Meditations 4.16 · 4.16

Marcus holds out a swift and startling reversal: the same people (αὐτοῖς τούτοις) who now regard you as a θηρίον and a πίθηκος — a wild beast and an ape, creatures of appetite and mimicry — will within ten days take you for a god. The condition is exact: ἐὰν ἀνακάμψῃς, "if you turn back," to your δόγματα, the settled principles you have let slip, and to the σεβασμὸς τοῦ λόγου, the reverence owed to reason. The transformation is not in the world’s opinion first but in yourself; the changed reputation merely follows a changed life.

Two things are characteristic here. First, the honesty about backsliding: the passage assumes that Marcus has drifted, is currently living like the beast, and needs to "return." The Meditations are full of this self-correction, never a report of arrival. Second, the brevity of the required turn — "ten days," a near-comic exactness — insists that reform is not a distant ideal but a matter of days once one takes the principles seriously again. The undercurrent is hope disciplined by realism: you can recover the divine in yourself quickly, but only by the unglamorous work of going back to your doctrines and honouring reason above appetite.

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