One passage may end this matter.  “If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me harm, why should they have any desire towards that?  For what advantage would result to them from this or to the whole, which is the special object of their providence?  But if they have not determined about me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at least; and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with them.  But if they determine about nothing—­which it is wicked to believe, or if we do believe it, let us neither sacrifice nor pray nor swear by them, nor do anything else which we do as if the gods were present and lived with us; but if however the gods determine about none of the things which concern us, I am able to determine about myself, and I can inquire about that which is useful:  and that is useful to every man which is conformable to his own constitution ([Greek:  kataskeue]) and nature.  But my nature is rational and social; and my city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world.  The things then which are useful to these cities are alone useful to me” (vi. 44).

It would be tedious, and it is not necessary, to state the emperor’s opinions on all the ways in which a man may profitably use his understanding towards perfecting himself in practical virtue.  The passages to this purpose are in all parts of his book, but as they are in no order or connection, a man must use the book a long time before he will find out all that is in it.  A few words may be added here.  If we analyze all other things, we find how insufficient they are for human life, and how truly worthless many of them are.  Virtue alone is indivisible, one, and perfectly satisfying.  The notion of Virtue cannot be considered vague or unsettled, because a man may find it difficult to explain the notion fully to himself, or to expound it to others in such a way as to prevent cavilling.  Virtue is a whole, and no more consists of parts than man’s intelligence does; and yet we speak of various intellectual faculties as a convenient way of expressing the various powers which man’s intellect shows by his works.  In the same way we may speak of various virtues or parts of virtue, in a practical sense, for the purpose of showing what particular virtues we ought to practice in order to the exercise of the whole of virtue, that is, as man’s nature is capable of.

The prime principle in man’s constitution is social.  The next in order is not to yield to the persuasions of the body, when they are not conformable to the rational principle, which must govern.  The third is freedom from error and from deception.  “Let then the ruling principle holding fast to these things go straight on, and it has what is its own” (vii. 55).  The emperor selects justice as the virtue which is the basis of all the rest (x. 11), and this had been said long before his time.