ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 24. Whether we accept Zeno's view of death or that of Epicurus, the same fate awaits conqueror and clown. The moral to be drawn is: 'Will you then demur and think that you do not deserve to die?' Perhaps 'Alexander the Great and his stable boy' was a proverbial saying, like 'Imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay.'
In any case Marcus seems to have in mind the passage in Lucretius[1] where Scipio, the conqueror of Carthage, 'renders his bones to the ground like the lowest of his household', a passage too which ends with a satire upon the man immersed in sleep, who strays like a drunken man:
But still uncertain, with thyself at strife,
Thou wander'st in the Labyrinth of life.[2]
T. H. Huxley[3] makes a curious reflection upon the atoms of our body: 'It is very possible that atoms which once formed an integral part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar may now enter into the composition of Caesar, the housedog in an English homestead.'
Ch. 25. Reflections upon the redistribution of material particles, or (as the Stoics say) of the elements and the seminal principles, leads to a reflection upon a problem already touched upon in iv. 21. 'How is there room in the Universe for all these changing incidents of life and death?' Here he draws an analogy from man's organism on the one hand, with its complication of processes at any given moment, and man's mind with its multiplicity of impressions, all physically determined, to the Universe on the other, with its infinity of simultaneous and successive changes. Similar considerations led Epictetus[4] to ask why God should not be able to oversee all things, to be present everywhere in the Universe, as mind and consciousness are everywhere present in man's constitution.
Chs. 26–7. On Patience, Tolerance, and Forbearance. The curious illustration from spelling his name seems to mean that as a name is composed of definite elements—letters or syllables—so duty is made up of certain 'numbers'.[5] Then he goes on to say
