ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 51. Death and a stormy passage are both inevitable.
Ch. 52. A Spartan saying reinterpreted.
Even if the choice of these aphorisms is Marcus', and even if some bear evidence of his own composition, yet the passages can hardly, as I have said elsewhere, have been intended for their present place. They do indeed throw light upon the mind of Marcus, for if he arranged them in their present mutual relation it is easy to appreciate our embarrassment in following the sequence of his thought elsewhere. He seems to revolve a limited group of problems, to return to them again and again, but not in the same order, nor in the same words. There is hardly a verbal repetition in the Meditations, and the thread which joins the thoughts is the continuity of an exalted and beautiful mind.
Elter has endeavoured to prove that many of the fragments of poetry used by Marcus are derived from a collection made by Chrysippus. This, however, applies only to a handful; the remainder of his quotations show a familiar acquaintance with Greek literature such as we should expect from one whose early letters exhibit a wide and serious study of Latin authors. Thus of the four selections from Plato (vii. 35, 44, 45, 46) the two famous places from the Apology are often cited (at least by writers of a later date than Marcus), but the striking extracts from the Gorgias and the Republic are quoted, I think, nowhere else.
Ch. 33. Herrick translated this saying of Epicurus:[1]
Grief if't be great, 'tis short: if long, 'tis light,
and Thomas More[2] had answered it in Latin, which may be rendered:
Long grief's not light: grave grief is never short,
thus grasping either horn of the dilemma.
Epicurus had noticed a fact of sensibility. 'Pains are intermittent; even though their cause persists, there comes a point where the capacity for suffering is for the time exhausted, and then a period of rest begins during which force is gathered for renewed suffering.'[3] Epicurus himself endured great pain with wonderful fortitude.
