Meditations 4.44 · 4.44

Marcus disarms shock with the calendar. A rose blooming in spring, fruit ripening in summer — no one is startled by these; they are exactly what the season produces. He applies the same logic to the events people find alarming: disease, death, βλασφημία (slander), ἐπιβουλή (intrigue) are equally "in season," the natural products of a world full of mortal, imperfect people. To be shocked by them is as naive as being shocked that a rose should appear in spring. This is the discipline he recommends elsewhere too (the maxim at 8.15, "expect the fig tree to bear figs"): nothing that belongs to the nature of things deserves surprise.

The sting is in the last clause. Marcus lumps together not only the sufferings but "all that gladdens or grieves τοὺς μωρούς, the fools." The point is that the fool’s pleasures and pains are cut from the same cloth as his shocks: he is moved up and down by the ordinary seasonal weather of events because he has never grasped that they are ordinary. The wise man, seeing each thing as γνώριμον, familiar, is neither elated nor cast down by what was always going to come. To recognize an event as "in season" is already to be free of the agitation it causes the unreflective — the recognition itself is the composure.

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