Meditations 4.28 · 4.28

This chapter is not an argument but a list — one of the notebook-jottings that show the Meditations for what they are, private memoranda rather than a finished treatise. Marcus is cataloguing the kinds of bad ἦθος, corrupted character, that a person may fall into or must deal with in others. The sequence runs through a whole gallery of moral types: the "black" (stained, malignant) soul, the soft, the obstinate; then the sub-human likenesses — θηριῶδες (brutish), βοσκηματῶδες (like grazing cattle, living only to feed), παιδαριῶδες (childish); then the shabby and dishonest — βλακικόν (dull-witted), κίβδηλον (counterfeit, like debased coinage), βωμολόχον (the coarse buffoon), καπηλικόν (the cheating shopkeeper); and finally the τυραννικόν, the tyrant’s temper.

The force of such a list is diagnostic. Elsewhere Marcus insists that every human failing is a departure from the rational, social nature we share; here he simply names the departures, as a physician might name diseases, so as to recognize them on sight. Two uses suggest themselves. The list is a warning about others — these are the dispositions one meets in the world and must bear with (4.3) without being surprised. But it is also, and more sharply, a mirror: Marcus is a man who watches himself for exactly these tendencies, and to write them down is to keep them in view. The unadorned brevity is the point — no rhetoric, just the honest inventory of what a character can go wrong into.

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