It's endlessly entertaining to find nuggets that reveal life in the B.Cs, a hunt for these is mainly what keeps me reading Marcus Aurelius. For example, Meditation III:2, in which Aurelius talks about noticing the beauty in the imperfections of nature, says -
... the lion's wrinkled brow, the foam flowing from the boar's mouth as it dies...Eww. What an image. Later in the same Meditation:
[A man who appreciates the beauty in imperfections] will be enabled to see in an old man a kind of freshness and bloom, and to look upon the charms of his own slave boys with sober eyes.Hee hee hee!
Curious turn of phrase in Meditation VI:30 -
Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar, not to be dipped in the purple eye...Smart people are welcome to enlighten me on the meaning and origin of purple-eye dippings.
Meditation V:7 -
A prayer of the people of Athens: "Rain, beloved Zeus, rain on the cornfields and the plains of Attica."...There's something incredibly aweing about hearing a prayer from two thousand years past, isn't it? But then it strikes me, all those shlokas and mantras my mom made me memorise when I was a kid - those are like three thousand years old. What unimaginable tracts of time. The thought makes me shiver; a dozen geese are playing hopscotch on my grave.
The Gaia hypothesis of Marcus Aurelius, Meditation IV:40 (among many others)-
Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being and one soul...This is Aurelius's main thesis. He constantly talks about being one with Nature and being in harmony with it, respecting it, etc. He's not an environmentalist, if that's what you're thinking; "Nature" is just his name for God, the Cosmic Order, or whatever you care to call it. He does urge treating the earth and its resources with respect a few times, but mostly you see the sentiment clearly expressed in Meditation VI:23 -
Use dumb animals and lifeless things and objects generally with a... free spirit... because you have reason and they have not; ...I'm telling you, this guy was sensible.
All right, I'm still on Book IX (it's slow reading, OK, needs to be deciphered and all), so expect more updates on this subj.
