ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 26. This is known from Seneca to have been a precept of Epicurus. Marcus himself prescribes the rule in vi. 48.
Ch. 27. Marcus has a similar reflection at vii. 47. In the fragments of the Pythagorean school, which were revived in the first century b.c., this maxim is associated with 'following God', which seems originally to have meant moving in harmony with the celestial bodies (x. 11).
Ch. 28. What Socrates answered is nowhere preserved. Xanthippe is by tradition the wise man's scold. There is little contemporary evidence of this, and Burnet has suggested that she was in fact a lady of high birth. He argues from her name (which belonged to the family of Pericles) and Lamprocles, their eldest son's name. There is something amusing to the vulgar in such stories at the expense of great men, and soon they are believed. Similarly it is probably gossip and spite that have injured the fair name of both Faustina and her mother.
Ch. 29. A form of a famous proverb referred to by Democritus, Aristophanes, and Aristotle.
Ch. 30. The quotation was used probably to illustrate the truth that servility indicates the absence of reason. Originally the word translated reason may have meant the right of speech, reserved for freemen, or even the ability in a slave to do more than obey an order.
Chs. 31–2. The point of these quotations is even more obscure than that of the rest. The second has a possible connexion with the sensitiveness to criticism which seems often to disturb the author.
Chapter 30 and both these quotations belong to the traditional literature of consolation.
Chs. 33–9. These fragments are either condensed summaries of extant chapters of Epictetus or are, it is thought, fragments from lost chapters of Arrian's Memoirs of that writer.
BOOK XII
This Book appears to have been left unfinished, or rather consists partly of incomplete work; mixed with careful chapters are a number of mere jottings. See, for instance, ch. 8. Others
