# The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus/Commentary on Book 10

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BOOK X
Beginning with the striking address to his Soul to find satisfaction in present right conduct and contentment with what the gods give, Marcus passes to an assertion of the perfection of the Universe, the living unity which includes and sustains the ever-changing present, the Whole of which he and his fellow men are members and upon whose Law depends the spiritual commonwealth of gods and men.
The following chapters dwell upon some implications of this opening statement and upon the practical requirements of life lived according to that Law. The Book closes with a statement ​that the Soul is the man himself, so related to the body and its members and to external reality as the efficient cause to its material, a view in fact not distinguishable from that held by Socrates and Plato.
Although, however, his main contention is that man's work is to be a loyal member of the Eternal City, freely obeying the Reason or Law which governs the Universe, both in its physical and moral aspect, a righteous Law completing its purpose whether this or that individual voluntarily conforms his will to it or not, Marcus pauses more than once to ask himself what are the implications of a rival theory, one which asserts mere natural uniformity in things, founded upon a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a blind world governed by no divine purpose. What, he seems to ask, is man's position if the individual consists, as the plain evidence of things suggests, of a body and soul intimately united in life and dissipated at death?
Again he frankly recognizes in this Book, as nowhere else, the presence in the actual world of a barrier opposed by evil men to righteous endeavour. In such a world the remedies are understanding and charity, and so far as possible the correction of the blindness of evil selves.
Lastly, the near approach of Death, the need of courage in its presence, lie not far beneath the surface of his thoughts. More than once he welcomes Death, as a deliverer from evil company and from bondage to the body.
Ch. 1. In hardly any other passage has Marcus allowed himself to express so warmly that ardour for the beauty of holiness, that passion to be at one with Nature, which possessed him. The language resembles the words of some Hebrew psalm, or an outburst like that of à Kempis: 'O that that day had dawned and that all these temporal things were ended. . . . When shall I enjoy true freedom without impediment, without trouble of mind or body? When shall I possess solid peace, peace undisturbed and secure, peace within and peace without, peace every way assured?' The sentiment is that of Shelley:
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here They have departed; thou should'st now depart.
​The Emperor Julian may have been thinking of this passage of the Meditations when he describes Marcus presenting himself in the conclave of the gods, 'his body transparent and translucent like to the purest and clearest flame.'
The description of the Universe seems to be derived from Plato: 'God, when forming the Universe, created mind in soul and soul in body, building them into one that he might be the framer of a work that should be most beautiful and most perfect in its nature.' The saying, too, that the gods preserve this Universe is perhaps a reminiscence of Plato's statement that the Creator retired to his own solitude after accomplishing his work, and left the rest to the 'younger gods'. Strictly this conception of God is inconsistent with the Stoic belief in a self-informed Whole, where an active spirit informs a passive matter, and the gods are embraced in one unity. The enthusiasm for a divine Universe, so remote and impersonal, is hardly to be understood except by the light of the Nature poetry of the early nineteenth century:
The One remains, the many change and pass,
and again:
A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all object of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Chs. 2–3. The thought of the writer passes from the soul or higher self to man, a composite creature, in the present world. Nature's scale, which manifests a gradual ascent from lifeless things to plant-life and thence to animals and to reasonable beings, is exhibited also in man both in his development from the embryo to maturity and in the structure of his being, when perfected by this process. The grown man's life is sustained by activities some of which resemble plant-life, his nourishment, growth, and reproduction, some mere animal life, his maintenance by respiration and by means of the senses and impulses, and finally the life of reason, his individual and social existence.
Man has a duty to observe the laws which govern these lower and higher activities of his complex constitution, but like Nature he must subordinate the claims of the lower to the higher, in each degree.
​Thus Marcus affirms implicitly the continuity of the living human creature and follows closely the teaching of Aristotle and of the school of medicine to which his own physician, the learned Galen, adhered. Man does not, as some Stoics seem to have held, leave behind him at birth the plant and take on the animal. This is important for the interpretation of a later chapter in this Book (ch. 7. 3).
Ch. 3. The composite self (ch. 3) is in one sense merely an animate body. Man may be regarded, by the scientific physician, primarily as composed of body and vital spirit. His organism is liable to suffering, sometimes to suffering which is intolerable. When this is the case, the suffering or sickness passes with the patient's life.
