1

2. The Stoic art of living

1. Wisdom, knowledge of things human and divine, and an art of living

When people today mention “philosophy as a way of life”, they will most often be thinking of the

Stoics. As we have seen, the publication of this and other studies on this theme coincide with a

remarkable flourishing of online communities of self-describing “modern” or “traditional” Stoics.

These communities are united by their agreement that Stoic philosophy is something to be lived,

as well as thought about or written upon.

The Stoic school (also known as the “Stoa” or “the porch”) was founded in late 4th century BCE

by Zeno of Kition (modern-day Larnaka in Cyprus). As Diogenes Laertius relays the foundation

story, Zeno had been a merchant who lost all his goods in a shipwreck near Athens. Zeno is

supposed to have made his way to the Athenian agora, where he picked up and began reading a

copy of Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates. “Where can I find a man like this?”, he asked, and the

bookseller pointed him to the Cynic Crates. Zeno followed Crates for nearly a decade, before

breaking away to found the Stoic school, named after the Stoa Poikilê (Painted Stoa), where Zeno

would give his lectures to the public and discuss the philosophy.1 Yet what is known as late or

simply “Roman Stoicism” is that which is today best known.2 This is due almost entirely to the

vicissitudes surrounding the survival and transmission of the ancient texts. The Roman Imperial

period from the first to second century CE gives us four key figures, some or all of whose writings

have survived, unlike their Hellenistic predecessors’: Musonius Rufus, Seneca the Younger, the

1 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII, 1-3.

2 After Zeno’s death, Cleanthes (famous for his reverential “hymn to Zeus”) became the second “scholarch” or leader of the
Stoics. After Cleanthes came the great systematiser Chrysippus of Silo, who is said to have authored some 165 books, none of
which survive in complete form. The Stoic school survived in Athens, with an unbroken sequence of Scholarchs, until the late
2nd century. This is the period of so-called “middle Stoics”, Panaetius and Posidonius. Both of these figures based themselves
in Rhodes, attracting some of the leading figures in the later Roman Republic to pay them court. According to most sources, they
also brought non-Stoic, Platonic and Aristotelian elements into Stoic thought.
 2

slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, and the Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. During

this time, there was no formal Stoic school in Rome, although Musonius carried out lectures for a

time, some of which survive. Epictetus’ school in Nikopolis seems to have been one of only a few

in the wider Roman imperium. Stoic philosophers (like philosophers from the other Hellenistic

and classical schools) were instead often housed by leading Romans as philosophical advisors or,

in Ilsetraut Hadot’s term, “spiritual directors”.3

The relationship between these Roman Stoics and the Hellenistic founders of the School is the

subject of continuing debate. One predominant image sees the Roman Stoics’ emphasis on ethics,

as against theoretical physics and logic, as reflecting the Romans’ hard-minded practicality, in

contrast to the more talkative, theoretically minded Greeks. Yet this image is disputed, in particular

by Ilsetraut Hadot, who notes that the doxographic record contains references to Roman-era Stoic

texts of physics.4 Epictetus’ Discourses make it clear that, however much he criticised the idea that

knowing Chrysippus’ logic could be sufficient for a Stoic, he also accorded this study an important

place in his curriculum.5 Seneca wrote a work on Natural Questions, and we shall see how Marcus

Aurelius’ Meditations turns heavily upon physico-theoretical considerations.6

There is considerable ancient evidence attesting to the fact that all the Stoics followed Socrates

(chapter 1) in defining philosophy as a business of both erga and logoi. The second century sceptic,

Sextus Empiricus, who preserves a large number of Stoic passages, thus records that for the

Stoics—he does not specify any particular period—philosophy is a technê peri ton bion or “art of

living”:

3 Ilsetraut Hadot, Sénèque: direction spirituelle et pratique de la philosophie (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2014).
4 Ilsetraut Hadot, Sénèque 132-140, 184-191. Compare Brad Inwood, The Importance of Form in Seneca’s Philosophical Letters, in R
Morello, and A.D. Morrison eds.. Ancient letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 137.
5Disc. II.23.44; I.4.4–14; cf. Disc. III.21; Epictetus, Encheiridion, sec. 49.
6 On the other hand, the same doxographic records suggest that amongst Chrysippus’ extraordinary literary production, there

were texts on practical philosophy like a Therapeutikon (On Therapy), and texts on consolation. The Hellenistics, as we might say,
seem already to have been Roman, at least insofar as an emphasis on philosophy as involving both discourses and a manner of
living in accordance with those discourses is concerned.
 3

the Stoics say straight out that practical wisdom (phronêsis), which is knowledge of things

which are good and bad and neither, is an art relating to life (technê peri ton bion), and that

those who have gained this are the only ones who are beautiful, the only ones who are rich,

the only ones who are sages.7

Seneca in the first century CE tells us that philosophy “tells us how to live, not how to talk”8, and

distinguishes it as a guide for life.9 As John Sellars notes, a century later, Epictetus provided a

concurring formulation in his Discourses:

Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be

admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject matter. For just as wood is the

material of the carpenter, bronze that of the statuary, so each individual’s own life (o bios

autou ekastou) is the material of the art of living (tês peri bion technês ).10

Diogenes Laertius, the doxographer of late antiquity (c. 3rd century CE), can be read as suggesting

that the Hellenistic Stoics distinguished between philosophy itself, which they likened to a living

organism, and “philosophical discourse” or the “theories of the philosophers”, which they divided

under the three headers of logic, physics and ethics.11 Indeed, as René Brouwer has examined in

The Stoic Sage, both of the extant Stoic definitions of wisdom stress that what is at stake is not

simply a body of systematic, true beliefs concerning “things both human and divine.”12 Wisdom

will also involve a “fitting expertise (technê)” whose goal is either “the virtues”, in a passage reported

by the first century CE Platonist Plutarch; or in pseudo-Galen’s History of Philosophy, “the best life

7 Sextus Empiricus Adv. math. 11.170 (= SVF 3.598); trans. Bett modified.
8 Ep. 20.2.
9 Ep. 16.1.
10 Epictetus Diss. 1.15.2; see John Sellars, Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003),

22.
11 DL II 39-40. Pierre Hadot ventures this reading in Pierre Hadot “La Philosophie Antique: une Éthique ou une Pratique?”, in

Études de Philosophie Ancienne (France: Éditions des Belles Lettres), 207-232, at 220-221.
12“The Stoics said that [i] wisdom is knowledge of human and divine matters, and [ii] philosophy exercise of fitting expertise; [iii]

the single and supremely fitting expertise is excellence, [iv] and excellences at their most general are three: in nature, in behaviour,
in reasoning.” Plutarch, Placita, SVF 2.35, LS 26 A, FDS 15; Sextus Empiricus, at Against the Professors 9.125 ( SVF 2.1017); René
Brouwer, The Stoic Sage: the Early Stoics on Wisdom, Sagehood and Socrates (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 8.
 4

for human beings.”13 Philosophy, we are told, remarkably, is the “exercise” of this technê aiming at

the best human life.14

Philosophy then is the exercise (askêsis) of the technê of the best life for human beings which is

wisdom. It will involve the training of a person’s psyche, both to acquire a systematic understanding

of the world, and to embody that knowledge in their course of their lives. The large Stoic literature

devoted to thinking through the attributes of the Sophos or Sapiens, the wise man, makes sense

against the background of these larger conceptions of philosophy [9].15 For the Stoics, as for the

other schools, the sage was the embodiment of wisdom itself. As such, he was the superlative

possessor of all the virtues and crafts useful for human beings. To imagine what he would say,

think, and do was to make vividly present, in personified form, the goal of philosophy. This goal,

Zeno had famously defined as “the life in harmony with nature”16 characterised by a certain “good

flow” of experiences.17 It is in this light also that the philosophical works bequeathed to us by the

great Roman Stoics, with their emphasis on the philosophical exercises, can be understood as in

no way a falling away from the Hellenistic Stoics’ theoretical understandings. They involve instead

a series of selective presentations of Stoic philosophy, geared to specific protreptic, exhortative,

and practical ends.

We will turn to these Roman Stoics presently, but first we must look at the specifically Socratic

dimension of the Stoics’ conception of philosophy.

13 “Others defined philosophy as the exercise of fitting expertise of the best life for human beings, saying that philosophy is
exercise, and calling wisdom fitting expertise, which is also a cognition of human and divine matters.” Ps.-Galen, On the History of
Philosophy, at 5, 602.19–3.2 Diels: at Brouwer, Stoic Sage, 47.
14 Loc cit. Again, the Stoics’ understandings of the technai themselves all point to these arts, as Socrates had suggested, involving

both systematic, applicable understandings of their objects, as well as a transformed hexis in the psyche of the technician. Such a
definition would need to be applied to the fitting techne of philosophy as well. The craftsperson knows more about her subject
than non-experts. Also, her mind, which for the Stoics remains a physical body, is differently shaped or conditioned by having
and exercising that knowledge. Indeed, a further definition of the technai attributed to Zeno defines an art as “a system of
cognitions unified by training (σύστημα έκ καταλήψεων συγγεγυμνασμένων …) towards some useful end in life.” Olympiodorus,
Commentary on the Gorgias 12.1 (SVF 1.73, FDS 392, LS 42. At Brouwer, Stoic Sage, 51.
15 See Julia Annas, “The Sage in Ancient Philosophy,” in Anthropine Sophia, edited by F. Alesse and others, volume in memory of

Gabriele Giannantoni (Naples, Bibliopolis 2008); and Pierre Hadot, “La Figure du Sage dans L’Antiquité Gréco-Latine”, in Études
de Philosophie Antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 233-258; and Brouwer, Stoic Sage, ch. 2. But see sec. 5 below.
16 DLVII.86.
17Stobaeus, 2.77.
 5

2. The Socratic lineage: dialectic, the emotions, and the sufficiency of virtue

According to Epictetus, “God counselled Socrates to undertake the office of refutation (elenktikēn);

Diogenes, that of reproving men in a kingly manner (basilikēn kai epiplēktikēn); Zeno, that of

doctrinal instruction …”18 Epictetus’ assignment of a principal place to Socrates in his genealogy

of Stoicism, alongside Diogenes and Zeno, is representative of a larger Stoic endoxa. Socrates is

numbered in some Stoic texts as one of the few sages, and the early Stoics identified themselves

as “Sokratikoi”.19 To understand the key Stoic debts to Socrates is then to approach the heart of

their conception of philosophy as a way of life.

