Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

cvi INTRODUCTION SECT.
that, qualitatively at least, though not with any survival
of personality, the soul-pneuma retained its independence
until the general conflagration of the Universe, when a
new cycle of being begins, and the Pneuma reproduces
from itself the forms of immanence previously realised.
Chrysippus limited even this qualitative
retention of
being to the souls of the wise, believing that in all other
cases reabsorption took place before the final conflagra-
tion. From the nature of the case, and from Stoic dis-
taste for gratuitous metaphysical hypotheses, there was
room for difference of judgment, and Seneca illustrates
the tendency of Roman Stoicism to make at least verbal
concessions to the popular belief in some survival after
Jdeath. In his own conviction Marcus nowhere seems
/to waver ; death, wherever he has occasion to give clear
/ and simple utterance to his own thoughts, is always a
[ dissolution of being, that is, the end of action, impulse,
I will, or thought, that terminates every human activity,
\ and bounds our brief span of life with an eternity that
\ contains neither hint nor hope nor dread of further
conscious being. 1 The bodily elements will pass to
other uses, earth to earth and dust to dust, while the
life-giving Pneuma will rejoin that ethereal or fiery
/ being of which it is a part. Death is the last word said
I of the greatest and the least, of Alexander or his stable-
l boy, and equally extinguishes the virtuous and vicious,
, the wise man and the fool :
2 '
had it been better other-
wise, the gods would have had it so ; from its not being
so, be assured it ought not so to be.' 3
So resolute and
\ unequivocal
falls his own utterance.
2 iii. 3 ; vi. 24, 47.
3 xii. 5.