What Is There to Resent?
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τίνι γὰρ δυσχερανεῖς; τῇ τῶν ἀνθρώπων κακίᾳ; ἀναλογισάμενος τὸ κρῖμα, ὅτι τὰ λογικὰ ζῷα ἀλλήλων ἕνεκεν γέγονε καὶ ὅτι τὸ ἀνέχεσθαι μέρος τῆς δικαιοσύνης καὶ ὅτι ἄκοντες ἁμαρτάνουσι καὶ πόσοι ἤδη διεχθρεύσαντες, ὑποπτεύσαντες, μισήσαντες, διαδορατισθέντες ἐκτέτανται, τετέφρωνται, παύου ποτέ. ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἐκ τῶν ὅλων ἀπονεμομένοις δυσχερανεῖς; ἀνανεωσάμενος τὸ διεζευγμένον τό· ἤτοι πρόνοια ἢ ἄτομοι, καὶ ἐξ ὅσων ἀπεδείχθη ὅτι ὁ κόσμος ὡσανεὶ πόλις. ἀλλὰ τὰ σωματικά σου ἅψεται ἔτι; ἐννοήσας ὅτι οὐκ ἐπιμίγνυται λείως ἢ τραχέως κινουμένῳ πνεύματι ἡ διάνοια, ἐπειδὰν ἅπαξ ἑαυτὴν ἀπολάβῃ καὶ γνωρίσῃ τὴν ἰδίαν ἐξουσίαν, καὶ λοιπὸν ὅσα περὶ πόνου καὶ ἡδονῆς ἀκήκοας καὶ συγκατέθου.
For at what will you be vexed? At the badness of people? Then reckon up the judgment that rational creatures have come to be for one another’s sake, that to bear with them is a part of justice, that they do wrong unwillingly, and how many who feuded, suspected, hated, and were run through with spears now lie dead and turned to ashes — and stop at last. But will you be vexed also at what is apportioned to you from the Whole? Then recall the disjunction: either providence or atoms, and from how many proofs it was shown that the world is like a city. But will bodily things still lay hold of you? Consider that the mind, once it has taken itself back and recognized its own power, is not mingled with the breath moving smoothly or roughly — and then remember all you have heard about pain and pleasure and given your assent to.
The elemental maxims for the retreat: a triage of the things that vex us — other people’s faults, what the universe allots, and bodily pain and pleasure — each dissolved by a principle already proven.
Marcus turns the "elemental" resources of the retreat into a working triage. He lists the three great sources of vexation and hands himself a doctrine for each. Against anger at other people’s κακία he sets the social principles he repeats everywhere: rational beings exist for one another, tolerance is a piece of justice, and wrongdoers err ἄκοντες, unwillingly — the old Socratic claim that no one goes wrong on purpose. To all of it he adds the memento mori: the fierce enemies of the past are ash now, so let the quarrel go.
The second and third dismissals are cosmological and psychological. Whatever the universe allots is answered by the standing disjunction "providence or atoms" — either the world is a rational order, in which case its distributions are just, or it is a chance swirl, in which case complaint is pointless; either way, resentment has no footing. And bodily pain or pleasure loses its grip once the διάνοια "takes itself back," reclaiming its independence from the πνεῦμα, the sensory current, and remembering the doctrines about pleasure and pain it has already examined and endorsed. The undercurrent is Marcus’s method in miniature: distress is not argued away in the abstract but met, case by case, with a principle he has already tested and to which he has already given συγκατάθεσις, his assent.
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