ENGLISH COMMENTARY
effluence (ch. 1). Then follows the statement of his duty as a Roman and a man, which is to be done each day as if it were the last. The duty is expressed in five precepts, which are repeated positively in ch. 16: content with the station assigned by his destiny; regard for reason, which eschews passion, especially anger; resists pleasure and pain, hypocrisy, and self-love; forbids a life without purpose. These few precepts of practice correspond to the few doctrines of theory given in ch. 3. They afford leisure from alien imaginations, ensure unaffected dignity, natural love of the kind, freedom and justice (which in the Stoic system includes benevolence), and thus permit a man to live the smooth and godlike life.
Ch. 6. To do wrong to the self is contrasted with paying honour and reverence to the self and the Divinity within. The word Marcus uses for wrong or outrage is in Greek tragedy that which begets the self-willed autocrat. Hesiod opposes this vice to reverence in a passage which Marcus paraphrases in v. 33. Again he says: 'reverence and the honour of your own thinking self will reconcile you to yourself, your neighbour and the gods,'[1] the three aspects of duty emphasized above.
By Plato temperance and self-control are opposed to violence and wrong, but Marcus prefers a word which Democritus first used in the sense of self-reverence. He often couples it with faith or truth or simplicity, using it only once in its older sense of modesty. Dr. Gilbert Murray says: 'if you look into the history of later Greek Ethics, it is rather a surprise to find how small a place is occupied by Aidôs.'[2] Marcus perhaps chose the word partly as appropriate to translate the Roman verecundia, partly in need of a word for one of the triad 'self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control', partly as marking the contrast with the despot's outrage of his subjects and himself, the shamelessness of a Nero or Domitian. 'Do not become a Caesar, do not be dyed with the purple', he says,[3] and he repeatedly shows his keen sense of the dangers of absolutism, of the wilful violence of which Seneca makes Caligula the awful example. He may then have himself felt the peculiar need of that sense of shame which is, in Dr.
