Gut feeling...
Feb. 27th, 2017 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI caught the tail end of Gladiator on the tube the other day, and caught the scene between emperor Commodus and Maximus, where the latter recalls he once knew a man—who turned out to be Commodus' father, Marcus Aurelius—who said, Death smiles at us all—all a man can do is smile back.
The quote appears on the Web and is attributed to Aurelius, but the trail runs cold at that point. As I am aware of only one work that has come down to us from Aurelius—which ordinarily goes by the name of Meditations—I searched my electronic version of the Hays translation for likely matches and came up empty.
This leads me to believe that the quote is bogus, mostly because after having read (and re-read) Aurelius' text over some period of time, the words in question just don't sound as if they fit in. Aurelius is not given to personifying death.
That said, if personifying death is your thing, the quote does seem to fit into the Stoic mindset.
Cheers...
The quote appears on the Web and is attributed to Aurelius, but the trail runs cold at that point. As I am aware of only one work that has come down to us from Aurelius—which ordinarily goes by the name of Meditations—I searched my electronic version of the Hays translation for likely matches and came up empty.
This leads me to believe that the quote is bogus, mostly because after having read (and re-read) Aurelius' text over some period of time, the words in question just don't sound as if they fit in. Aurelius is not given to personifying death.
That said, if personifying death is your thing, the quote does seem to fit into the Stoic mindset.
Cheers...
