BOOK III
we come each moment nearer to death, but also because our insight into facts and our close touch of them is gradually ceasing even before we die.
2. Such things as this also we ought to note with care, that the accessories too of natural operations have a charm and attractiveness of their own. For instance, when bread is in the baking, some of the parts split open, and these very fissures, though in a sense thwarting the bread-maker's design, have an appropriateness of their own and in a peculiar way stimulate the desire for food. Again when figs are at their ripest, they gape open; and in olives that are ready to fall their very approach to over-ripeness gives a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the full ears of corn bending downwards, and the lion's beetling brows, and the foam dripping from the jaws of the wild-boar,[1] and many other things, though, if looked at apart from their setting, they are far from being comely, yet, as resultants from the operations of Nature, lend them an added charm and excite our admiration.
And so, if a man has sensibility and a deeper insight into the workings of the Universe, scarcely anything, though it exist only as a secondary consequence to something else, but will seem to him to form in its own peculiar way a pleasing adjunct to the whole. And he will look on the actual gaping jaws[2] of wild beasts[3] with no less pleasure than the representations of them by limners and modellers; and he will be able to see in the aged of either sex a mature prime and comely ripeness, and gaze with chaste eyes
- ↑ A very fine early medallion shows Marcus in full chase after a wild boar (Grueber, Plate xviii.). cp. Dio 71. 36, § 2, σὺς ἀγρίους ἐν θήρᾳ κατέβαλλεν ἀπὸ ἵππου; Fronto, ad Cæs. iii. 20; iv. 5; Capit. iv. 9.
- ↑ iv. 36.
- ↑ Such are the things Marcus noticed in the amphitheatre, and not the bloodshed which his soul abhorred (Dio 71. 29, § 3).
