1.Say to thyself at daybreak:I shall come across the busy-body,the thankless,the bully,the treacherous,the envious,the unneighbourly.A ll this has befallen them because they know not good from evil.But I,i n that I have comprehended the nature of the Good that it is beautiful,and the nature of Evil that it is ugly,and the nature of the wrong-doer himself that it is akin to me,not as partaker of the same blood and see d but of intelligence and a morsel of the Divine,can neither be injured by any of them-for no one can involve me in what is debasing-nor can I be wroth with my kinsman and hate him.For we have come into being for c o-operation,as have the feet,the hands,the eyelids,the rows of upper and lower teeth.Therefore to thwart one another is against Nature;and we do thwart one another by shewing resentment and aversion.

2.This that I am,whatever it be,is mere flesh and a little breath and the ruling Reason.Away with thy books!Be no longer drawn aside by them:it is not allowed.But as one already dying disdain the flesh:it is naught but gore and bones and a network compact of nerves and veins a nd arteries.Look at the breath too,what sort of thing it is;air:and not even that always the same,but every minute belched forth and again gulped down.Then,thirdly,there is the ruling Reason.Put thy thought thus:thou art an old man;let this be a thrall no longer,no more a pup pet pulled aside by every selfish impulse;nor let it grumble any longer at what is allotted to it in the present or dread it in the future.

3.Full of Providence are the works of the Gods,nor are Fortune's w orks independent of Nature or of the woven texture and interlacement of all that is under the control of Providence.Thence are all things deriv ed;but Necessity too plays its part and the Welfare of the whole Univer se of which thou art a portion.But good for every part of Nature is tha t which the Nature of the Whole brings about,and which goes to preserve it.Now it is the changes not only of the elements but of the things com pounded of them that preserve the Universe.Let these reflections suffic e thee,if thou hold them as principles.But away with thy thirst for bo oks,that thou mayest die not murmuring but with a good grace,truly and from thy heart grateful to the Gods.

4.Call to mind how long thou deferrest these things,and how many t imes thou hast received from the Gods grace of the appointed day and tho u usest it not.Yet now,if never before,shouldest thou realize of what Universe thou art a part,and as an emanation from what Controller of th at Universe thou dost subsist;and that a limit has been set to thy time,which if thou use not to let daylight into thy soul,it will be gone-and thou!-and never again shall the chance be thine.

5.Every hour make up thy mind sturdily as a Roman and a man to do w hat thou hast in hand with scrupulous and unaffected dignity and love of thy kind and independence and justice;and to give thyself rest from all other impressions.And thou wilt give thyself this,if thou dost execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last,divesting thyself of a ll aimlessness and all passionate antipathy to the convictions of reason,and all hypocrisy and self-love and dissatisfaction with thy allotted share.Thou seest how few are the things,by mastering which a man may l ead a life of tranquillity and godlikeness;for the Gods also will ask n o more from him who keeps these precepts.

6.Wrong thyself,wrong thyself,O my Soul!But the time for honouri ng thyself will have gone by;for a man has but one life,and this for t hee is well-nigh closed,and yet thou dost not hold thyself in reverence,but settest thy well-being in the souls of others.

7.Do those things draw thee at all away,which befall thee from wit hout?Make then leisure for thyself for the learning of some good thing more,and cease being carried aside hither and thither.But therewith mu st thou take heed of the other error.For they too are triflers,who by their activities have worn themselves out in life without even having an aim whereto they can direct every impulse,aye and even every thought.

8.Not easily is a man found to be unhappy by reason of his not rega rding what is going on in another man's soul;but those who do not atte nd closely to the motions of their own souls must inevitably be unhappy.

9.This must always be borne in mind,what is the Nature of the whol e Universe,and what mine,and how this stands in relation to that,bein g too what sort of a part of what sort of a whole;and that no one can p revent thee from doing and saying always what is in keeping with the Nat ure of which thou art a part.

10.Theophrastus in his comparison of wrong-doings-for,speaking in a somewhat popular way,such comparison may be made-says in the true ph ilosophical spirit that the offences which are due to lust are more hein ous than those which are due to anger.For the man who is moved with ang er seems to turn his back upon reason with some pain and unconscious com punction;but he that does wrong from lust,being mastered by pleasure,seems in some sort to be more incontinent and more unmanly in his wrongdoing.Rightly then,and not unworthily of a philosopher,he said that t he wrong-doing which is allied with pleasure calls for a severer condemn ation than that which is allied with pain;and,speaking generally,that the one wrong-doer is more like a man,who,being sinned against first,has been driven by pain to be angry,while the other,being led by lust to do some act,has of his own motion been impelled to do evil.

