Meditations

THE FIFTH BOOK

The fifth book of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations unfolds thirty short reflections, each pressing the Stoic claim that a good life lies within the reach of the rational soul, provided the soul consents to act in agreement with nature.

The book opens with the morning argument: if you are unwilling to rise, ask whether you were born to loll in a warm bed or to do the work of a man. Trees, ants, and bees all pursue their appointed task; the craftsman and the miser sacrifice their bodies for the objects of their affection. Can the common good of human society weigh less? He reminds himself how easy it is to shrug off turbulent imaginings and do what is right without flinching at the reproach of onlookers, who have their own reasons and are not his concern.

The center of gravity is the distinction between true and apparent goods. When one hears prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude named as good, the ear is satisfied; when wealth, pleasure, and honor are so named, the listener still wants more—and the comedian’s joke, that the rich have not a place to void their excrement, lays bare the absurdity. The physician prescribes riding, cold baths, or going barefoot, and the patient accepts the harshness in hope of health. So too the universe prescribes to each man his portion—sickness, loss, or damage—and the Greek word συμβαίνειν, “to fall together,” shows that particular events cohere as square stones cohere in a wall. Reason is self-sufficient in its own operations; outward events are indifferent, and even other men are like the sun, the wind, or a wild beast—capable of hindering some action but never reaching the mind, which can convert every impediment into material for its work. If a wrong is not our own wicked act, and the public is not hurt, what does it concern us? What does not hurt the city cannot hurt any citizen.

Marcus maps the soul’s interior life. He bids himself honor, both in the cosmos and within himself, the rational part that uses and governs all the rest. The chief faculty must not be subject to the body’s pain or pleasure, nor should opinion be added to natural sense. To live with the Gods is to offer them a soul contented with whatever is allotted. Anger at offensive breath or manners is pointless; better to use one’s reason upon another’s reason. If rogues and harlots will not suffer you, leave as one leaves a smoky room—free in will, regulated by the nature of a reasonable and sociable creature. Society is the proper good of the rational being, for the worse is subordinated to the better, and things that have souls are made one for another.

On doing good, Marcus distinguishes three kinds of people—those who keep accounts, those who silently know what they have done, and those who, like the vine that bears grapes or the horse that has run its race, are unaware of having done anything worthy. He urges himself to be of the third kind. The Athenian prayer for rain upon all Athenian fields becomes a parable: pray absolutely, or do not pray at all. Lacking quick wit, he must compensate with what depends entirely on him: sincerity, gravity, laboriousness, magnanimity, contentedness, kindness, simplicity. Form and matter alike are not reduced to nothing but pass by mutation into other parts of the whole.

The closing reflections turn to self-examination. Marcus reviews his conduct toward gods, parents, kin, wife, children, masters, and servants, asking whether he has wronged any. Faith, modesty, justice, and truth have, as the poet says, retreated to heaven; what is left is to worship, to do good, to bear with others, and to remember that the body and its accidents are neither ours nor in our power. He reminds himself, as the old foster-father in the comedy asks for his rattle-top while knowing it is only a rattle-top, that what others litigate is equally trivial. Death, whenever it comes, will find him εὔμοιρος, a man with a happy lot—for a happy lot is good inclinations, good desires, and good actions.