From Daily Stoic: “Words once common in use now sound archaic,” he writes, “and the names of the famous dead as well…Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who shone. The rest—‘unknown, unasked for,’ a minute after death.” Marcus Aurelius mentions his predecessors, he mentions kings and conquerors, he mentions powerful people, important people. Yet even by 160 AD, many were already going the way of Ozymandias, half buried by the desert and the decades, their immortal reputation increasingly worse for the wear.
“What is ‘eternal’ fame?” Marcus asks, “Emptiness.”
It doesn’t even last. So what should we prize instead? We should just focus on doing good. Telling the truth. Trying our best. Accepting what happens. And with humility, prepare to be forgotten, as everyone who came before us eventually was, as Marcus Aurelius himself is to ninety nine percent of the world.
Read all of it here.
