ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Without Providence these images suggest fatalism, with Providence they demand trust and resignation; 'as he that flings a ball to the ground or to a wall intends in that action that that ball should return back, so even now, when God does throw me down, it is the way that He hath chosen to return me to Himself'[1] (viii. 45).
Chs. 24–5. The comparison of the bath to terrene filth shows the fastidious temperament of Marcus. From it he passes to personal reminiscences of the death of relatives and acquaintances, which serve to recall himself to the certainty of his own end, with the uncertain future beyond.
He begins with Domitia Lucilla, his mother, who lost her husband Annius Verus when Marcus was a child; passes to Maximus, his philosophy teacher (i. 15; 16. 10; 17. 5), and Secunda his wife; thence to Diotimus and Epitynchanus, perhaps favourites of Hadrian. Last he mentions Hadrian and acute minds of his circle, names of which we know nothing, so that they fitly illustrate to us his sad moral of mortality and oblivion. And so he passes to his aunt, the Empress Faustina the elder, who died early in the reign of Pius.
Chs. 26–7. Joy, the joy of man's characteristic activities, is contrasted with sorrow and death. The three fundamental moral relations to self, to neighbour, and to Universal nature are outlined in two different ways.
Chs. 28–9. Once more the reminder that natural reason and right judgement can vanquish sorrow and wipe out all weak, idle, and evil fancies, so that a man may win calm and peace of soul.
Chs. 30–1. A brief exhortation to use language which rings true in addressing the Senate leads him to think of older scenes in what was still an august body, though its power was gone. There follows the most effective of his many aphorisms upon time's passage and death's equality.
In a long series of single names, the characters of Rome's golden age, the persons of the court of Augustus Caesar file before the reader, and then, to point the moral, he dwells for a moment upon the memorials with which Rome's street of tombs, the Via Appia, is crowded—records of the anxious care of families to
- ↑ Donne, Sermon cxi, Alford, vol. iv, p. 544.
