In the Meditations, Marcus explains the nature of this social duty. The gods, he says, created us for a reason—created us, as he puts it, “for some duty.” In the same way that the function of a fig tree is to do a fig tree’s work, the function of a dog is to do a dog’s work, and the function of a bee is to do a bee’s work, the function of a man is to do man’s work—to perform, that is, the function for which the gods created us.2 What, then, is the function of man? Our primary function, the Stoics thought, is to be rational. To discover our secondary functions, we need only apply our reasoning
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