pleasure as good, and avoids pain as evil, is guilty of impiety.  For of necessity such a man must often find fault with the universal nature, alleging that it assigns things to the bad and the good contrary to their deserts, because frequently the bad are in the enjoyment of pleasure and possess the things which procure pleasure, but the good have pain for their share and the things which cause pain.  And further, he who is afraid of pain will sometimes also be afraid of some of the things which will happen in the world, and even this is impiety.  And he who pursues pleasure will not abstain from injustice, and this is plainly impiety.  Now with respect to the things towards which the universal nature is equally affected—­for it would not have made both, unless it was equally affected towards both—­towards these they who wish to follow nature should be of the same mind with it, and equally affected.  With respect to pain, then, and pleasure, or death and life, or honor and dishonor, which the universal nature employs equally, whoever is not equally affected is manifestly acting impiously.  And I say that the universal nature employs them equally, instead of saying that they happen alike to those who are produced in continuous series and to those who come after them by virtue of a certain original movement of Providence, according to which it moved from a certain beginning to this ordering of things, having conceived certain principles of the things which were to be, and having determined powers productive of beings and of changes and of such like successions (vii. 75).

[A] “As there is not any action or natural event, which we are acquainted with, so single and unconnected as not to have a respect to some other actions and events, so possibly each of them, when it has not an immediate, may yet have a remote, natural relation to other actions and events, much beyond the compass of this present world.”  Again:  “Things seemingly the most insignificant imaginable are perpetually observed to be necessary conditions to other things of the greatest importance, so that any one thing whatever may, for aught we know to the contrary, be a necessary condition to any other.”—­Butler’s Analogy, Chap. 7.  See all the chapter.  Some critics take [Greek:  ta hyparchonta] in this passage of Antoninus to be the same as [Greek:  ta honta]:  but if that were so he might have said [Greek:  pros allela] instead of [Greek:  pros ta hyparchonta].  Perhaps the meaning of [Greek:  pros ta hyparchonta] may be “to all prior things.”  If so, the translation is still correct.  See vi. 38.

2.  It would be a man’s happiest lot to depart from mankind without having had any taste of lying and hypocrisy and luxury and pride.  However, to breathe out one’s life when a man has had enough of these things is the next best voyage, as the saying is.  Hast thou determined to abide with vice, and hast not experience yet induced thee to fly from this pestilence?  For the destruction of the understanding is a pestilence, much more, indeed, than any such corruption and change of this atmosphere which surrounds us.  For this corruption is a pestilence of animals so far as they are animals; but the other is a pestilence of men so far as they are men.