Meditations 4.7 · 4.7

This is Marcus’s doctrine of harm compressed into a chain of three terms: the ὑπόληψις (the judgment), the felt complaint βέβλαμμαι ("I have been harmed"), and the βλάβη (the harm). He treats them as links that stand or fall together. Remove the first — the opinion that what happened counts as an injury — and the second, the inner cry of grievance, simply has nothing to rest on. Remove that cry, and there is no βλάβη left at all: the "harm" was never in the event but in the verdict passed on it.

The Greek makes the point with a neat trick of grammar Marcus is fond of: he treats the verb form βέβλαμμαι, "I have been harmed," as if it were a noun by putting the article before it (τὸ βέβλαμμαι) — the complaint itself becomes an object he can pick up and set down. It is the same teaching he gives at 4.3.4, that disturbances come "only from the inner supposition," and the one Epictetus had fixed as the school’s slogan: men are troubled not by things but by their judgments about things. The undercurrent is empowering to the point of severity — if the harm lives in your assent, then it is always, in principle, within your power to withhold it.

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