![]() ![]() ![]() However, Marcus also said that one of the key moments of his life occurred when his beloved Stoic tutor, Junius Rusticus, presented him with a copy of notes from the lectures of Epictetus, which belonged to his own personal library. Look at the matter in this way: you are an old man, no longer allow this part of you to act as a slave, no longer allow it to be tugged this way and that, like a puppet, by each unsociable impulse, no longer allow it to be discontented with its present lot or flinch from what will fall to it in the future. Elsewhere, therefore, he tells himself: Put away your books, distract yourself with them no longer, that is not permissible but rather, as though you were now on the verge of death, despise the flesh-just blood and bones and a mesh of interwoven nerves, veins, and arteries. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”Īt the beginning of his personal record of philosophical reflections, The Meditations, the Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius thanks the gods that once he became interested in philosophy, as a young man, he did not merely “sit down to pore over books” (1.17). ![]()
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