Change Is Not an Evil
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Οὐδέν ἐστι κακὸν τοῖς ἐν μεταβολῇ γινομένοις, ὡς οὐδὲ ἀγαθὸν τοῖς ἐκ μεταβολῆς ὑφισταμένοις.
Nothing is evil for the things that come to be through change, just as nothing is good for the things that come into being out of change.
A tight symmetry: change harms nothing that comes to be through it, just as it benefits nothing that comes into being out of it — change in itself is morally neutral, neither loss nor gain.
This is a compressed corollary of Marcus’s whole treatment of change (compare 4.36, that the cosmos "loves" to transform things). The sentence is built as a strict parallel: if you are tempted to call the change that dissolves something an evil for it, you would have to call the change that produces something a good for it — and neither claim holds. Coming-to-be and passing-away are the same process viewed from two ends, and a process cannot be a harm at one end and a benefit at the other while remaining, in itself, one neutral thing.
The deeper point is about the Stoic category of "indifferents." Change belongs to the realm of what merely happens, τὰ ἀδιάφορα, things neither good nor evil in the moral sense — for the only genuine good is virtue and the only evil vice. So when a thing perishes by transformation, nothing evil has befallen it; when a thing arises by transformation, nothing good has been conferred; the transformation is just the universe rearranging its matter. Applied to oneself, the consolation is exact: your own dissolution by change is not an evil, any more than your coming-to-be was a good handed to you. To fear death as a loss is to smuggle a value-judgment into a value-neutral fact, and this crisp sentence is Marcus’s reminder to withhold it.
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Meditations 4.42 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/4.42/