Meditations IV.17

The passage stands as a single short paragraph in the fourth book of the Meditations — three short clauses, structurally compressed, with the moral injunction at the end held without elaboration. It is among the most cited expressions of the Stoic discipline of death-attention and a representative instance of the practice the passage simultaneously articulates and enacts.

Μὴ ὡς μύρια μέλλων ἔτη ζῆν. τὸ χρεὼν ἐπήρτηται· ἕως ζῇς, ἕως ἔξεστιν, ἀγαθὸς γενοῦ.

— Marcus Aurelius, Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν IV.17. Public domain.

Behave not thyself, as if thou wert about to live ten thousand years. Death stands at the door: while thou hast life, while thou mayest, do good.

— Translation: Meric Casaubon, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Roman Emperor, his Meditations concerning Himselfe (London: Mortlock, 1634). Public domain.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

— Translation: George Long, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862). Public domain.

Notes on the translations

The two renderings differ across all three of Marcus's clauses, and the differences are not stylistic but interpretive.

In the second clause, Casaubon's "Death stands at the door" and Long's "Death hangs over thee" render the same Greek (tò chreòn epērtētai) through different images. Epērtētai (perfect passive of epartáō) means hanging-over, suspended, impending; the verb's etymology favors Long's image. Casaubon's "stands at the door" is freer; the phrase imports a different metaphor that operates in English idiom but loses the suspension that the Greek emphasizes. Neither is wrong as English prose; they construct different relations of the reader to mortality.

The third clause carries the more substantive divergence. The Greek imperative is agathòs genoû — "become good," from gígnomai (to become). Casaubon renders "do good"; Long renders "be good." The choice has philosophical consequences. "Do good" reads as enjoinment toward virtuous action; "be good" reads as enjoinment toward virtuous character. The Greek can support either; gígnomai operates across the senses of becoming-into-being and coming-into-existence. Within Stoic context, the "be / become good" reading aligns more closely with the broader emphasis on character cultivation (prokopē, prohairesis); Casaubon's "do good" aligns with a more pragmatic tradition of moral admonition.

The architecture renders both translations and does not adjudicate between them. The disagreement is real and substantive; it cannot be dissolved by appeal to a more literal third translation, because agathòs genoû itself has the dual sense the translators are partitioning. What the reader receives by encountering both renderings is the recognition that the passage's force in English depends on translation choices, and that those choices have arrived from genuine readings of the Greek operating within somewhat different reception traditions — Casaubon's earlier-modern moral-pragmatic register, Long's Victorian character-formation register. More recent translations (Hays, Hard, Hammond) make their own choices that align variously with each.

The deepest editorial discipline at this passage is to refuse to settle the question. The translations disagree; the reader is permitted to encounter the disagreement; what they conclude from it is theirs.