Book II

1 Say to yourself at dawn: today I shall meet the meddlesome, the ungrateful, the insolent, the treacherous, the envious and the unsociable. All these things have come upon them through their ignorance of good and evil. But I, who have seen 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 as sharing the same blood or seed, but as sharing the same mind and the same portion of the divine — I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no one can involve me in what is shameful, 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 to be vexed with someone and to turn away from him is to work against him.

2 Whatever it is that I am, it is a little flesh, a little breath, and the ruling mind. Despise the flesh: blood and bones and a mesh woven of nerves, veins and arteries. Consider too what the breath is: wind, and never the same, but every moment breathed out and drawn in again. The third, then, is the ruling mind. Think of it this way: you are an old man; do not let this part be a slave any longer, do not let it be jerked about any longer like a puppet by unsocial impulses, do not let it any longer resent what is allotted to it now or fear what is to come.

3 The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of fortune are not without nature, nor apart from the weaving and interlacing of the things governed by providence. All things flow from there; and there is also necessity, and what is beneficial to the whole universe, of which you are a part. For every part of nature, that is good which the nature of the whole brings about and which preserves it; and the universe is preserved by the changes of the elements as well as by the changes of the things compounded of them. Let this be enough for you; let these be your principles. But throw away your thirst for books, so that you do not die grumbling, but cheerful, truly, and grateful to the gods from your heart.

4 Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how many times you have been granted days of grace by the gods and have not used them. It is time at last to perceive of what universe you are a part, and from what governor of the universe you have come forth as an emanation; and that a limit of time has been set for you, which, if you do not use it to clear your mind, will be gone — and the chance will not come again.

5 Every hour, set yourself firmly, as a Roman and a man, to do what is at hand with precise and unaffected dignity, with affection, freedom and justice, and to give yourself rest from all other thoughts. You will give yourself this rest if you do every act as though it were the last of your life, free from all aimlessness, from all passionate turning away from the commands of reason, from all pretence, self-love and discontent with what has been allotted to you. You see how few things a man must master to live a life that flows smoothly and is like the life of the gods; for the gods will ask nothing more of one who keeps these things.

6 Go on, wrong yourself, wrong yourself, my soul; but you will no longer have time to honour yourself. Each of us has only one life, and yours is nearly over, while you have no respect for yourself, but place your own happiness in the souls of others.

7 Do the things that come upon you from outside distract you? Give yourself leisure to learn something good, and stop being whirled about. But you must also guard against the other kind of drifting: for they too are triflers who have worn themselves out with activity in life and yet have no goal to which they direct every impulse and, in a word, every thought.

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

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

10 In comparing faults — as one might compare such things in a general way — Theophrastus¹ says, like a true philosopher, that faults committed through desire are more serious than those committed through anger. For the man who is angry seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and an unconscious contraction; but the one who errs through desire, overcome by pleasure, seems somehow more licentious and more unmanly in his faults. Rightly, then, and in a manner worthy of philosophy, he said that a fault committed with pleasure deserves greater blame than one committed with pain. In general, the one is more like a man who was wronged first and driven to anger by pain; the other has set out to do wrong of his own accord, carried away into action by desire.

11 Do everything, say everything and think everything as one who may depart from life at any moment. To go away from among men, if there are gods, is nothing to fear, for they would not involve you in evil; and if there are no gods, or if they do not care about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe empty of gods or empty of providence?

But there are gods, and they do care about human affairs; and they have put it entirely in man's power not to fall into what is truly evil; and if there were any evil among the rest, they would have provided for that too, so that it would be in everyone's power not to fall into it. And how could what does not make a man worse make his life worse?

The nature of the whole would not have overlooked these things, either through ignorance, or through knowing but being unable to guard against them or set them right; nor would it have made so great a mistake, through lack of power or lack of skill, as to let good and evil fall indiscriminately on good and bad men alike.

