Figs, rotting olives, and a lion's brow: beauty as by-product
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πάλιν τε τὰ σῦκα ὁπότε ὡραιότατά ἐστι, κέχηνε καὶ ἐν ταῖς δρυπεπέσιν ἐλαίαις αὐτὸ τὸ ἐγγὺς τῇ σήψει ἴδιόν τι κάλλος τῷ καρπῷ προστίθησι. καὶ οἱ στάχυες κάτω νεύοντες καὶ τὸ τοῦ λέοντος ἐπισκύνιον καὶ ὁ τῶν συῶν ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ῥέων ἀφρὸς καὶ πολλὰ ἕτερα, κατ’ ἰδίαν εἴ τις σκοποίη, πόρρω ὄντα τοῦ εὐειδοῦς, ὅμως διὰ τὸ τοῖς φύσει γινομένοις ἐπακολουθεῖν συνεπικοσμεῖ καὶ ψυχαγωγεῖ·
So too, when figs are at their ripest, they gape open; and in near-rotting olives it is the very nearness to decay that lends the fruit a peculiar beauty of its own. And ears of grain bowing downward, the lion's furrowed brow, the foam streaming from a boar's mouth, and much else besides—each far from beautiful if one were to examine it on its own—still, because they attend upon what nature brings about, lend a beauty of their own and win the soul over.
Continuing the catalogue begun with the cracked loaf of 3.2.1, Marcus lists more incidental, even unlovely, natural phenomena — a gaping ripe fig, near-rotting olives, drooping ears of grain, a lion's furrowed brow, a boar's foam — that end up captivating the mind precisely because they follow nature's own processes.
Marcus continues an unusual argument he opened with the cracked crust of baking bread in 3.2.1: things that would fail any formal test of loveliness — a fig splitting open as it ripens, olives just short of spoiling, grain bent double under its own weight, the wrinkled hide over a lion's eyes, the foam a boar slings from its jaws — nonetheless strike an attentive observer as beautiful. He is careful about the mechanism. Taken κατ' ἰδίαν, "by themselves," these things are πόρρω τοῦ εὐειδοῦς, far from anything a sculptor or painter would choose to render. Their appeal is parasitic on process, not on form; it exists because it follows upon τοῖς φύσει γινομένοις, upon what nature is doing. This is the same move he makes throughout Book 3 with the ἡγεμονικόν itself: value need not sit inside an isolated object, but can belong to that object's relation to a larger unfolding it is part of.
The claim quietly does two jobs at once. First it is aesthetic — an early statement of what later gets called organic or "natural" beauty, distinct from mere symmetry. But Marcus is not writing aesthetics for its own sake; the payoff in the next lines of the chapter is that anyone with a deeper feeling and insight into the workings of the Whole will find almost nothing that happens by natural consequence unpleasant to watch. The list is training material for reconciling oneself to the Whole: if a boar's foam can be looked at without disgust once its causal place is seen, so, the argument implies, can the events of one's own life that look ugly only because they are examined κατ' ἰδίαν, torn out of the process that produces them.
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