸν δὲ ἐξενεγκόντα σε ἤδη ἄλλος θρηνήσει.
For someone steeped in true principles, even the shortest and most commonplace reminder is enough to recall freedom from grief and fear. For example: “The wind pours some leaves to the ground; so is the generation of men.” Your little children too are little leaves; little leaves too are those who acclaim you with an air of conviction and applaud, or, on the other side, curse you or quietly blame and mock you; little leaves too are those who will carry on your fame after death. For all these “grow in the season of spring.” Then the wind has cast them down, and the woodland grows others in their place. Brief duration is common to all, yet you avoid and pursue everything as though it would last forever. A little while, and you will close your eyes; and someone else will already be mourning the one who carried you out.
Commentary
A familiar leaf image extends mortality to children, critics, admirers, and the keepers of posthumous fame. The opening assumes principles already absorbed deeply enough for a brief reminder to reactivate them. The diminutive leaves then gather emotionally different attachments into a shared short duration. Wind and woodland continue the concrete seasonal setting. The final turn includes the person who will carry the speaker out, so even the immediate witness of his death cannot provide lasting security.
10.34.1 Steeped follows the printed reading, while the biting image belongs to an alternative. Leopold prints δεδευμένῳ and reports the other participle in the apparatus. The reading represents principles as having soaked into the person sufficiently for a small reminder to work. A sharper image in another version may be intelligible, but it should not be treated as the imagery of this pin.
10.34.1 Woodland continues the leaf image rather than automatically invoking philosophical matter. LSJ distinguishes the concrete woodland sense from material and philosophical uses. Leaves, wind, spring, and replacement growth give the immediate setting for the concrete choice here. The repeated diminutives also connect children, applause, criticism, and later fame within that seasonal image; a uniform technical translation would weaken the local texture.
10.35
Τὸν ὑγιαίνοντα ὀφθαλμὸν πάντα ὁρᾶν δεῖ τὰ ὁρατὰ καὶ μὴ λέγειν· τὰ χλωρὰ θέλω· τοῦτο γὰρ ὀφθαλμιῶντός ἐστι. καὶ τὴν ὑγιαίνουσαν ἀκοὴν καὶ ὄσφρησιν εἰς πάντα δεῖ τὰ ἀκουστὰ καὶ ὀσφραντὰ ἑτοίμην εἶναι, καὶ τὸν ὑγιαίνοντα στόμαχον πρὸς πάντα τὰ τρόφιμα ὁμοίως ἔχειν ὡς μύλην πρὸς πάντα ὅσα ἀλέσουσα κατεσκεύασται. καὶ τοίνυν τὴν ὑγιαίνουσαν διάνοιαν πρὸς πάντα δεῖ τὰ συμβαίνοντα ἑτοίμην εἶναι, ἡ δὲ λέγουσα· τὰ τεκνία σῳζέσθω, καί· πάντες ὅ τι ἂν πράξω ἐπαινείτωσαν, ὀφθαλμός ἐστι τὰ χλωρὰ ζητῶν ἢ ὀδόντες τὰ ἁπαλά.
A healthy eye must see everything visible, not say, “I want green things.” That is what an ailing eye does. Healthy hearing and smell must be ready for everything audible and everything that can be smelled, and a healthy stomach must face all nourishment as a mill faces everything it was built to grind. So a healthy mind too must be ready for everything that happens. The mind that says, “Let my little children be safe,” and “Let everyone praise whatever I do,” is an eye seeking green things or teeth seeking soft things.
Commentary
The analogy of healthy organs challenges a mind that demands only selected events. Sight, hearing, smell, and digestion are measured by readiness for their proper range of objects. The mind is then asked to meet its range with the same readiness. The wishes for children’s safety and universal praise are intentionally difficult examples of restrictive demands. The argument concerns conditions imposed on accepting events; it does not describe every practical act of caring for children as a disease.
10.36
Οὐδείς ἐστιν οὕτως εὔποτμος ᾧ ἀποθνῄσκοντι οὐ παρεστήξονταί τινες ἀσπαζόμενοι τὸ συμβαῖνον κακόν. σπουδαῖος καὶ σοφὸς ἦν· μὴ τὸ πανύστατον ἔσται τις ὁ καθ’ αὑτὸν λέγων· ἀναπνεύσομέν ποτε ἀπὸ τούτου τοῦ παιδαγωγοῦ; χαλεπὸς μὲν οὐδενὶ ἡμῶν ἦν, ἀλλὰ ᾐσθανόμην ὅτι ἡσυχῇ καταγινώσκει ἡμῶν. ταῦτα μὲν οὖν ἐπὶ τοῦ σπουδαίου, ἐφ’ ἡμῶν δὲ πόσα ἄλλα ἐστί, δι’ ἃ πολὺς ὁ ἀπαλλακτιῶν ἡμῶν. τοῦτο οὖν ἐννοήσεις ἀποθνῄσκων καὶ εὐκολώτερον ἐξελεύσῃ, λογιζόμενος· ἐκ τοιούτου βίου ἀπέρχομαι, ἐν ᾧ αὐτοὶ οἱ κοινωνοί, ὑπὲρ ὧν τὰ τοσαῦτα ἠγωνισάμην, ηὐξάμην, ἐφρόντισα, αὐτοὶ ἐκεῖνοι θέλουσί με ὑπάγειν, ἄλλην τινὰ τυχὸν ἐκ τούτου ῥᾳστώνην ἐλπίζοντες. τί ἂν οὖν τις ἀντέχοιτο τῆς ἐνταῦθα μακροτέρας διατριβῆς; μὴ μέντοι διὰ τοῦτο ἔλαττον εὐμενὴς αὐτοῖς ἄπιθι, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἴδιον ἔθος διασῴζων, φίλος καὶ εὔνους καὶ ἵλεως· καὶ μὴ πάλιν ὡς ἀποσπώμενος, ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τοῦ εὐθανατοῦντος εὐκόλως τὸ ψυχάριον ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος ἐξειλεῖται, τοιαύτην καὶ τὴν ἀπὸ τούτων ἀποχώρησιν δεῖ γίνεσθαι· καὶ γὰρ τούτοις ἡ φύσις συνῆψε καὶ συνέκρινεν, ἀλλὰ νῦν διαλύει. διαλύομαι ὡς ἀπὸ οἰκείων μέν, οὐ μὴν ἀνθελκόμενος ἀλλʼ ἀβιάστως· ἓν γὰρ καὶ τοῦτο τῶν κατὰ φύσιν.
