ENGLISH COMMENTARY
(33) if the activity is appropriate, the pain or pleasure it may bring are of as little moment as the labour which attends the limbs in their functions. Moreover (34), if pain and labour are not, as such, evils, neither are pleasures, as such, goods, as you may see from the pleasures of evil men.
Ch. 35. Man's peculiar art, to live by reason, is one which he shares with the gods. He should respect this, as the builder and the physician refuse to neglect their arts and are guided by them. Grote[1] calls this a striking statement of the 'fundamental analogy, which governed the reasoning of Socrates, between the special professions and social living generally—transferring to the latter the ideas of a preconceived End, a Theory, and a regulated Practice or Art, which are observed in the former.' We are to rise, that is, above merely private ends. In the light of the development of the professions, it is remarkable to find the physician and the master builder still classed as mere artisans. Galen[2], on the contrary, puts medicine on a level with the liberal arts, music, painting, and sculpture. When we come down to Sir Thomas Browne, medicine is classed with law and divinity.
Ch. 36. The claim to partake in reason with the gods is at once corrected by reflection upon the relative pettiness of man's life and his earthly habitation. Here too, he says, there is much that appears to be evil and harmful.[3] We are not, however, to regard physical evil as alien to Nature, but to see in it a necessary consequence, directly planned by or arising as a subordinate consequence from the source of all good. When we see physical evil, we are to dwell in thought upon the eternal Fountain of good; in Wordsworth's phrase 'that imperial palace whence we came'.
The reference to Mount Athos may depend upon a favourite rhetorical theme,[4] the canal made by Xerxes during his war with Greece, or Marcus may be recalling the striking effect of grandeur made by the rugged peninsula as you sail past it. In this case he will be writing after a.d. 175–6 when he visited the East.
Ch. 37. 'There is nothing new under the sun', a familiar theme.[5]
