ENGLISH COMMENTARY
not a question which we can or should trouble about, we should be satisfied to resign ourselves to the rule of Nature and the ruler of the Universe. What has he said elsewhere? 'Your own frame is bound either to be scattered into atoms or your own spirit to be extinguished or else to change its place and to be stationed somewhere else' (vii. 32). Different though his cherished philosophy is from the confident atomism of the Epicureans, realizing though he does that there is no final answer to his obstinate questionings within the limits of pure reason, he holds as strongly as the great Latin poet that 'this terror and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the sun's rays or the lucid shafts of day (that is to say, by no evidence of the senses), but by the perceived form and inner principle of Nature'.[1]
Ch. 8. The suggestion for these reflections on Names or Titles appears to be a chapter in Epictetus, headed 'How Duties may be discovered from Names', where it is said that 'each of the names, when we ponder upon it, gives an outline or model for the actions associated with it'.
Marcus may also have been reflecting upon the ascriptions current upon his own coins. Thus Hadrian is entitled Clement, Indulgent, Just, Tranquil, Patient in illness. Here Marcus avoids imperial titles, preferring names that belong to a good man or a philosopher. There is a third influence at work, that love for etymology which is characteristic of him, mixed perhaps with the almost superstitious reverence in antiquity for proper names, which made the derivation of Apollo or Ajax or Oedipus a thing of serious import.
The last section of the chapter is an afterthought. He seems to mean that worshippers bend the knee at the sacred name, whereas what God desires is that man should be made and make himself into His likeness; this can only be done by living the life appropriate to man, as the fig-tree bears its fruit in due season and as each creature pursues its appointed work (v. 6).
The incidental reference to the Islands of the Blest or the Fortunate Isles is to the old belief in some islands in the far West, where heroes enjoyed an existence of quiet and content, without a divorce of soul from body. The expression, which was already
- ↑ Lucr. i. 146; ii. 59; iii. 91; vi. 39.
