BOOK X
one thing well in life, that thou hast quitted it thus. Howbeit, to keep these attributes in mind it will assist thee greatly if thou bear the Gods in mind, and that it is not flattery they crave but for all rational things to be conformed to their likeness,[1] and that man should do a man's work, as the fig tree does the work of a fig-tree, the dog of a dog, and the bee of a bee.
9. Stage-apery, warfare, cowardice, torpor, servility—these will day by day obliterate all those holy principles of thine which, as a student of Nature,[2] thou dost conceive and accept. But thou must regard and do everything in such a way that at one and the same time the present task may be carried through, and full play given to the faculty of pure thought, and that the self-confidence engendered by a knowledge of each individual thing be kept intact, unobtruded yet unconcealed.
When wilt thou find thy delight in simplicity? When in dignity? When in the knowledge of each separate thing, what it is in its essence, what place it fills in the Universe, how long it is formed by Nature to subsist, what are its component parts, to whom it can pertain, and who can bestow and take it away?
10. A spider prides itself on capturing a fly; one man on catching a hare, another on netting a sprat, another on taking wild boars, another bears, another Sarmatians.[3] Are not these brigands, if thou test their principles?
- ↑ cp. Diog. Laert. Plato, 42; Ignat. Eph. §§ 1, 10; Justin, Apol. i. 21; Diogn. Ep. § 10; Julian, Conviv. 427. 21, puts similar words in the mouth of Marcus.
- ↑ ἀφυσιολογήτως, would mean without due study of Nature.
- ↑ See Domaszewski, Marcus-Saüle Plates, 62. 102, for Marcus "taking Sarmatians"; and cp. the story of Alexander and the Scythian, Quintus Curtius vii. 8.
