ENGLISH COMMENTARY
doubt by Marcus, interpreted as the 'best'. He identifies it elsewhere with Reason (Logos) and its objective expression Law. When he says 'it uses all and orders all', he is probably thinking of Heraclitus,[1] who said of Logos that 'it is as strong as it wills, suffices for all and prevails over all', and perhaps of Pindar's enigmatic saying: 'Law, the lord of all, mortals and immortals, guides with a high hand.'[2]
Ch. 22. He passes from the principle of law to its realization in the State. The test of illegality is injury to the State, not to the individual, so that an imaginary grievance can usually be disposed of by asking whether the supposed wrong injures society. The interpretation of the conclusion of the chapter is uncertain. With the punctuation adopted in the text, the respondent objects that righteous anger is justified in regard to an injury to the State; to this Marcus replies: 'Not anger! you forget that you must instruct him reasonably, that is, show him his mistake.' This is the teaching of Marcus at x. 4 and xi. 13. No doubt there is a reference, however we interpret the words, to a forgotten controversy between the Stoics and the followers of Aristotle. The latter held that anger is given to man to reinforce his reason, a doctrine of Plato in The Republic. The Stoics held that anger, as a passion of the soul, is never to be justified.
It will be seen that the real question involved is the theory of punishment. Those who take the retributive view of punishment censure the Stoic view, as Lactantius did already.
Here Marcus appears to be referring to the actual State; when, however, he speaks, as he does elsewhere, of the Eternal City, he insists that the Whole cannot be injured any more than the good man (v. 25), and we should have expected him to adopt the same view about the actual State (v. 35).
Chs. 23–4. These reflections upon the rapid passage of the world of generation and the littleness of mortal man by comparison with the whole are now familiar to the reader (ii. 17; iv. 43; v. 10. 2). Here they are correctives for anger, elsewhere for pride, distraction and idle complaint. The 'boundless gulf of past and future' probably suggested Pascal's: 'quand je considère la petite durée de ma vie, absorbée dans l'éternité précédant et suivant, je
