"Yesterday, a little bit of slime, tomorrow ashes or a mummy." 47
Two words suffice to sum up the human comedy: all is banal, and all is ephemeral. Banal, because nothing is new under the sun: Always bear in mind that everything is exactly the way it comes to pass right now; it has happened that way before, and it will happen that way again. Make them come alive before your mind's eye, these monotonous dramas and scenes, which you know through your own experience or through ancient history; picture the whole court of Hadrian, of Antoninus, of Philip, Alexander, and Croesus. All these spectacles were identical; the only thing that changed were the actors.48
Banality and boredom reach the point of being sickening: Just as you get sick of the games in the arena and such places, because they arc always the same, and their monotony makes the spectacle tedious, so feel the same way about life as a whole. From top to bottom, everything is the same, and comes from the same causes. How long will this go on?49
Not only arc hum1tn nffnirs tedious: they arc also transitory. Marcus tries to mnkc the hunutn 11wnrm11 of 11ast ages come alive in his imagination,111 picturing
i86
Figures
the days of Trajan or Vespasian, with their weddings, illnesses, wars, feasts, trading, agriculture, ambition, and intrigues. All these human masses have disappeared without a trace, observes Marcus, along with their activities.
Marcus also tries to imagine this incessant process of destruction at work upon those around him.51
Marcus has no patience for those who would try to console themselves for the brevity of existence by the hope that they will survive in the name they leave to posterity. "What's in a name?" he asks: "A mere noise, or a faint echo." 52 At best, this miserable, fleeting thing will be transmitted to a few generations, each of which will last as long as a lightning-flash in the infinity of time.53 We ought not to be fooled by such an illusion: "How many do not even know your name, and how many will very soon forget it." 54 "Soon you will have forgotten everything; soon, too, everything will have forgotten you." ss
Such an accumulation of pessimistic utterances is indeed impressive. We should be careful, however, of deducing from them over-hasty conclusions about Marcus' own psychology. It is too facile for us to imagine that, like many modem authors, ancient writers wrote in order directly to communicate information, or the emotions they happened to be feeling. We assume, for instance, that Marcus' Meditations were intended to transmit his everyday feelings to us; that Lucretius was himself an anxious person, and used his poem On the Nature of Things to try to combat his anxiousness; that Augustine was really confessing himself in his Confessions. In fact, however, it is not enough to consider the obvious, surface meaning of the phrases in an ancient text in order fully to understand it. Rather, we must try to understand why these phrases were written or spoken; we must discover their finality.
Generally speaking, we can say that Marcus' seemingly pessimistic declarations are not expressions of his disgust or disillusion at the spectacle of life; rather, they are a means he employs in order to change his way of evaluating the events and objects which go to make up human existence. He does this by defining these events and objects as they really are - "physically," one might say - separating them from the conventional representations people habitually form of them. Marcus' definitions of food, wine, purple togas, or sexual union arc intended to be "natural. " They are technical, almost medical definitions of objects which, when considered in a purely "human" way, provoke the most violent passions, and we are to use them to free ourselves from the fascination they exercise upon us. Such definitions do not express Marcus' impressions; on the contrary, they correspond to a point of view intended to be objective, and which is by no means Marcus' invention. Already in antiquity, for instance, Hippocrates and Democritus were said to have defined sexual union as "a little epilepsy."
When Marcus pitiles.11ly imagines the intimate life of the arrogant "eating, sleeping, copulating, defecating," he iH t rying lo ((ivc 11 p/011fral viNinn of
Marcus Aurelius
1 87
human reality. We find a similar reflection in Epictetus, concerning people who are content just to discourse about philosophy: "I'd like to stand over one of these philosophers when he's having sex, so as to see how he sweats and strains, what kind of grunts and groans he utters; whether he can even remember his own name, much less the philosophical discourses he has heard, declaimed, or read!" 56 Marcus applies the same method to our idea of death:
"consider what it is to die; and that, if one looks at death in and of itself, dissolving the images associated with death by taking apart our common conception of it, he will not suspect it to be anything other than a product of Na tu re. " 57
As we have seen, Marcus' effort to confront existence in all its naked reality leads him to glimpse processes of decay and dissolution already at work in the people and things around him, or to make the court of Augustus come alive before his eyes for an instant, so as to realize that all these people, so alive in his imagination, are in fact long dead. Yet we have no more right to interpret this as obsession with death or morbid complacency than when, in the film Dead Poets ' Socie�y, Robin Williams makes his students study a picture of the school's old boys. Williams' character is trying to make his charges understand the meaning of carpe diem ("seize the day"), the irreplaceable value of each instant of life, and it is with this goal in mind that he emphasizes that all the faces in the class photograph, so young and alive, arc now long dead.
Moreover, when Marcus speaks of the monotony of human existence, it is not in order to express his own boredom, but in order to persuade himself that death will not deprive us of anything essential. In Lucretius, the same argument is used by nature herself, to console man for the misfortune of death: "There is no new invention I can think up to please you; everything is always the same . . . what lies in store for you is always the same even
.
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.
if you were never to die." 58
In the case of Marcus Aurelius, all these declarations are the conscious, voluntary application of a method which he formulates in the following terms: always make a definition or description of the object that occurs in your representation, so as to be able to see it as it is iri its essence, both as a whole and as divided into its constituent parts, and say to yourself its proper name and the names of those things out of which it is composed, and into which it will be dissolved.59
This method is quintessentially Stoic: it consists in refusing to add subjective value-judgments - such as "this object is unpleasant," "that one is good,"
"this one is bad," "that one is beautiful," "this is ugly" - to the "objective"
representation of things which do not depend on us, and therefore have no morn! v11luc.·. The StoicK' notorious phantasia kata/eptike which we have
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trn11Nl11tt•d 1111 1111hl,•t·1 ivc representation"
tokes place precisely when we
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