George Long

says he should not, about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not do that which he thinks and says and does.

Epictetus and Antoninus have had readers ever since they were first printed. The little book of Antoninus has been the companion of some great men.

From the time of Zeno to Simplicius, a period of about nine hundred years, the Stoic philosophy formed the characters of some of the best and greatest men. Finally it became extinct, and we hear no more of it til the revival of letters in …

The last reflection of the Stoic philosophy that I have observed is in Simplicius' "Commentary on the Enchiridion of Epictetus." Simplicius was not a Christian, and such a man was not likely to be converted at a time when Christianity was …

I could have made the language [in the translation of Meditations] more easy and flowing, but I have preferred a ruder style as being better suited to express the character of the original.

Our extant ecclesiastical histories are manifestly falsified, and what truth they contain is grossly exaggerated; but the fact is certain that in the time of M. Antoninus the heathen populations were in open hostility to the Christians, …

this was a declaration of hostility against the Roman government, which tolerated all the various forms of superstition that existed in the empire, and could not consistently tolerate another religion, which declared that all the rest were …

declared war against the heathen rites

A prudent governor will not roughly oppose even the superstitions of his people, and though he may wish they were wiser, he will know that he cannot make them so by offending their prejudices.

He [Marcus Aurelius]... plainly distinguishes between Matter, Material things, and Cause, Origin, Reason. This is conformable to Zeno's doctrine that there are two original principles of all things, that which acts and that which is acted …

He [Marcus Aurelius] constantly recurs to his fundamental principle that the universe is wisely ordered, that every man is a part of it and must conform to that order which he cannot change, that whatever the Deity has done is good, that …

He [Marcus Aurelius] has doubts perhaps sometimes even about that to which he holds most firmly. There are only a few passages of this kind, but they are evidence of the struggles which even the noblest of the sons of men had to maintain …

The emperor says that life is smoke, a vapour, and St. James in his Epistle is of the same mind; that the world is full of envious, jealous, malignant people, and a man might be well content to get out of it.

Epictetus wanted little, and it seems that he always had the little that he wanted, and he was content

The emperor Antoninus was a practical moralist. From his youth he followed a laborious discipline, and though his high station placed him above all want or the fear of it, he lived as frugally and temperately as the poorest philosopher.

but in activity, lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity"

no Ethical philosophy is worth anything, if the teacher has not lived the "life of an apostle," and been ready to die "the death of a martyr." "Not in passivity

A man who leads a life of tranquillity and reflection, who is not disturbed at home and meddles not with the affairs of the world, may keep his mind at ease and his thoughts in one even course. But such a man has not been tried. All his …

there is occasionally an apparent contradiction in the emperor's thoughts, as if his principles were sometimes unsettled, as if doubt sometimes clouded his mind.

as a means towards establishing his Physical, Theological, and Ethical principles.

an examination implies a use of Dialectic

intimately and inseparably connected with Physic or the Nature of Things and with Theology or the Nature of the Deity.

Antoninus does not treat of Politic. His subject is Ethic

Cleanthes also connects Ethic and Politic, or the study of the principles of morals and the study of the constitution of civil society.