ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 13. After a comparison of the philosopher's maxims to the physician's instruments, which are always in readiness, Marcus reasserts and develops the statement of ch. 1 about the 'knowledge of the divine and human'. Right conduct depends on recognition of the intimate bond between man's reasonable life and the divine world of law and order. Right relation to man demands reference to natural law, to the reason realized in the Universe; right behaviour towards God requires the recognition of man's bond to all his fellow men.
Ch. 14. Duty requires every other occupation to be put aside (ii. 2 and 3), even the innocent intellectual pursuits reserved for declining years. This is the fullest reference to the author's literary labours, outside his youthful correspondence with Fronto. The Note-books may be lecture notes (the word is used in that sense) or possibly jottings for the work we have before us. The histories of old Greeks and Romans may be such as old Cato wrote for his son, 'that he might learn of the great deeds of old Rome, and the customs (i. 16. 6) of his fatherland'.[1] The Extracts were no doubt largely of commonplaces, like the prose and poetry we meet with in Books vii and xi.
Ch. 15. One of those intrusive fragments, disturbing the natural sequence. The meaning is enigmatic, though the general purport is that the foolish neither understand the world they live in, nor the real meaning of the words they use. Marcus seems to have been meditating in the satirical vein of a favourite author, Heraclitus, who contrasts[2] the outward senses with the inward vision: 'the many do not understand the things they meet with, nor when they are told of them do they know what they mean, though they appear to themselves to understand.'
Ch. 16. The same tripartite division of man as in ii. 2. Commentators have all felt great difficulty in the ascription of reason to atheists and unpatriotic evil-doers. Observe, however, that the writer is careful to say: 'to have the mind as guide to what appear to be duties'. Men possess mind by contrast with beasts who have no more than 'spirit', or 'animal spirit'. The difference between ordinary men and instructed men is that the latter's
