ENGLISH COMMENTARY
moved to anger by detecting a bad habit. This is one of several passages which can hardly be understood as intended merely for his private edification; the tone resembles such hortatory discourses as Galen's two treatises upon the Passions and their cure,[1] and his Protrepticus.
The last four words are one of the unsolved enigmas of our book. Gataker thought that Marcus means that a good man neither lauds it over the evil-doer nor panders to him.
Ch, 29. The image of the smoky chimney is derived from Epictetus: 'the room is full of smoke; if it be tolerable, I shall stop there; if it is excessive, I walk out.' Other images were from leaving a banquet, abandoning a dilapidated tenement.
Marcus speaks of suicide in five or six places. That the Stoics justified it in some circumstances is well known, and many admired followers of the Porch died by their own hand, like Cato the younger and Marcus Brutus.
The most important passage in the Meditations on this topic is x. 8. 3. There self-destruction is contemplated hypothetically, as a last resort: if you cannot be your own master, go into a corner and learn your lesson; if you fail, depart life, not in anger or indignantly (he is thinking of Ajax, perhaps), but simply, like a freeman, not for effect. Clearly Marcus does not advocate suicide there; what he would have one do is to acquire mastery of self. In the present passage, by repeating the language of ch. 25 and the sentiment of ch. 27, he points to the life of liberty as the true path; it is only when the good life is made impossible, not by man's own fault, that a voluntary death is justified. In viii. 47 his solution, as in x. 8, is that you are not to grieve, for you are not responsible for the impediment that thwarts your activity. In x. 32 he says it were better to depart than to continue in evil, that is, if you cannot be good and simple, implying that you are able to be such, and he says much the same in x. 22. In vii. 33 and x. 3 he cites the maxim of Epicurus that extreme pain brings its own relief by bringing death in its train.
Suicide then is contemplated by Marcus, and here he follows the best Stoic teaching, only as an escape from insuperable moral evil, whether imposed from without or arising from his own
- ↑ 'There are tracts to heal the passions of the self by Chrysippus and other 'writers', Galen (De Dignotione) v. 3.
