ENGLISH COMMENTARY
restore old religious beliefs and customs, without reference to his reputation.
The grand simile of the soldier 'waiting for the Retreat to sound' is used by S. Johnson in The Vanity of Human Wishes,
For Faith that panting for a holier seat
Counts Death kind Nature's signal of Retreat.
Ch. 6. The old problem of the relation of virtue to advantage, and the kindred question, which of the many ends that man has proposed to himself is his true end. The answer to the first resembles that of Bishop Butler in his sermon on Self-love. Nature, said the Stoics, has made all her creatures endeavour to persist in their own being. Man's being is, when he reaches his true nature, a life of reasonable will. This then is the advantage which Nature's purpose intends. Marcus returns to this problem more than once, notably in v. 16, where he identifies the advantage and the good of every man with his true end in living, and at vi. 44, where advantage is said to be determined by man's reasonable and social constitution, and by his place in the world. Here the problem is put half-ironically. The language chosen seems reminiscent of the famous paradox debated in Plato's Republic, whether justice is the advantage of the superior (or stronger), in short, whether might is right, and, if so, what kind of might. Marcus says, in effect, that a man must choose for himself what is, in his eyes, superior. If he chooses fame, or power, or wealth, or pleasant indulgence, let him stick to his choice. But he must remember first that he is choosing what is superior in the view of his inferior self, the body or the merely animate creature, and secondly, that these unreasonable ends appear to suit only for a time, then suddenly they get the mastery, and the man who has proposed them to himself turns out to be their servant (iii. 3). The Stoics held firmly to the view, which is also the view of Socrates, that there cannot be a conflict for the good man between expediency and right, since what is right is advantageous and nothing can advantage a man which is not right.[1]
Chs. 7–8. The true advantage of the reasonable man, who has his life among his fellows, is contrasted with the miserable lot of
- ↑ Cic. Off. iii, esp. ch. 8.
