Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [8]
Cato, Thrasea, and Helvidius were doers, not writers, and their legendary heroism inevitably lends them a somewhat two-dimensional quality. A more complex and much more interesting figure was the poet Lucan’s uncle, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), commonly known as Seneca the Younger to distinguish him from his equally distinguished father. Originally councillor to the young Nero, he was eventually forced to commit suicide after being implicated in an attempted coup against his erstwhile pupil. Men’s lives are not always consistent with their ideals, and some critics have found it hard to reconcile Seneca’s fabulous wealth and his shameless flattery of Nero with his philosophical views. Yet his works (in particular the Letters to Lucilius) remain the most engaging and accessible expressions of later Stoicism. Because they were written in Latin they were also among the most influential on succeeding generations.
But not all Stoics were wealthy senators. There was another kind of Stoic exemplar as well: the outsider whose ascetic lifestyle won him the admiration of his wealthier contemporaries and enabled him to criticize the pretenses of upper-class society with real authority. An early example of the type is Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 30–100), a member of the Roman administrative class, the so-called knights (equites), who was banished by both Nero and Vespasian. A still more dramatic example was Musonius’s student Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135), who had taken up the practice of philosophy as a slave and devoted the remainder of his life to it after being freed. He had been exiled to Nicopolis (in northern Greece) under Domitian, and after the tyrant’s death, elected to remain there where he taught and lectured to visitors who often traveled great distances to study with him.
One of these was the upper-class historian and statesman Arrian (c. 86–160), who published an extensive record of the master’s discussions, a text conventionally referred to as the Discourses of Epictetus. He later produced an abridged version, the Encheiridion (“Manual” or “Handbook”). Epictetus seems to have been an especially important figure for Marcus. He thanks his philosophical mentor Rusticus for introducing him to “Epictetus’s lectures” (either the Discourses themselves or a private set of lecture notes), and a series of quotations and paraphrases from the philosopher appear in Book 11 of the Meditations. And Arrian’s abridged Encheiridion provides the closest literary parallel to the Meditations itself, not only in its content, but also in its form: a series of relatively short and unrelated entries.
Stoicism and the Meditations
The late Stoicism of Epictetus is a radically stripped-down version of its Hellenistic predecessor, a philosophy which “had learnt much from its competitors and had almost forgotten parts of itself.”3 Both these tendencies, the narrowing of the field and the eclectic borrowing from non-Stoic sources, can be discerned also in the Meditations.
Chrysippus and his followers had divided knowledge into three areas: logic, physics and ethics, concerned, respectively, with the nature of knowledge, the structure of the physical world and the proper role of human beings in that world. Marcus pays lip service to this triadic division in at least one entry (8.13), but it is clear from other chapters and from the Meditations as a whole that logic and physics were not his focus. Among the things for which he thanks the gods is that he was never “absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied by physics” (1.17). Occasional entries show an awareness of Stoic thought about language (the etymological pun in 8.57 is perhaps the clearest example), but they are the exception, not the rule. In many cases Marcus’s logic is weak—the logic of the rhetorician, not of the philosopher; it is rare to find a developed chain of reasoning like that in Meditations 4.4. His interest in