“Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly....  Death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things happen equally to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse.  Therefore they are neither good nor evil.” (ii. 11.)

Elsewhere he says that Hippocrates cured diseases and died; and the Chaldaeans foretold the future and died; and Alexander, and Pompey, and Caesar killed thousands, and then died; and lice destroyed Democritus, and other lice killed Socrates; and Augustus, and his wife, and daughter, and all his descendants, and all his ancestors, are dead; and Vespasian and all his Court, and all who in his day feasted, and married, and were sick and chaffered, and fought, and flattered, and plotted, and grumbled, and wished other people to die, and pined to become kings or consuls, are dead; and all the idle people who are doing the same things now are doomed to die; and all human things are smoke, and nothing at all; and it is not for us, but for the gods, to settle whether we play the play out, or only a part of it. “There are many grains of frankincense on the same altar; one falls before, another falls after; but it makes no difference.” And the moral of all these thoughts is, “Death hangs over thee while thou livest:  while it is in thy power be good.” (iv. 17.) “Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou hast come to shore; get out.  If, indeed, to another life there is no want of gods, not even there.  But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures.” (iii. 3.)

Nor was Marcus at all comforted under present annoyances by the thought of posthumous fame.  “How ephemeral and worthless human things are,” he says, “and what was yesterday a little mucus, to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes.”  “Many who are now praising thee, will very soon blame thee, and neither a posthumous name is of any value, nor reputation, nor anything else.”  What has become of all great and famous men, and all they desired, and all they loved?  They are “smoke, and ash, and a tale, or not even a tale.”  After all their rages and envyings, men are stretched out quiet and dead at last.  Soon thou wilt have forgotten all, and soon all will have forgotten thee.  But here, again, after such thoughts, the same moral is always introduced again:—­“Pass then through the little space of time conformably to nature, and end the journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew” “One thing only troubles me, lest I should do something which the constitution of man does not allow, or in the way which it does not allow, or what it does not allow now.”

To quote the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius is to me a fascinating task.  But I have already let him speak so largely for himself that by this time the reader will have some conception of his leading motives.  It only remains to adduce a few more of the weighty and golden sentences in which he lays down his rule of life.