"As the earth is a pinpoint in infinite space, so the life of man is a pinpoint in infinite time, a knife-edge between two eternities -- στιγμἠ του αἰῶνοϛ. His activities are 'smoke and nothingness'; his prizes are 'a bird flying past, vanished before we grasp it'. The clash of armies is 'the quarrel of puppies over a bone'; the pomp of Marcus's own Sarmatian triumph is the self-satisfaction of a spider which has caught a fly. For Marcus this is not empty rhetoric: it is a view of the human condition, and it is meant in deadly earnest."
-- Pagan and Christian in the Age of Anxiety, E. R. Dodds, (Wiles Lectures, Belfast 1963), 1965, p. 8.
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