Marcus writes here with the teaching of Epicurus in his mind, that pain which lasts can be borne, extreme pain brings the relief of death (vii. 33, 64). What he says indeed is what Shakespeare said of all life, what an observer may think at least of the body, after extreme endurance: 'after life's fitful fever he sleeps well'.
But, from a moral point of view, man has power by his understanding to support whatever befalls him; what is evil, because destructive to the mere animal organism, can always be borne. The judgement can interpret its experience, especially by conceiving that what Nature brings, and at the time when she brings it, is good.
Marcus may have been thinking of the brave fight which Epicurus made against acute bodily pain. We have a letter of his where he says: 'On this happy day at the close of my life, I write this to you. My ailment pursues its course, abating nothing of its severity; but this is all countered by joy in myself, when I recall our talks together.' This courage in the presence of pain and death Marcus refers to in ix. 41; to the critics of Epicurus it appeared to be the paradox of the Hedonism which they misunderstood and misrepresented.
Ch. 4. A brief note interrupting the connexion which unites chs. 2–3 to chs. 5–7. How rightly to use a fellow man, who offends or appears to offend you, is the subject of xi. 9, 13, 18. 4, 37 (cf. xii. 12 and 16).
​Chs. 5–7. The right judgement referred to in ch. 3 involves an understanding of the chain of necessary causation, what is called here by the poetical name of 'the web of Destiny'. From this he passes in ch. 6 to Nature's subordination of the parts of the Universe to the whole and to the co-ordination of the parts within the whole. On these two principles human society is based, the law which rules the life of a city is the correlate of the law which rules the eternal Commonwealth of gods and men.
Again (ch. 7), the parts of Nature all obey the law of regeneration by change. Decay and death, like life and growth, are instances of change. These changes must be good, since Nature cares for her parts and cannot be ignorant of the vicissitudes which those parts undergo.
But even if we surrender a belief in a reasonable Universe, wisely and justly determining its eternal process for good, and adopt a contrary view (ch. 7, § 2), what is the result? We may adopt the view of the Atomists, based on observed uniformity, and recognize that a chance concourse of material particles has resulted, as Epicurus taught, in a natural law by which this world, like a multitude of others, is subject to a constant process of decay and dissolution. We cannot therefore repine at the change and death of any individual, as if that were contrary to nature.
Such appears to be the force of what is condensed to extreme brevity. In fact the chief object of Epicurus' natural philosophy was confessedly to teach men by the realization of Nature's law to rise above the fear of death and superstition. In a later Book (xii. 34) Marcus recognizes this, as in an earlier passage (vii. 31) he said that if we accept the answer of the Atomist, 'it is sufficient to remember that all is by law'. Whether then death is a shattering into atoms or, as the Stoics held, a separation of the material and spiritual, each returning to its own kind; whether, as he adds, the world passes ultimately to the primal Fire and so the process of generation begins anew or (as some Stoics held with Aristotle) the world is eternal, and is sustained by a continuous series of renewals, the individual has no cause for surprise at death, no ground to complain of his destiny in a world of generation and decay.
So far the argument is clear, but the last section has been found ​difficult, ever since Gataker himself said that he 'stuck in it'. The difficulty is due to the obscurity of the problem at issue, namely, the meaning of individuality, but also to uncertainty as to the exact doctrine of the Stoic school in this question as well as that of Marcus himself.
He begins with a reflection familiar to-day, but then something of a paradox to the ordinary man. What passes away at death is a composite frame, built up only yesterday out of the solid and gaseous matter which the organism absorbed from food solids and the atmosphere it breathed. We cannot then take the popular view that death means that the breath leaves the body, for the breath (the vital spirit) is itself a material element in the compound. Neither is what passes away the same as what came into the visible world at birth; obviously that too was a composition of elements gradually brought together in the womb by Nature's formative energy. See what he says below in ch. 26.
Death then, as he stated in § 2, is a disintegration of a composite whole, either, as Epicurus held, into atoms or into the elements which the Stoics believed to be its basis. Death is merely one instance of the 'alteration' which obtains in the universe generally. That 'alteration' is a rearrangement of matter or substance by which nothing is lost of the whole material which Nature disposes.
Then, as I understand the last words, Marcus says: 'Suppose for a moment that, as Epicurus and the school of medicine of Asclepiades held, you yourself are merely an intimate union of this changing composite, this continually integrating and disintegrating 'body', with the individuality which has persisted throughout your life, what then?' The answer is in the words which close the chapter, 'that hypothesis and its implications have nothing to do with my present argument'. His present argument is that death is an example of a universal law in this world of generation and decay, therefore it is not something of which we are entitled to complain, being, in the view of Epicurus and Zeno alike, a necessary incident of the life we know.
Paul Fournier gives as his opinion that Marcus here gives last and final expression to a pantheism which leaves no room for individual existence beyond the grave. Is it not rather true that the wise Emperor is reminding himself that our concern is with the present and with present dutiful action? Personal survival is ​not a question which we can or should trouble about, we should be satisfied to resign ourselves to the rule of Nature and the ruler of the Universe. What has he said elsewhere? 'Your own frame is bound either to be scattered into atoms or your own spirit to be extinguished or else to change its place and to be stationed somewhere else' (vii. 32). Different though his cherished philosophy is from the confident atomism of the Epicureans, realizing though he does that there is no final answer to his obstinate questionings within the limits of pure reason, he holds as strongly as the great Latin poet that 'this terror and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the sun's rays or the lucid shafts of day (that is to say, by no evidence of the senses), but by the perceived form and inner principle of Nature'.
Ch. 8. The suggestion for these reflections on Names or Titles appears to be a chapter in Epictetus, headed 'How Duties may be discovered from Names', where it is said that 'each of the names, when we ponder upon it, gives an outline or model for the actions associated with it'.
Marcus may also have been reflecting upon the ascriptions current upon his own coins. Thus Hadrian is entitled Clement, Indulgent, Just, Tranquil, Patient in illness. Here Marcus avoids imperial titles, preferring names that belong to a good man or a philosopher. There is a third influence at work, that love for etymology which is characteristic of him, mixed perhaps with the almost superstitious reverence in antiquity for proper names, which made the derivation of Apollo or Ajax or Oedipus a thing of serious import.
The last section of the chapter is an afterthought. He seems to mean that worshippers bend the knee at the sacred name, whereas what God desires is that man should be made and make himself into His likeness; this can only be done by living the life appropriate to man, as the fig-tree bears its fruit in due season and as each creature pursues its appointed work (v. 6).
The incidental reference to the Islands of the Blest or the Fortunate Isles is to the old belief in some islands in the far West, where heroes enjoyed an existence of quiet and content, without a divorce of soul from body. The expression, which was already ​proverbial in Plato's day, means no more than we should imply by speaking of the Vale of Avalon or the Earthly Paradise.
Ch. 9. This appeal to the self to enjoy a true life in the present, with its recurrence to the theme of ch. 1, was perhaps suggested by the passing reference to the Islands of the Blest.
The fruit of philosophy is here and now; it rests upon sound doctrines and these depend on true reflection upon impressions and impulses.
Ch. 10. Once more his favourite thought that the crucial test of men, of great rulers, and even of a Socrates, is the doctrine which they hold and carry out in act.
He was himself called, for his victories in the North, Germanicus and Sarmaticus, the latter title being first conferred in a.d. 175 with Imperator VIII.
The closing moral 'Are they not robbers?' suggests that Marcus may have had in mind a traditional tale (which St. Augustine refers to) about Alexander and a captured pirate. The latter told the king that the only difference between them was that Alexander's robbery was on a larger scale:
Right so bitwixe a titlelees tiraunt And an outlawe or a theef erraunt, The same I seye, ther is no difference; To Alisaundre was told this sentence.
Ch. 11. True magnanimity, as distinguished from the robber spirit of the last chapter, comes from realizing Nature's law of mutation (iii. 11. 2). A man's aim should be justice, resignation, contempt of vainglory, and to walk in the straight path of Nature. Marcus uses the third person, as he did in iii. 16, to avoid the suggestion that he claims to have reached this ideal.
The closing words allude to a splendid passage in the Laws of Plato: 'God, holding the beginning and the end and the middle of all things that are, proceeds naturally in a circular course, straight to his purpose. And with him follows Right, to punish those who come short of Divine Law. He who would be happy holds fast to Right and follows in his train, humbly and orderly . . .' The image is drawn from the observed rotation of the starry ​heavens, as they appear all through the night, following in the path of the sun, and may have been derived by Plato from the Pythagoreans.
Ch. 12. The path of duty is plain, and he who follows reason enjoys a tranquil activity. So Wordsworth says The Happy Warrior
Is happy as a lover, and attired With sudden brightness, like a man inspired.
Marcus handles slightly differently the topics of v. 20; vi. 50; vii. 5; and viii. 32.
Ch. 13. The right attitude in regard to adverse criticism (ch. 4). Here he contrasts the fruits of a right use of reason with the results of its misuse.
Chs. 14–15. The beautiful expression of resignation to Nature's will is like that in iv. 23. This is followed by an adjuration to the self to live life on earth as if on a mountain. Similarly in ch. 23 he insists that the life of retirement may be lived anywhere equally well, a lesson stated fully in iv. 3 and repeated in vi. 11 and 12.
Ch. 16. A lesson enjoined by his tutor Rusticus, i. 7.
Chs. 17–18. The familiar thought of the pettiness of this world and of finite time against the background of Cosmic space and time, and how all things are in perpetual mutation.
Ch. 19. An expression of withering scorn and contempt of wickedness in high places. The word 'slavery' may be literal, in which case he would be thinking of men who had risen from low estate or even slavery to a station where they abused their temporary authority by brutality to those beneath them; or he may be using 'slavery' to contrast immoral servitude, as he often does, with moral freedom.
Ch. 20. An aphorism on a favourite theme, with a play upon words which we have had before.
Ch. 21. This beautiful thought is founded upon a passage in Euripides, which was often quoted in antiquity. The poet gave expression to the very primitive myth that the birth of all things came from a union between the sky god and the earth mother.
​The effect here is a little spoiled by the verbal comment, which turns upon the use in both Greek and Latin of the word 'to love' in the sense 'to be usual'.
Chs. 22–3. This simple prescription for content, followed by the recognition, as in ch. 15, that change of place is no remedy for disquiet, seems to be a recall to prosaic duty after the enthusiastic words of ch. 21.
The word translated 'place of retreat' means literally 'farm' or 'country seat'. It is often used in the New Comedy for the country as a place of quiet and natural life in contrast with the town, a scene of bustle and unreal conventions.
Marcus uses it, as in iv. 3. 4, for 'retreat' in the spiritual sense, a meaning which may be derived from its use in Homer's Odyssey for the retirement of Laertes. The point is a favourite with the writers on exile and the satirists, namely, that change of scene does not bring change of temper.
The quotation from Plato's Theaetetus seems to mean that the man who shuns his station and retires to solitude takes his selfish desires with him and lives on the mountain at the expense of his dependants. Plato had said that the ruler is only a herdsman on a grand scale, like a boorish farmer in the uplands. Marcus remembers the general notion only, using it to illustrate the point that solitude on a height may be uncultivated and selfish.
Ch. 24. From the mistaken search for solitude he returns to self-examination. The passage to be compared is v. 11, where also he regards the governing self as degraded to a lower level. The temptations to a divorce from neighbourly duty and to absorption in bodily emotions are again touched upon in xi. 19. There the latter fault is spoken of as subordination of the divine part to the mortal, quite in the manner of Plato; here the language is derived from the Epicurean image of smooth or impeded movements of the flesh, as in v. 26 and x. 8. 1.
Ch. 25. The rule of the lower self is enslavement to passions, like fear and grief and anger. To be subject to passion is to desert reason, which is embodied in Law. Such a man then is like a law-breaker, he deserves the severe usage which Roman custom meted out to a runaway slave or to a deserter (xi. 9) from the ​ranks. See the fuller treatment in iv. 29. Marcus again plays on words, in suggesting the derivation of Law from assignment, that which distributes to each man his role, assigns to him his duty and reward.
Ch. 26. Reasoning argues from the seen to the unseen, from effect to concealed cause. Here the illustrations from elaboration of the embryo and absorption of nourishment are intended to prove the constant operation of the spermatic, generative, and restorative energies of Nature in physiological development. Marcus in simple words uses much the same argument as Galen in the opening chapters of his Natural Faculties. The great scientist there uncovers the hidden powers of the natural body from observation of results, and beginning with the shaping of the inborn child exhibits what he calls Generation, Growth, and Nutrition as processes designed and directed by Nature. Compare what Marcus said at iv. 36.
Ch. 27. As Physiology is a science of observed uniformities, the search for unity in hidden causes, so the student of History discovers behind ostensibly changed relations the unity of Law.
Marcus puts his philosophy of history in the form that life is a series of scenes in a drama which repeats itself, where the complication and denouement are determined by the great author of the piece. Similarly Aristotle in his Theory of Poetry says that tragedies belong to the same type, not because they present the fame individuals or even the same story, but because their construction follows an identical series of development.
Marcus used Vespasian and Trajan to illustrate his point in v. 32. Here he first names his elder contemporaries Hadrian and Pius, and then runs back to Philip of Macedon and his great son, and so to Croesus, who is made by Herodotus the standing example in history of a tragic reversal of fortune.
Ch. 28. Human destiny, like the 'sad stories of the death of kings' or the pictures of heroes on the tragic stage (xi. 6), is the fulfilment of a necessary chain of causes and effects. The man who rebels against circumstance, the runaway slave of ch. 25, the spiritual invalid upon his couch are like the reluctant pig appointed for sacrifice.
​The last words refer to a poetic fragment of Cleanthes, the Stoic philosopher and pupil of Zeno:
Lead me, O Zeus, and lead me, Destiny, Whatway soe'er ye have appointed me. I follow unafraid: yea, though the will Turn recreant, I needs must follow still.
Chaucer thus puts the truth in the Knight's Tale:
And whoso gruccheth ought, he dooth folye, And rebel is to him that al may gye.
Marcus succeeds here in securing remarkable literary effect by his favourite device of condensed thought and parsimony of expression.
Chs. 29–30. The first reflection is to be interpreted in the light of xii. 31. To set our affections upon material things, things of little worth, inspires that fear of death which will take them all away. This is accordingly a hindrance to following in the train of Reason and of God.
The thought is continued in ch. 30. Evil conduct springs from wrong ends. If we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that conflict with others originates in our own esteem of money or pleasure or reputation, which is the same as theirs. This thought is an antidote to anger; at the same time, if our ends are less mistaken, we must endeavour to correct theirs.
Chs. 31–2. The present is illuminated by the past. The conduct, perhaps the failure, of a Caesar may well be an encouragement or a warning to Marcus himself.
The other examples are obscured by our ignorance of some of the names and probably by a corruption of the text. They illustrate the sameness of human life and its transience.
From these thoughts Marcus turns to the reflection that life is a training school and a discipline for the reasonable will, and to an injunction (ch. 32), by way of corollary, to simplicity and goodness.
Ch. 33. The object of this chapter is to illustrate the freedom of the reasonable being, in comparison with the hindrances to which the inorganic parts of the world are exposed. The clue to ​the underlying thought is given by the instances chosen. They belong to discussions of the relation of man's freedom to the necessary determination of the Universe. The answer given by the Stoics attempted to reconcile a definite, that is a limited, freedom of the individual with the notion of the Universe as the scene of predetermined Necessity. The 'roller' (or 'cylinder') recurs in this discussion both in the Stoic writers and in their critics. The point clearly was not (as it is often misrepresented) that the roller if started rolls down a slope, but that the motion of the roller is determined by its shape, and therefore, when set free, it pursues its own path. Within limits it is so to speak free. Similarly man in obeying his impulses is relatively free, since every animated being has an impulse to its own preservation. But man achieves what freedom he possesses as rational only by conforming his impulses to what he knows to be a natural law for reasonable creatures. Thus though the roller cannot behave otherwise, it still carries out what is determined by its conformation, and, similarly, man consciously, if he is rational, carries out what is determined by himself according to his own construction.
This solution of the problem of freedom does not deserve the scorn which Plutarch and others exhibit in their criticism. This criticism comes to saying that man is not free according to the Stoic showing and yet that moral conduct depends on man's consciousness of freedom. What none of the critics understands is the certainty with which Zeno and his followers had grasped the law of necessary cause and effect in the Universe. Given this, the Stoic solution, which is the recognition of limited freedom of the will, is the best that can be found. Marcus seems to have clearly grasped the Stoic answer, and he repeatedly enforces the true liberty of the disciplined reason.
Minor points of interest in the chapter are the assertion of the joy which consists in the exercise of man's real nature, which he boldly compares with the hedonist's self-indulgence, and the true statement (after repeating once more that obstacles to goodness are only obstacles because our judgement makes concessions to false ends, and that hindrances are not injurious unless they are themselves morally evil) that man is strengthened by these tests of his goodness. That is a favourite doctrine of Epictetus, which ​Marcus has appropriated; the Happy Warrior, as Wordsworth says, 'turns his necessity to glorious gain'.
Ch. 34. This beautiful chapter belongs to the consolatory strain in the Meditations. The passage of Homer to which Marcus refers was called by the poet Simonides 'the most beautiful of the sayings of the poet of Chios':
Like as the generation of leaves, even such are the children of men, The wind scatters them on the face of the ground, but others the woodland Brings forth again in its strength and they shoot in the season of spring; Like to them are the children of men, one waxes, another is waning.
Marcus uses the passage to illustrate his doctrine of serial change in human life. Our mistake is to forget the brevity of human existence; we pursue or shun the temporal as though it were eternal.
Ch. 35. Health of mind is like health of the body and its senses. The understanding which rebels against its circumstance is like the jaundiced eye or squeamish stomach. The misfortunes we repine at, the death of children or the blame of men, connect the thought with the last chapter and lead on to the next.
Ch. 36. This is one of the occasional passages which are written in a vein of pleasant satire, quickly shifting to a more serious reflection.
Lord Tweedsmuir's Oliver Cromwell contains a parallel to the image of the schoolmaster: 'But to most men, after the first shock, came a half-ashamed sense of relief. They had lost their protector, but also their mentor. They had been dragged up to unfamiliar heights and they were weary of the rarefied air.'
The phrase 'the soul slips easily from its casing' is probably an allusion to a favourite representation in contemporary works of art of the disembodied spirit as winged. The soul is thought of as the perfected imago escaping from the pupa, just as the word Psyche meant in Greek the moth or butterfly. Marcus here uses the diminutive 'little soul' as Hadrian did in his famous poem beginning 'animula blandula, vagula',
little soul, kindly little wanderer friend and comrade of my day.
​We cannot, however, read any philosophic theory into Marcus' words. They are poetical like Byron's 'why even the worm at last disdains her shatter'd shell' or Tennyson's
And these are but the shattered stalks Or ruined chrysalis of one.
Ch. 37. Actions, our neighbour's as our own, are to be tested by their relation to the whole to which they belong, especially by the relation of human purpose to an end.
Ch. 38. Whatever the right interpretation of the hard saying in x. 7. 3, Marcus here says that the higher self, the mind (or Psyche as he sometimes calls it), is seated in the man as a controlling motive cause. This no doubt is the strict sense of the term so often used, the governing principle. The view is Platonic rather than Stoic, if we take it to express a metaphysical theory, and implies that the intellectual soul is not united to the body as the form in the material but as a motive cause to that which is moved, the view of Plato in the Laws, Book x. Here the statement leads to the opening chapter of Book xi and, if not pressed unduly, is intelligible to a simple mind, whatever its difficulties to a scientific thinker or to a philosopher. Like Marcus, Butler says: 'Upon the whole then our organs of sense and our limbs are certainly instruments, which the living persons, ourselves, make use of to perceive and move with'; and he goes further and says: 'it follows that our organized bodies are no more ourselves or part of ourselves than any other matter around us.'
* ↑ à Kempis, Imit. Christi, iv (iii), 48. 1.
* ↑ Adonais, liii.
* ↑ Julian, Convivium, 317 c.
* ↑ Pl. Ti. 30 b.
* ↑ Ibid. 42 d.
* ↑ Shelley, Adon. lii; Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, 100.
* ↑ Epicurus, D. L. x. 22, Fr. 30 Bailey.
* ↑ Lucr. i. 146; ii. 59; iii. 91; vi. 39.
* ↑ De Civitate Dei, iv. 4.
* ↑ Chaucer, Manciple's Tale, H. 223.
* ↑ Pl. Laws, iv. 715 e, cf. above, v. 3, vii. 55.
* ↑ Euripides, Chrysippus, Fr. 898.
* ↑ Pl. Tht. 174 d.
* ↑ Arist. Poet. ch. 18, 1456$^a$ 7.
* ↑ Epict. Manual, 53, translated by Seneca, Ep. 107. 10.
* ↑ Canterbury Tales, A. 3045.
* ↑ Fraser, Golden Bough², i. 253; contrast the image in ix. 3.
* ↑ Oxford Book of Latin Verse, No. 287.
* ↑ Byron, Childe Harold ii. 5.
* ↑ In Memoriam, 82.
* ↑ xii. 8, 10, 18.
* ↑ Butler's Analogy, 1. 1. 19 and 1. 1. 11.