Meditations 1.12 · 1.12

This entry belongs to Book 1's catalogue of debts, and it is characteristically small: not a doctrine but a habit to break. Alexander the Platonist — otherwise unattested outside this line, one of the many tutors Marcus thanks and then lets vanish from history — is credited with a rule against a particular verbal tic: telling people, in person or by letter, that one is ἄσχολος, "too busy." The fault Marcus isolates is not busyness itself but its overuse as a reflex (πολλάκις, συνεχῶς) — the same excuse deployed so often that it stops describing a real state and starts working as a wall between himself and other people.

The second half sharpens the point into properly Stoic terms. What gets postponed under cover of πράγματα, "circumstances," are καθήκοντα — the technical word for duties, the fitting acts owed by virtue of one's σχέσεις, one's relations to the people who share a life (συμβιοῦντας). On Marcus's own later account, circumstances are raw material to be used, not obstacles that license withdrawal from others; to plead τὰ περιεστῶτα, "the things standing around," is to let an external stand in for a decision only one's own choice can make. A minor courtesy lesson from a minor teacher turns out to rehearse one of the book's largest arguments.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Meditations — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese