Meditations 4.35 · 4.35

This aphorism is the distilled conclusion of the several chapters Marcus has spent on the vanity of reputation (4.19, 4.33). The word ἐφήμερον means "lasting a single day," the creature or thing whose whole existence is over almost as soon as it begins. He applies it with a neat symmetry to both parties in the transaction of fame: τὸ μνημονεῦον, the one doing the remembering, and τὸ μνημονευόμενον, the one being remembered. Both are day-flies.

The point is that fame is doubly perishable. It is not merely that the famous man dies; the very people whose memory would keep him alive are themselves fleeting, gone within a breath of him. A reputation is a thing held briefly by the short-lived about the short-lived — a shadow cast by one mayfly upon another. Set beside the eternity of time Marcus keeps invoking, the whole apparatus of being-remembered collapses. The sentence needs no argument; the single word ἐφήμερον, applied evenly to both sides, does all the work.

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