ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Thus Marcus affirms implicitly the continuity of the living human creature and follows closely the teaching of Aristotle and of the school of medicine to which his own physician, the learned Galen, adhered. Man does not, as some Stoics seem to have held, leave behind him at birth the plant and take on the animal. This is important for the interpretation of a later chapter in this Book (ch. 7. 3).
Ch. 3. The composite self (ch. 3) is in one sense merely an animate body. Man may be regarded, by the scientific physician, primarily as composed of body and vital spirit. His organism is liable to suffering, sometimes to suffering which is intolerable. When this is the case, the suffering or sickness passes with the patient's life.
Marcus writes here with the teaching of Epicurus in his mind, that pain which lasts can be borne, extreme pain brings the relief of death (vii. 33, 64). What he says indeed is what Shakespeare said of all life, what an observer may think at least of the body, after extreme endurance: 'after life's fitful fever he sleeps well'.
But, from a moral point of view, man has power by his understanding to support whatever befalls him; what is evil, because destructive to the mere animal organism, can always be borne. The judgement can interpret its experience, especially by conceiving that what Nature brings, and at the time when she brings it, is good.
Marcus may have been thinking of the brave fight which Epicurus made against acute bodily pain. We have a letter[1] of his where he says: 'On this happy day at the close of my life, I write this to you. My ailment pursues its course, abating nothing of its severity; but this is all countered by joy in myself, when I recall our talks together.' This courage in the presence of pain and death Marcus refers to in ix. 41; to the critics of Epicurus it appeared to be the paradox of the Hedonism which they misunderstood and misrepresented.
Ch. 4. A brief note interrupting the connexion which unites chs. 2–3 to chs. 5–7. How rightly to use a fellow man, who offends or appears to offend you, is the subject of xi. 9, 13, 18. 4, 37 (cf. xii. 12 and 16).
- ↑ Epicurus, D. L. x. 22, Fr. 30 Bailey.
