The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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STOIC MASTERS AND THEIR WRITINGS 31
articulated dissertation. In a word, we have here
simply the guileless earnest presentation of a limited
number of great ethical notions in the shape of selfmusings,
and the stimulating example of a lovable man
in the highest social rank, the idolized ^philosopherpontiff,"
moulding his life consistently on his own
principle "Whatever any one else does or says, my
duty is to be good ; just as gold or emerald or purple
for ever says, Whatever any one else does or says, my
duty is to be an emerald and keep my proper hue
(Med. vii. 15).
This lack of system all
along
the line is unfortunate
and tantalizing, all the more so as it was in great
measure intentional. One can quite well understand
the position
fession
of Epictetus, who was a teacher by pro
and a man with a mission, and who naturally
conceived it to be his duty
to lecture rather than to
write, and, in lecturing, to stir his hearers by ardent
words uttered straight from the heart in conversational
style, rather than to perplex and possibly to repel them
by sterile logomachies and mere intellectual conceits.
Arrian s characterization of him insists on his intensity
and his infectious enthusiasm. 1 But the position of
others, not thus situated, is more difficult to understand.
Marcus Aurelius, however, near the opening of his
Meditations (i. 7), lets us into the secret. When
acknowledging his debt to the Stoic Rusticus, who
was the first to arouse in him the desire to live rightly,
he expresses his gratitude that he was kept back by him
from "sophistic
ambitions and essays on philosophy,
discourses provocative to virtue, or fancy portraitures
1
See Arrian s dedicatory letter to Lucius Gellius.