Death and life, fame and obscurity, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty: all these fall equally to good men and bad, being neither noble nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

12 How quickly all things vanish — the bodies themselves in the universe, and the memory of them in eternity. What all the things of sense are, especially those that entice us by pleasure, or frighten us by pain, or are trumpeted abroad by vanity — how cheap, contemptible, sordid, perishable and dead: this the power of the mind can observe. Who are these men whose opinions and voices make reputations? What is it to die? — and that if one looks at death by itself, and by analysing the idea of it strips away the fancies that cling to it, he will no longer think it anything but a work of nature; and whoever fears a work of nature is a child. Yet death is not only a work of nature, but also useful to nature. How does man touch god, and with what part of himself, and in what state is that part of man when it does so?

13 Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round everything, "searching the things beneath the earth", as the poet says,² and trying to guess what is in the souls of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is enough to be with the guardian spirit within oneself alone, and to serve it truly. And to serve it is to keep it pure from passion and aimlessness, and from discontent with what comes from gods and men. For what comes from the gods is to be revered for their excellence; what comes from men is to be welcomed because of our kinship, and sometimes, in a way, to be pitied, because of their ignorance of good and evil — a blindness no less than that which robs us of the power to tell white from black.

14 Even if you were going to live three thousand years, or ten times as many, remember that no one loses any other life than the one he is living, nor lives any other life than the one he loses. The longest life and the shortest come to the same. For the present is the same for all, and so what is lost is the same, and what is lost is shown to be a mere instant. No one can lose either the past or the future: how could anyone take from a man what he does not have?

Remember these two things, then: first, that all things from eternity are of the same kind and come round again in cycles, and that it makes no difference whether one sees the same things for a hundred years or two hundred or for an infinite time; second, that the one who lives longest and the one who will die soonest lose the same. For the present is all that a man can be deprived of, since that is all he has, and no one loses what he does not have.

15 "All is opinion." What was said to Monimus the Cynic is plain enough;³ and plain too is the usefulness of the saying, if one takes its substance as far as it is true.

16 The soul of a man wrongs itself most of all when it becomes, as far as it can, an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe; for to be vexed at anything that happens is to secede from nature, in which the natures of all other things are contained. Next, when it turns away from any man, or even sets itself against him intending to harm him, as do the souls of the angry. Third, it wrongs itself when it is overcome by pleasure or pain. Fourth, when it plays a part, and does or says anything falsely and untruthfully. Fifth, when it directs an action or impulse of its own to no aim, but acts at random and without thought, whereas even the smallest things ought to be done with reference to the end; and the end of rational beings is to follow the reason and law of the most venerable of cities and constitutions.

17 Of human life, the time is a point, the substance a flux, perception dim, the composition of the whole body subject to decay, the soul a whirl, fortune hard to read, fame uncertain. In a word: all that belongs to the body is a river, all that belongs to the soul a dream and a vapour; life is a war and a stay in a foreign land; fame after death is oblivion.

What, then, can guide us through? One thing and one thing only: philosophy. And this consists in keeping the guardian spirit within free from violence and harm, master of pleasures and pains, doing nothing at random, nothing falsely or with pretence, not needing another to do or not do anything; accepting what happens and what is allotted to it as coming from the same source from which it came itself; and above all, awaiting death with a cheerful mind, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements of which every living thing is composed. And if it is nothing terrible for the elements themselves that each is continually changing into another, why should anyone look askance at the change and dissolution of them all? It is according to nature; and nothing is evil that is according to nature.

Written at Carnuntum.⁴

1. Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), Aristotle's successor as head of the Lyceum. ↩
2. A line of Pindar quoted by Plato in the Theaetetus. ↩
3. Monimus, a Cynic philosopher of the fourth century BC, taught that "all is opinion". ↩
4. A Roman legionary fortress on the Danube near present-day Vienna, Marcus' headquarters in the wars against the Marcomanni. ↩