hardly be quoted or alluded to, but there is a note of
melancholy that runs through the work that one can only call
Vergilian.
Other concerns surface as well. A number of entries
discuss methods of dealing with pain or bodily weakness of
other sorts. “When you have trouble getting out of bed.. .”
begin several entries (5.1, 8.12). A persistent motif is the
need to restrain anger and irritation with other people, to put
up with their incompetence or malice, to show them the
errors of their ways. Several entries focus on the frustrations
of life at court, nowhere more present than when Marcus tells
himself to stop complaining about them (8.9). He contrasts
the court against philosophy as a stepmother against a mother
—to be visited out of duty, but not someone we can really
love (6.12). Yet the court need not be an obstacle: it can be a
challenge, even an opportunity. One can lead a good life
anywhere, even at court, as Antoninus showed (5.16, 1.16).
“No role [is] so well suited to philosophy,” Marcus tells
himself, “as the one you happen to be in right now” (11.7).
A more subtle clue to Marcus’s personality is the imagery
that he prefers. It is worth noting, for example, how many
images of nature occur in the Meditations. Many readers
have been struck by Meditations 3.2, with its evocation of
“nature’s inadvertence” in baking bread or ripening figs,
olives, and stalks of wheat. Metaphors and offhand
comparisons in other entries evoke the pastoral and