ENGLISH COMMENTARY
younger contemporary, ends his massive treatise on the Bodily Functions and their Uses by contrasting the 'mire of this body of man', 'a compound of flesh and blood and phlegm and yellow and black bile',[1] with mind's majesty as exhibited in the courses of the sun and moon, the planets, and the stars. A modern cannot recover that ancient sense of the heavenly luminaries as divinities ruling the world and governing themselves according to constant and beneficent law.
Boethius, writing in a.d. 524, carries on the tradition when he thus addresses Philosophy: 'With thy rod thou didst map out for me the paths of the stars and didst frame my manners and my whole method of life to the pattern of the order of the heavens';[2]indeed the wise minister of Theodoric seems to have the Meditations in mind when he writes: 'If by turns you look down to the sordid earth and up to heaven, setting on one side all outward things, by the actual law of sight, at one moment you seem to be in the mire, at another present with the stars.'[3]
Filled with these aspirations, Marcus closes on the familiar note: 'To study man's life, forty years are as ample as a myriad.'
Chs. 50–2. This triad is suggested by what preceded. He inquires what is the destiny of the human spirit; shows that sorrow and death are inevitable and are to be borne as determined by God. Finally he contrasts the rule of force with the modesty, order, and charity of the rightly endowed Reason.
Ch. 50. This passage from the Chrysippus of Euripides was familiar to Roman readers from Lucretius' translation.[4] Vitruvius,[5] the architect of Augustus, mentions it. Philo, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Galen, and Clement of Alexandria all refer to it. Euripides was believed to be giving the doctrine of Anaxagoras, when he ascribes creation to the union of Aether and Earth. Therefore, at death, the earthy returns to earth, the etherial spirit regains the spaces of the sky.
Marcus asks whether this doctrine, which the Epicurean poet, Lucretius, had by a splendid inconsequence accepted, is consistent with his materialist creed of the dissolution of the spirit into the atoms. He produces a marked effect by opposing the beautiful
