9781945186240

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 the nature of the physical world is limited to
its relevance to human problems. About one of the basic Stoic physical
doctrines—the notion of the periodic conflagration (ekpyrosis) that ends a
cosmic cycle—Marcus adopts an agnostic position (though he was not
alone in this). To him it was ethics that was the basis of the system: “just
because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or
scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving
others . . .” (7.67).
The questions that the Meditations tries to answer are primarily
metaphysical and ethical ones: Why are we here? How should we live our
lives? How can we ensure that we do what is right? How can we protect
ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life? How should we
deal with pain and misfortune? How can we live with the knowledge that
someday we will no longer exist? It would be both pointless and
impertinent to try to summarize Marcus’s responses; the influence of the
Meditations on later readers springs in part from the clarity and insistence