Three Sources of Every Event
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διὸ δεῖ ἐφ̓ ἑκάστου λέγειν· τοῦτο μὲν παρὰ θεοῦ ἥκει, τοῦτο δὲ κατὰ τὴν σύλληξιν καὶ τὴν συμμηρυομένην σύγκλωσιν καὶ τὴν τοιαύτην σύντευξίν τε καὶ τύχην, τοῦτο δὲ παρὰ τοῦ συμφύλου καὶ συγγενοῦς καὶ κοινωνοῦ, ἀγνοοῦντος μέντοι ὅ τι αὐτῷ κατὰ φύσιν ἐστίν. ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ οὐκ ἀγνοῶ· διὰ τοῦτο χρῶμαι αὐτῷ κατὰ τὸν τῆς κοινωνίας φυσικὸν νόμον εὔνως καὶ δικαίως, ἅμα μέντοι τοῦ κατ’ ἀξίαν ἐν τοῖς μέσοις συστοχάζομαι.
So one must say of each thing that happens: this comes from god; this from the web of fate, the concerted spinning of circumstance, and such a chance encounter; and this from a fellow being, a kinsman, a partner in life — who does not himself know what, by nature, is right for him. But I am not ignorant of it. That is why I deal with him, by the natural law of our common life, with goodwill and justice — while at the same time reckoning, among things that are in themselves neither good nor bad, what each is truly worth.
Marcus gives himself a formula to say of anything that happens to him — that it comes from god, from the interwoven chain of fate and chance, or from a kinsman who does not yet see what is natural — and then states how he, knowing better, must respond.
Marcus offers himself a formula for narrating any event that touches him: it comes from god, or from the interlocking chain of fate and chance — σύλληξις and σύγκλωσις, words drawn from the Fates' own vocabulary of joining and spinning — or from a fellow human being acting upon him. That third category is qualified with unusual care: the person is a σύμφυλος, a συγγενής, a κοινωνός, kin by nature rather than merely by blood, who nonetheless acts in ignorance of what actually accords with his own nature. The taxonomy is not idle cataloguing; it is diagnostic. Whatever happens has an intelligible source, and none of the three is malicious in the way that anger habitually imagines.
Because Marcus does know what accords with nature, he owes the offending party something the offender cannot supply for himself: goodwill and justice, exercised under "the natural law of our common life," a formula close to the οἰκείωσις doctrine that grounds Stoic ethics in an expanding circle of natural affinity. Yet knowledge of the good does not collapse into passive tolerance — he still "aims jointly" (συστοχάζομαι) at what is due, weighing outcomes among the μέσα, the indifferents that are themselves neither virtuous nor vicious. The passage holds together two things Marcus keeps in tension elsewhere, echoing the resolve at the opening of Book Two to meet the meddling and the ungrateful without anger: a metaphysics that explains other people's failures without excusing them, and an ethics that still asks, case by case, what a given outcome is worth.
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