ENGLISH COMMENTARY
faith in the disposer of his destiny and his confidence to be able to live in agreement with the god within; here he seems 'in love with easeful death', invokes him as a deliverer from earthly circumstance and evil company. This is a less mature attitude of mind than the other.
The passage about the child's birth is referred to by Bishop Butler, who says, in his treatment of the analogy between birth and death: 'death may immediately, in the natural course of things, put us into a higher and more enlarged state of life, as our birth does.' He continues: 'this according to Strabo was the opinion of the Brachmans, to which opinion perhaps Antoninus may allude in these words, "as you are now waiting for the unborn child . . .".'[1]
Seneca uses this analogy as pointing to a life beyond the grave, and Marcus here speaks of the living seed, in an image, falling to the ground from the pod. Death is once more spoken of in x. 36 as a delivery from discordant influence, but with a feeling which accords better with Marcus' faith in the bond of kind. The present chapter may have suggested the lines:
To die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work and to commence
A newer and a better. Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness.[2]
There may also be an echo of Marcus in Montaigne's words: 'your death is a part of the order of the universe, 'tis a part of the life of the world',[3] in an essay based principally upon Lucretius for the one part and Seneca for the other.
Ch. 4. The writer turns, according to his wont, to practical maxims, preserving the connexion by repeating in this chapter the form of the opening of ch. 1.
The wrongdoer not only sins but he wrongs himself; he not only endeavours to disturb the harmony of the Universe, he also disturbs his own. This paradox that it hurts a man more to do wrong than to suffer wrong was taught by Socrates, who said that
