Sublime

and to prefer, if you must, to speak haltingly, like Publius Vinicius.° When someone asked Asellius how Vinicius’s speech went, he said, “Bit by bit.”

“I’ll never be ashamed to quote a bad writer with a good saying.” —SENECA, ON TRANQUILITY OF MIND, 11.8

But Marcus Aurelius knows that what the heart is full of, the man will do. ‘Such as thy thoughts and ordinary cogitations are,’ he says, ‘such will thy mind be in time.’

may perhaps be attained by man, for to that extent I am inclined to believe that I am wise; whereas the persons of whom I was speaking have a superhuman wisdom which I may fail to describe, because I have it not myself;

It is as Epictetus said so many years ago: ‘No man is free who is not a master of himself.” ’

Unlike his elder brother, Gaius somehow succeeded in being elected tribune twice. But, in murky circumstances, he failed to be elected again for 121 BCE. In that year he resisted the efforts of the consul Lucius Opimius, a diehard who became something of a hero to the conservatives, to cancel much of his legislation. In the process he was killed, o

« l’homme le plus implacablement curieux de l’Histoire6 ».

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.