The Book of Marcus Aurelius 5 · Notes to himself. Written by his own hand, and not for any reader
Marcus Aurelius, born at Rome in 121, died in 180 with the army on the Danube. Emperor from 161 for nineteen years, through plague, flood and war on the frontier, and he spent most of them in camp. The notebooks are in Greek, twelve of them. He wrote his own, but not for publication. These are private notes: written in a camp, at night, for himself. He gave them no title and did not mean them to be read. So they repeat themselves, and much of them is a man talking himself into things; the Order deletes none of it — that is precisely the use of this book: it is not being explained to you, it is a man being watched at the work. He was the most powerful man alive. Another in this scripture was a slave (cf. The Book of Epictetus). What the two of them say is very nearly the same thing. The Order holds that this fact is worth more attention than either man’s sayings: one doctrine, tested from the very bottom and from the very top. Chapter six matters most: his pages are full of gods, and he never once closes an argument with one — he puts it as providence or atoms, works out both, and arrives at the same conclusion. That is the thing the Order takes him for.
5.1Let me say something only I am placed to say.
5.2I sit in this seat. The lives of everyone are in my hands.
5.3This seat dyes a man badly. It dyes slowly, and he cannot see it happening.
5.4So every day I remind myself of one thing: take care not to become a Caesar. Do not be dyed purple.
5.5What does becoming a Caesar look like?
5.6It is no longer being able to hear what grates. It is taking other men’s deference for your own being right. It is coming to feel that the rules were made for other people.
5.7I have seen such men. I know it is not done in a day.
5.8I use several methods, and I set them down here.
5.9One. I work with my own hands. Whatever I can do myself, I do not have done for me.
5.10Two. I do not wait to be praised. When a thing is finished I do not go looking at faces.
5.11Three. I keep about me several men who will contradict me to my face. Such men are very rare; having got them, guard them.
5.12Four. Every day I think it through once: I am the same stuff as everybody else. I am only wearing a garment that has been dyed.
5.13Someone says: if you think so, why not give up the seat?
5.14Because the man who gives it up only hands the load to someone more willing to be dyed.
5.15I stay here because this too is my share. Doing my share and a cobbler doing his are the same act.