ENGLISH COMMENTARY
judgement is enlightened; the good man corrects his false imaginations, distinguishes what is good, sees the good even in apparent evil. The bad, on the other hand, have a tainted imagination, in their ignorance they cannot distinguish light from darkness, as he said in ch. 13, to which this chapter perhaps originally belonged.
The same is true of the intellectual life; truth, for the Stoics, resulted from acquiescence, after due scrutiny, in a clear and distinct apprehension. Bion[1] puts well and simply what Marcus means: 'the pain of things arises because of man's judgement (the word Monimus used in the sense of "fancy"); judge of them like Socrates: you will suffer no pain; judge of them amiss: you will be hurt by your own moods, your own false opinion.' So Marcus says:[2] 'Remove the judgement: with it the "I am hurt" is removed; remove the "I am hurt": the hurt itself is gone.'
Ch. 16. Marcus here sums up much of what he has been saying before. There are five ways in which the soul of man does outrage to itself, abandons self-reverence.[3] By this outrage it becomes a foreign growth in the Universe, superfluous and injurious to the whole. 'The Stoics used to say that the selfish man is a cancer in the Universe . . . the parallel is scientifically exact.'[4] Such evil, Marcus says, is 'disobedience to the reason and ordinance of the most reverend City and Commonwealth'.
This is his first mention of the greatest of Stoic ideas, the Eternal City in which all outward differences of race, creed, station, and gifts disappear beside the power of reason, which enables men to live in equal communion with one another and the gods.
From one point of view the Roman Empire represented to contemporary thinkers this realm of equal right and law. Polybius,[5] the Greek historian, had seen this in the days of the younger Scipio; Plutarch[6] recognized the truth in the first century a.d. The Romans, he thought, were realizing what Alexander the Great had begun. Marcus himself is conscious of this.[7] From a second and deeper standpoint, the Emperor is suggesting the City of the Universe (St. Augustine's Civitas Dei, Kant's Kingdom
