Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/73

 in the completed book. We may possess portions of composition written at different times with different purposes in view. Apart from the continuity of reflection which I seem to detect in considerable passages, and which would be clearer if we might make some small changes of order in the present text, the general character of the whole is not, fairly viewed, what Gataker has suggested. Many of the chapters are indeed brief memoranda, some are hardly grammatical as they stand, but the greater number are carefully composed and can hardly be designed to recall aspects of a creed already entirely familiar to their author. Again, many maxims have primarily a personal reference, may be private counsels and encouragements, but still more of them impress the reader as addressed, even if unconsciously, to a listener other than Marcus. There is again a whole class of reflections, like Book xi, ch. 18, which might well belong to a hortatory or expository discourse. The brief aphorisms, too, are many of them thrown into a proverbial, sometimes an antithetic form, modelled perhaps on sentences like the traditional words of the Seven Sages or the sayings of Heraclitus and Democritus; their very phrases are chosen with such care and precision as a man hardly uses when recording his thoughts in his own behoof. To take three instances: 'What does not advantage the hive, does not advantage the bee' (vi. 54); 'How many whose praises have been loudly sung are now committed to oblivion; how many who sang their praises are long ago departed' (vii. 6); 'Whosoever does wrong, wrongs himself: whosoever does injustice, does it to himself, making himself evil' (ix. 4).

Then again there are longer passages, scattered through the work, which are essays in little, fastidiously composed to the best of the writer's ability. Here are a few, chosen almost at hazard: on retreat or recueillement, iv. 3; lessons from the industry of animals and from the artisan's devotion to his work, v. 1; reflections upon the transitoriness of