BOOK IV
16. Ere ten days are past, thou shalt rank as a god with them that hold thee now a wild-beast or an ape,[1] if thou but turn back to thy axioms and thy reverence of reason.
17. Behave not as though thou hadst ten thousand years to live. Thy doom hangs over thee. While thou livest, while thou mayest, become good.
18. What richness of leisure doth he gain who has no eye for his neighbour's words or deeds or thoughts,[2] but only for his own doings, that they be just and righteous! Verily it is not for the good man to peer about into the blackness of another's heart,[3] but to 'run straight for the goal with never a glance aside.'
19. He whose heart flutters for after-fame[4] does not reflect that very soon every one of those who remember him, and he himself, will be dead, and their successors again after them, until at last the entire recollection of the man will be extinct, handed on as it is by links that flare up and are quenched. But put the case that those who are to remember are even immortal,[5] and the remembrance immortal, what then is that to thee? To the dead man, I need scarcely say, the praise is nothing, but what is it to the living, except, indeed, in a subsidiary way?[6] For thou dost reject the bounty of nature unseasonably in the present, and clingest to what others shall say of thee hereafter.[7]
- ↑ There was a Greek proverb: ἢ θεὸς ἢ θηρίον (Arist. Pol. i. 2, Eth. vii. 1). Plut. Stoic. Parad. speaks of conversion by philosophy from a θηρίον to a θεός. See Justin's clever application of this proverb, Apol. i. 24.
- ↑ iii. 4 ad init.
- ↑ iv. 28.
- ↑ ii. 17; iii. 10; viii. 44; x. 34.
- ↑ iv. 33.
- ↑ iv. 19, 51; xi. 18, § 5. The Greek word covers the meanings expediency, management, or means to an end. We use it in a sort of double sense in the expression economy of truth.
- ↑ Marcus is perhaps finding real fault with himself for caring so much what people said of him; see Capit. xx. 5; xxix. 5. But the reading is doubtful.
