ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch, 8. Social and political unity were illustrated from the parable of the body and its members,[1] so here we meet the image of the tree and its branches, with the further illustration of 'grafting'.[2] The last simile is very familiar from St. Paul's use of it in Romans.[3] Neither writer draws attention to the importance in horticulture of grafting a cultivated branch or bud upon a wild stock. Marcus is even mistaken as to the result of grafting a cultivated branch upon its parent tree; he says that the gardeners are wrong to suppose that the graft will ever recover its full union with the original stock.
Ch. 9. The last words convey the main point of this chapter. Both the coward and the unsocial citizen are deserters from duty, they break the ranks of the body politic.[4] The earlier part refers to another question debated in the schools. The Stoics were at issue both with the followers of Aristotle, the Peripatetics, and with the Epicureans as to the place of anger in human life.[5] Their opponents emphasized the advantage to society and the individual of anger, especially in the form of moral indignation, Marcus holds, with his school, that anger, like every other passion, is a weakness, not a strength. Wrath then is to be resisted as much as sorrow or pleasure, if a man is to fulfil his duty.[6]
In his moral writings Galen, whose mother, he tells us, was liable to violent fits of temper, lays frequent stress upon the unreasoning anger in which Romans of high rank indulged. He tells, for example,[7] how the Emperor Hadrian once blinded a servant in one eye. He inquired how he might make amends, and the victim replied by asking for the return of his eye.
Ch. 10. The argument is condensed and the ending difficult. First Marcus says that every 'nature', i.e. living organism, is superior to human art, because the arts and crafts are, in their processes, imitations of natural products. He means that spinning is suggested by the spider's web; weaving, perhaps, by the nests of birds. The crafts achieve man's purposes by the right use of their materials, and especially by a subordination of the lower to the higher, of means to ends, and of ancillary to architectonic arts.