11.Let thine every deed and word and thought be those of a man who can depart from life this moment.But to go away from among men,if ther e are Gods,is nothing dreadful;for they would not involve thee in evil.But if indeed there are no Gods,or if they do not concern themselves with the affairs of men,what boots it for me to live in a Universe wher e there are no Gods,where Providence is not?Nay,but there are Gods,a nd they do concern themselves with human things;and they have put it wh olly in man's power not to fall into evils that are truly such.And had there been any evil in what lies beyond,for this too would they have ma de provision,that it should be in every man's power not to fall into i t.But how can that make a man's life worse which does not make the man worse?Yet the Nature of the Whole could not have been guilty of an over sight from ignorance or,while cognizant of these things,through lack o f power to guard against or amend them;nor could it have gone so far am iss either from inability or unskilfulness,as to allow good and evil to fall without any discrimination alike upon the evil and the good.Still it is a fact that death and life,honour and dishonour,pain and pleasur e,riches and penury,do among men one and all betide the Good and the E vil alike,being in themselves neither honourable nor shameful.Conseque ntly they are neither good nor evil.

12.How quickly all things vanish away,in the Universe their actual bodies,and the remembrance of them in Eternity,and of what character a re all objects of sense,and particularly those that entice us with plea sure or terrify us with pain or are acclaimed by vanity-how worthless a nd despicable and unclean and ephemeral and dead!-this is for our facu lty of intelligence to apprehend;as also what they really are whose con ceptions and whose voices awardrenown;what it is to die,and that if a man look at death in itself,and with the analysis of reason strip it of its phantom terrors,no longer will he conceive it to be aught but a fun ction of Nature,but if a man be frightened by a function of Nature,he is childish;and this is not only Nature's function but her welfare;-and how man is in touch with God and with what part of himself,and in w hat disposition of this portion of the man.

13.Nothing can be more miserable than the man who goes through the w hole round of things,and,as the poet says,pries into the secrets of t he earth,and would fain guess the thoughts in his neighbour's heart,w hile having no conception that he needs but to associate himself with th e divine "genius" in his bosom,and to serve it truly.And service of it is to keep it pure from passion and aimlessness and discontent with a nything that proceeds from Gods or men.For that which proceeds from the Gods is worthy of reverence in that it is excellent;and that which proc eeds from men,of love,in that they are akin,and,at times and in a ma nner,of compassion,in that they are ignorant of good and evil-a defec t this no less than the loss of power to distinguish between white and b lack.

14.Even if thy life is to last three thousand years or for the matte r of that thirty thousand,yet bear in mind that no one ever parts with any other life than the one he is now living,nor lives any other than t hat which he now parts with.The longest life,then,and the shortest am ount but to the same.For the present time is of equal duration for all,while that which we lose is not ours;and consequently what is parted wi th is obviously a mere moment.No man can part with either the past or t he future.For how can a man be deprived of what he does not possess?Th ese two things,then,must needs be remembered:the one,that all things from time everlasting have been cast in the same mould and repeated cycl e after cycle,and so it makes no difference whether a man see the same things recur through a hundred years or two hundred,or through eternity:the other,that the longest liver and he whose time to die comes soone st part with no more the one than the other.For it is but the present t hat a man can be deprived of,if,as is the fact,it is this alone that he has,and what he has not a man cannot part with.

15.Remember that everything is but what we think it.For obvious ind eed is the saying fathered on Monimus the Cynic,obvious too the utility of what was said,if one accepts the gist of it as far as it is true.

16.The soul of man does wrong to itself then most of all,when it ma kes itself,as far as it can do so,an imposthume and as it were a malig nant growth in the Universe.For to grumble at anything that happens is a rebellion against Nature,in some part of which are bound up the natur es of all other things.And the soul wrongs itself then again,when it t urns away from any man or even opposes him with intent to do him harm,a s is the case with those who are angry.It does wrong to itself,thirdly,when it is overcome by pleasure or pain.Fourthly,when it assumes a m ask,and in act or word is insincere or untruthful.Fifthly,when it dir ects some act or desire of its own towards no mark,and expends its ener gy on any thing whatever aimlessly and unadvisedly,whereas even the mos t trifling things should be done with reference to the end in view.Now the end for rational beings is to submit themselves to the reason and la w of that archetypal city and polity-the Universe.

17.Of the life of man the duration is but a point,its substance str eaming away,its perception dim,the fabric of the entire body prone to decay,and the soul a vortex,and fortune incalculable,and fame uncerta in.In a word all the things of the body are as a river,and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour;and life is a warfare and a pilgrim's sojourn,and fame after death is only forgetfulness.What then is it that can help us on our way?One thing and one alone-Philosophy;and th is consists in keeping the divine "genius" within pure and unwronged,lord of all pleasures and pains,doing nothing aimlessly or with deliber ate falsehood and hypocrisy,independent of another's action or in acti on;and furthermore welcoming what happens and is allotted,as issuing f rom the same source,whatever it be,from which the man himself has issu ed;and above all waiting for death with a good grace as being but a set ting free of the elements of which every thing living is made up.But if there be nothing terrible in each thing being continuously changed into another thing,why should a man look askance at the change and dissoluti on of all things?For it is in the way of Nature,and in the way of Natu re there can be no evil.

Written at Carnuntum.