No one is so fortunate that some people will not stand beside them as they die and welcome the misfortune. He was earnest and wise: will there not at least be someone who says privately, “At last we will have a breathing space from this schoolmaster! He was harsh with none of us, but I felt that he quietly condemned us”? So much for the earnest person. As for us, how many other things make many people long to be rid of us! Think of this, then, as you die, and you will leave more easily, reckoning: I am departing from a life in which my very companions, for whom I struggled, prayed, and cared so much, these very people want me to go, perhaps hoping for some other relief from it. Why, then, should anyone cling to a longer stay here? Yet do not go away with less goodwill toward them on this account. Preserve your own character: friendly, well-disposed, gracious. Nor, again, as though being torn away. As the little soul is easily unwound from the body in someone who dies well, so should your withdrawal from them occur. For nature joined and combined you with them, but now separates you. I part from them as from my own people, yet without resisting the pull, without constraint. This too is one of the things according to nature.
Commentary
Imagining relief at one’s death must not become a reason to withdraw goodwill. Even the wise person may be resented as a silent judge; the turn to us then admits more ordinary grounds for others’ impatience. Such thoughts can loosen attachment to staying, but the explicit counterinstruction protects friendship and graciousness. Nature’s earlier joining and present separation give the ending its form: departure remains separation from one’s own people rather than vindictive rejection of them.
10.37
Ἔθισον ἐπὶ παντός, ὡς οἷόν τε, τοῦ πρασσομένου ὑπό τινος ἐπιζητεῖν κατὰ σαυτόν· οὗτος τοῦτο ἐπὶ τί ἀναφέρει; ἄρχου δὲ ἀπὸ σαυτοῦ καὶ σαυτὸν πρῶτον ἐξέταζε.
Make a habit, as far as possible, of asking yourself about everything anyone does: to what end does this person refer this action? Begin with yourself; examine yourself first.
Commentary
Inquiry into another’s purpose begins with examination of one’s own. The habit sought is to ask what end an action serves, as far as this can be done. The final instruction establishes an order of application, making the observer answerable to the same question. It thus limits an exercise that might otherwise become constant scrutiny of others without self-correction.
10.38
Μέμνησο ὅτι τὸ νευροσπαστοῦν ἐστιν ἐκεῖνο τὸ ἔνδον ἐγκεκρυμμένον· ἐκεῖνο ῥητορεία, ἐκεῖνο ζωή, ἐκεῖνο, εἰ δεῖ εἰπεῖν, ἄνθρωπος. μηδέποτε συμπεριφαντάζου τὸ περικείμενον ἀγγειῶδες καὶ τὰ ὀργάνια ταῦτα τὰ περιπεπλασμένα· ὅμοια γάρ ἐστι σκεπάρνῳ, μόνον διαφέροντα, καθότι προσφυῆ ἐστιν. ἐπεί τοι οὐ μᾶλλόν τι τούτων ὄφελός ἐστι τῶν μορίων χωρὶς τῆς κινούσης καὶ ἰσχούσης αὐτὰ αἰτίας, ἢ τῆς κερκίδος τῇ ὑφαντρίᾳ καὶ τοῦ καλάμου τῷ γράφοντι καὶ τοῦ μαστιγίου τῷ ἡνιόχῳ.
Remember that what pulls the strings is that thing hidden within. That is eloquence, that is life, that—if one must say it—is the human being. Never include in your conception the vessel-like covering and these little instruments molded around it. They are like an adze, differing only because they grow attached. Without the cause that moves and controls them, these members are no more use than the shuttle to the woman weaving, the reed to the writer, or the whip to the charioteer.
Commentary
The closing tool analogy locates agency in the hidden cause that directs bodily instruments. The string-pulling image distinguishes the inner source of activity from its covering and attached members. Tools need an agent, and their being naturally attached does not erase that dependence. The sequence that names this source eloquence, life, and human being is textually doubtful, especially its first predicate. The analogy can be explained without silently replacing that reading or treating it as a settled definition of the person.
10.38.1 Eloquence preserves a printed predicate that the editor explicitly doubts. The main text contains ῥητορεία, and the apparatus says that the passage scarcely seems sound. Retaining its ordinary sense records the source rather than solving the problem. The clearer string-pulling and tool analogies can support an interpretation of inner agency, but they cannot silently turn the doubtful predicate into activity or another smoother term.
10.38.1 The inner cause is said both to move and to restrain the bodily instruments. The holding-back sense of ἴσχω supports controls as a counterpart to initiating movement. The examples then keep agent and implement distinct: the weaving woman, writer, and charioteer each use a tool. The female form for the weaver is explicit; its preservation belongs to the concrete comparison rather than an added claim about all historical weavers.