On not being damaged

Book Eleven is the most socially focused of the books. Marcus returns again to the question of whether anyone can really damage you, and the answer is the same as it has always been: only your own assent can damage you. What another person does to your body or your reputation or your work is not, in the strict sense, harm. The harm only completes itself if you fire the second arrow at yourself.

He works through specific cases. The petitioner who is rude. The senator who has decided to dislike him. The flatterer. The man who lies in court. The friend who has betrayed a confidence. For each case he rehearses the response: this person is acting from ignorance; their action does not change what I am; my work is to do my own duty here, not to balance their account. By the eleventh book Marcus has gone through these moves so many times that he can run through them quickly.

What is striking in Book Eleven is the gentleness. Marcus reminds himself, repeatedly, that the people who annoy him have their own reasons. They are doing what they think is good. They cannot help being what they are. Compassion comes first; correction, where it must come, comes second. The book closes with a list of the names of philosophers who lived without bitterness — Marcus reaching for his predecessors one more time, reminding himself that this is possible.