Meditations
It is from Heraclitus that Marcus derives one of his most memorable motifs, that of the unstable flux of time and matter in whic ...
Diogenes of Sinope, were united less by doctrine than by a common attitude, namely their contempt for societal institutions and ...
component atoms. This process is not only inevitable, but harmless, for the simple reason that after death there is no “us” to s ...
(12.34). But other entries suggest a less dismissive attitude. Marcus quotes with apparent approval Epicurus’s account of his ow ...
book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus’s original—the ...
emperors” (10.31). How are we to categorize the Meditations? It is not a diary, at least in the conventional sense. The entries ...
of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment.” On this readi ...
individual entries begin and end; in some cases this is a question Marcus himself might not have been able to answer.^8 A specia ...
Book 1) we find the same voice, the same themes; Marcus’s thought does not change or develop noticeably from one book to another ...
his own time. Portions of two books (7 and 11) consist simply of quotations. Some entries appear to be rough drafts for others; ...
Not a dancer but a wrestler... (7.61) To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. (8.33) The philosophical t ...
noticeable features of Marcus’s prose—namely, his tendency to string together pairs of near-synonymous words and phrases, as if ...
To try to extract a sustained and coherent argument from the Meditations as a whole would be an unprofitable exercise. It is sim ...
This theme is not specific to Stoicism. We meet it at every turn in ancient literature. Marcus himself quotes the famous passage ...
hardly be quoted or alluded to, but there is a note of melancholy that runs through the work that one can only call Vergilian. O ...
agricultural rhythms of the Mediterranean world, with its flocks, herds, and vines, its seasons of sowing and harvesting, its gr ...
time accepting. The gods care for mortals, he reminds himself, “and you—on the verge of death—you still refuse to care for them. ...
those who love the book cannot deny that there is something impoverishing about the view of human life it presents. Matthew Arno ...
orthodox Stoic doctrine endows it. It is not easy to see why one should pray to a power whose decisions one can hardly hope to i ...
half-conscious awareness that the answer Stoicism offered was not in every respect satisfactory. Later Influence How or by whom ...
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