Meditations

Book 7 begins somberly with Marcus, seemingly in a troubled state, noting that he is seeing “wickedness,” which he has seen often before, since nothing is new (58). He turns then to the transience of life as a comforting reminder: Everything that is happening has happened before and will happen again, but “all [is] short-lived” (58). He repeats his familiar refrain, perhaps as a source of comfort or reinforcement: The universe is change; matter is reshaped. Everyone and everything are absorbed back into the universal substance of the Whole. His appeal to Epicureanism and its atom dispersal theory seems also designed to further comfort him, as even if he is mistaken about divine design, death is still nothing to fear.

A source of some debate is what Marcus means by loving others from his heart rather than as a duty. Here, it is helpful to note that the word Greek word Marcus uses, phyloi, which is translated as “love” in the English text, describes one’s people, those who belong to each other and who are responsible for each other. Turned into a verb, the kind of love phyloi suggests can be understood as the practice of one’s responsibility toward others. Thus, in this case, Marcus may find duty insufficient to the context as it does not capture the sense of mutual dependence implied both by phyloi and by Marcus’s analogy of humans as limbs on a single body who must work in harmony with each other.

The “straight” path Marcus refers to resonates with an ancient Greek concept that can be traced as far back as the poetry of Hesiod, whom Marcus later quotes in Chapter 32 of Book 11 . Greek poetics describes good judgements, and justice more generally, as a “straight” path and bad judgements, or injustice, as a “crooked path.” Marcus earlier in the Meditations conceded that the justice of the gods can be mysterious. Here he concretizes it with repeated injunctions to focus on his reason, to not allow his “directing mind” to trouble him, and to recall that everything changes—all of which are encouragements to remain fixedly on the “straight” path toward virtue and justice.