Everything that exists is in the process of becoming something else. The great empires, the celebrated men, the cities that seemed eternal: all have dissolved into the same forgetfulness. Marcus had seen this with his own eyes; he spent his reign watching a plague hollow out the population, watching the frontier cities he had known reduced to ruins. Change was not a philosophical abstraction but a daily fact.
The meditation on impermanence serves several purposes. First, it dissolves the urgency of vanity. If fame lasts no longer than a generation or two, why sacrifice virtue to achieve it? Second, it equalises: the slave and the emperor are subject to the same dissolving current. Third, it sharpens the value of the present moment, the one thing that is actually real.
Marcus lists, with almost archaeological relish, the great men of history who are now forgotten. Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Alexander. How many Chrysippuses and Socrateses has time already swallowed up? If they are gone, so too will be his own anxieties, grievances, and small dramas. This is oddly freeing.
The correct response to impermanence is neither clinging nor nihilism. It is a kind of light-handed engagement with the world: acting well, loving well, thinking clearly, without requiring that any of it last. The river flows. The wise person flows with it, not against it. What matters is not permanence but the quality of the moment as it passes.