"This is his [Marcus Aurelius Antoninus'] conclusion (II. 17): "What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, Philosophy. But this consists in keeping the divinity within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements [himself]? for it is according to nature; and nothing is evil that is according to nature.""
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George Long (scholar)
1844 – 1848
George Long (November 4, 1800 – August 10, 1879) was an English classical scholar, historian and translator. Among other works, he translated of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (1862), the Discourses of Epictetus (1877), Plutarch's Lives (1844–1848) and was the author of the Decline of the Roman Republic (1864–1874), the Civil Wars of Rome, and the Summary of Herodotus (1829).
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