ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The question of the propriety of anger, in the form of just indignation, was at issue between the Peripatetic school (the followers of Aristotle and Theophrastus) and the Stoics. It is interesting, as exhibiting Marcus' range of study and impartiality, to find him commending Theophrastus here, as elsewhere he speaks with commendation of Epicurus.[1]
Ch. 11. This and the next chapter are principally directed to remove the fear of death, but Marcus uses them to bring out some of his favourite philosophic positions.
§ 1. To leave this mortal life is not a ground of fear, if there are gods, for they will bestow not evil but good. His meaning is, and here he agrees with the Epicureans, that what is beyond the grave is not an existence of darkness and suffering.[2]
But if the gods do not exist or if, as the Epicureans hold, they take no care for men, wherefore should I live in a world devoid of gods and Providence?
§ 2. But the gods do exist and make human life their care, and they have put it in man's power to avoid true evils, that is, moral failure. If anything else that befalls man were evil, they would have put it in man's power to avoid it. He leaves the conclusion unexpressed, viz. that as man cannot escape what are commonly called evils, they cannot actually be evils.
§ 3. We know that so-called goods and evils befall men indifferently; there is no exemption of the good man from suffering or of the bad man from blessings. These goods and evils cannot be true goods and evils or the gods would not have allowed them. We cannot believe that they would have allowed them in ignorance, or have consciously permitted them because they were not strong enough or wise enough to prevent or correct them.
§ 4. And certainly death and life, honour and dishonour, wealth and poverty, pain and pleasure fall to good and bad indifferently; but they are morally neither good nor evil, because what does not make a man morally worse cannot make his life worse. They are therefore neither good nor evil.
