Begin the Morning by Saying

The story

Marcus Aurelius wrote Book II of the notes later called Meditations to himself. George Long’s 1862 translation opens it with a morning rehearsal: he will meet the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, the unsocial. He does not stop at the list. Those people, he says, act from ignorance of good and evil. The wrongdoer is still kin, sharing reason, and so is not someone to hate. People are made to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, and the rows of teeth. To be vexed and turn away is to act against one another, and that is contrary to nature.

The book does not stay on other people’s manners. A few lines later he tells himself to throw away the books, to remember that he is an old man, and to stop being pulled like a puppet. Long’s translation then ends the whole book with four words: “This in Carnuntum.”

Long’s note identifies Carnuntum as a town of Pannonia on the south side of the Danube, about thirty miles east of Vindobona, modern Vienna. He cites Orosius and Eutropius for a stay of three years there during the wars with the Marcomanni. The place-note is part of the text he prints. It is not a date for section 2.1 down to a morning.

The painting is a different episode, imagined in 1765. Vien shows a distribution of bread, the public face of an emperor in a city. The sentence is a private warning about the people he expected to meet, written from a military town on the river. The same man, in another section, puts the disturbance in the judgment rather than in the event.