Tomorrow or the Day After
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Ὥσπερ εἴ τίς σοι θεῶν εἶπεν, ὅτι αὔριον τεθνήξῃ ἢ πάντως γε εἰς τρίτην, οὐκέτ’ ἂν παρὰ μέγα ἐποιοῦ τὸ εἰς τρίτην μᾶλλον ἢ αὔριον, εἴ γε μὴ ἐσχάτως ἀγεννὴς εἶ· πόσον γάρ ἐστι τὸ μεταξύ; οὕτως καὶ τὸ εἰς πολλοστὸν ἔτος μᾶλλον ἢ αὔριον μηδὲν μέγα εἶναι νόμιζε.
Just as, if one of the gods told you that tomorrow you would die, or at all events the day after, you would no longer count it a great thing to die on the third day rather than tomorrow — unless you were utterly ignoble; for how small is the interval? — so too consider it no great thing to die in the thousandth year rather than tomorrow.
A calculation about the fear of death: if a god told you you would die tomorrow or the next day, you would not think it mattered which — the gap is trivial. So too, dying in a thousand years rather than tomorrow is no great difference.
Marcus reasons the fear of death down to size with a small thought-experiment about intervals. Suppose a god announced you would die tomorrow, or at the latest the day after. Would you really care much which? Only ἐσχάτως ἀγεννής, someone utterly small-souled, would clutch at that one extra day as a great prize; πόσον γὰρ ἐστι τὸ μεταξύ — "how tiny is the gap between them?" The difference between tomorrow and the day after is obviously negligible, not worth a moment’s anxiety.
The move is then to expand the interval without changing the logic. If one day makes no real difference, why should a far larger span? Marcus asks himself to regard dying "in the thousandth year rather than tomorrow" as equally μηδὲν μέγα, "nothing great." Against the backdrop of infinite time he keeps invoking, even a millennium is only a slightly longer version of that trivial extra day — a finite scrap next to eternity. So the whole difference between an early death and a late one, which looms so large from inside a single life, shrinks to the same insignificance as tomorrow-versus-the-day-after. The point is not to become careless of life but to strip the panic out of its length: whether you die soon or late, the amount of time gained or lost is, measured rightly, almost nothing, and no fit object for a great fear.
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Meditations 4.47 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/4.47/