Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [12]
Of Socrates’ predecessors (the so-called pre-Socratic thinkers), the most important, both for Marcus and the Stoics generally, was Heraclitus, the mysterious figure from Ephesus (in modern-day Turkey) whose Zenlike aphorisms were proverbial for their profundity and obscurity alike. Heraclitus’s philosophical system ascribed a central role to logos and to fire as the primordial element. Both elements were naturally congenial to the Stoics, and may well have influenced them. Heraclitus is mentioned in a handful of entries in the Meditations (4.46, 6.47), but his doctrines can be traced in many others. Moreover, his concision and epigrammatic phrasing anticipate the kind of enigmatic apothegm we find in a number of entries:
The best revenge is not to be like that. (6.6)
Straight, not straightened. (7.12)
The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer’s is part of him. (12.9)
It is from Heraclitus that Marcus derives one of his most memorable motifs, that of the unstable flux of time and matter in which we move. “We cannot step twice into the same river,” Heraclitus had said, and we see Marcus expanding on the observation: “Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone” (4.43; and compare 2.17, 6.15).
Though Heraclitus was clearly the pre-Socratic who most influenced Marcus, other thinkers leave traces as well. Marcus twice borrows the poet Empedocles’ image of the self-contained soul as a perfect sphere (8.41, 12.3), and he alludes once to the mystic doctrines of the Pythagoreans (11.27). Several entries explore the implications of phrases attributed to Democritus, one of the inventors of the theory of atoms, which would later inspire the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus.
Neither Heraclitus nor Socrates had founded a school. That was an achievement reserved for Plato, and then for Plato’s student Aristotle, who broke from his master to found the Peripatetic movement. Marcus never refers to Aristotle, though he does quote approvingly from the latter’s successor Theophrastus (2.10). Probably more important was another fourth-century B.C. movement: Cynicism. The Cynics, of whom the first and most notorious was the irascible Diogenes of Sinope, were united less by doctrine than by a common attitude, namely their contempt for societal institutions and a desire for a life more in accord with nature. Diogenes himself was largely responsible for the image of a philosopher as an impoverished ascetic (the “philosopher without clothes” evoked by Marcus at Meditations 4.30 might well be a Cynic). His famous claim to be a “citizen of the world” surely anticipates, if it did not actually influence, the Stoic conception of the world as a city-state. Marcus refers to Diogenes in several passages, as well as to the latter’s student Monimus (2.15), and invokes another Cynic, Crates, at Meditations 6.13, in an anecdote whose tenor is now uncertain.
Marcus’s relationship to Epicureanism, Stoicism’s great rival among Hellenistic philosophical systems, is much more vexed. The followers of Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) believed in a universe radically unlike that posited by Zeno and Chrysippus. The Stoic world is ordered to the nth degree; the Epicurean universe is random, the product of the haphazard conjunctions of billions of atoms. To speak of Providence in such a world is transparently absurd, and while Epicurus acknowledged the existence of gods, he denied that they took any interest in human life. As for humans, our role is simply to live as best we can, making the most of what pleasures are available to us and insulating ourselves as far as possible from pain and anxiety. In particular, we are to feel no anxiety about death, which consists simply in the dissolution of our component atoms. This process is not only inevitable, but harmless, for the simple reason that after death there is no “us” to suffer harm.
Although the sect numbered not a few prominent Romans among