ENGLISH COMMENTARY
repeated severance makes it harder to heal the breach (xi. 8), and that in all Nature only rational beings are found to forget the law of social unity (ix. 9).
Ch. 35. He goes back to what he had touched upon in ch. 32, the right treatment of obstacles in the path of chosen activity. Man, like Nature, can convert obstacles to the necessary order (ch. 50).
Ch. 36. Just as imagination exaggerates its own or another's suffering or misrepresents the actual reality, so it runs off to future anxieties when it should mirror faithfully the present experience. When isolated from 'past regret and future fears', the present shrinks to its true size and is tolerable:
What need a man forestall his date of grief
And run to meet what he would most avoid.[1]
Ch. 37. The folly of protracted mourning for the dead is illustrated by four names, only one of which is otherwise known. Panthea was a beautiful woman from Smyrna, who returned with L. Aurelius Verus after the Parthian war of a.d. 161–6. Her talents of mind and bodily charms are the subject of a brilliant study by Lucian.[2]
Ch. 38. The text here is corrupt and the meaning and origin of the saying unknown.
Ch. 39. Justice is one of the four cardinal virtues, but also, as the root of social good conduct, it enjoys a certain primacy over the others. Moreover, the Stoics taught the unity of virtue, so that the Greek word translated justice often stands for all righteousness.
What Marcus says, then, is that there is no conflict between the various virtues or aspects of right conduct, but that if pleasure be treated as an end, it must be controlled (even in the view of Epicurus) and is therefore subordinate to goodness.
Chs. 40–1. The mention of pleasure leads to this discussion of pain or sorrow, which may be defined as the sense of hindrance to life and living activity.
First he repeats his principle that pleasure and pain depend upon moral judgement. If that is sound, the man himself is secure. 'But', an objector says, 'I am not pure reason.' The
