ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Marcus clearly means that the fate of our spirit is irrelevant to out present purpose, for we may live here and now in the Eternal City; as Spinoza[1] says: 'the wise man is hardly moved in mind (ch. 22), but conscious by a certain eternal necessity of himself, of God, and of the universe, never ceases to exist, but is always master of a true satisfaction of spirit'.
Ch. 24. Marcus is here referring to discussions upon Tranquillity, in which a favourite text was the saying of Democritus,[2] the spirit of which had been accepted by Epicurus: 'he who intends tranquillity must avoid doing many things, in public and in private, and in what he does must not undertake what exceeds his strength and nature.' What Marcus means is that we are not to avoid public and private obligations, as some Stoics did, and as the Epicureans preferred to do. He is carrying out in this connexion the advice he gave in ch. 3 in regard to retirement. His words are not inconsistent with what Democritus said, but with the interpretation that had been put upon them. He adds a wholesome remark that if we are to avoid superfluous actions, we must control the imaginations and thoughts which lead to them.
An excellent modern book on the avoidance of plain duty through selfish sensitiveness, as a malady of civilized society, is Henri Bordeaux's Peur de vivre; much that he says will be found in Seneca, writing for a similar age.
Chs. 25–6. These chapters put in various ways the effect of carrying out the principles of ch. 24. They repeat what he has said many times already. The last words, 'be sober in relaxation', sum up what he said in reference to Democritus, and may be meant as a kind of parallel to the Epicurean maxim 'live a life which avoids observation'.
Ch. 27. The maxim, so familiar from the earlier Books, that all that comes to pass comes from the Whole (ch. 26), and is necessarily determined and connected, suggests the question: 'Why should we believe that the universe is an ordered system?' The problem is raised again at vi. 10; ix. 39; xi. 18. 1; xii. 14, and by suggestion at vii. 31. The opposed views are those of the Stoics and the Epicureans, which are represented by the antitheses of unity and unification to welter and chance medley; marshalling