On one hand, the Stoics greatly admired Socrates’ personal conduct, in particular his fearlessness

in the face of death. Socrates’ refusal to compromise on his philosophical principles, demonstrated

in his defiant conduct at his trial, then his equanimity before drinking the hemlock, set up a

paradigm for later Stoic conceptions of the good death. Thus, for instance, we are told that Cato

the Younger had been reading Plato’s Phaedo before going to his death.20 A century later, Seneca’

own death at the hands of Nero seems to have been consciously modelled on the atopos Greek

sage (see Chapter 1).21

Yet, secondly, as in Epictetus’ assessment above, the Stoics were also legatees to Socrates’

conception of the role of dialectic and reasoning in shaping the good life. As Epictetus explains:

“Socrates knew that, if a rational soul be moved by anything, the scale must turn, whether it will

or no. Show the governing faculty of reason a contradiction, and it will renounce it; but until you

have shown it, rather blame yourself than him who remains unconvinced.”22 For the Stoics as for

18 Disc, II 21 18-20.
19 See Sellars, Art of Living, 72.
20 Plutarch, “Life of Cato the Younger”, in Lives of the Eminent Greeks and Romans, 69-71.
21 Tacitus, Annals XV, 60-64; see James Ker, Deaths of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship, 2009).
22 Disc. II 26.
 6

Socrates, that is, error—whether epistemic or ethical—is involuntary, involving forms of

concealed self-contradiction:

Every error implies a contradiction; for, since he who errs does not wish to err, but to be

in the right, it is evident, that he acts contrary to his wish. What does a thief desire to attain?

His own interest. If, then, thieving be really against his interest he acts contrary to his own

desire.23

While denying the metaphysical grounds of the Platonic conception of anamnêsis, the Stoics

maintained that people are each endowed by nature with correct starting points or

“preconceptions” (prolêpseis, emphytos ennoia24) about good and bad, the advantageous, the virtues,

etc.: “[f]or which of us does not admit, that good is advantageous and eligible, and in all cases to

be pursued and followed? Who does not admit that justice is fair and becoming?” 25 It follows

that, as A. A. Long has expressed it, “whoever has a false moral belief will always have at the same

time true moral beliefs entailing the negation of the false belief.”26 To live philosophically, then,

for the Stoics, involves a fundamental Socratic commitment to the examination of one’s various

opinions. It also entails a willingness to let go of those opinions that are shown to contradict the

better-founded beliefs that Stoic philosophical discourse aimed to codify. Epictetus, as ever,

condenses the thought powerfully, by way of an analogy with the Socrates of the Apology:

Just as Socrates used to say we should not live an unexamined life, so we should not accept

an unexamined impression (anazetaton phantasian), but should say: ‘Wait, let me see who you

are and where you are coming from … Do you have your guarantee from nature, which

every impression that is to be accepted should have.’27

23 Disc. II 26.1-2.
24 Disc. III.12.15.
25 Disc 1.22.1-2; cf. 4.1.44-5; cf. A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25-

26.
26 Long, Epictetus, 82.
27 Disc. III.12.15.
 7

This work of the examination of one’s beliefs is what Pierre Hadot has called the “discipline of

logic” (see section 3.4 below). In the pedagogical analogies which Diogenes Laertius tells us that

the Stoics used to explain the interdependency of the different parts of philosophy, it is certainly

significant that “logic” is depicted as the sinews and bones of the organism; or else the shell

encompassing the egg, or as the wall encompassing the field or city of the whole.28 In each analogy,

logic shapes the very structure of this whole. The full ethical force of the Socratic discipline of

logic however rests upon the Stoics’ “cognitivist” or “intellectualist” account of the emotions, to

use later modern terms.29 For the Stoics as for the Epicureans, what people think about the world

and themselves is decisively important in understanding the causes of suffering. “Men are not

disturbed by things which happen (ta pragmata), but by the opinions (dogmata) about the things,”

Epictetus’ Encheiridion states aphoristically.30 The emotions, according to the Stoics, embody

specific kinds of pathogenic opinions about the world, and about what we imperatively need in

order to be happy. Stoic tabulations of the passions (pathê), as in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations IV,

6-7 hence reduce the entire range of human emotions to just four headers. These are divided

according to whether the things that people suppose to be beneficial or harmful to them, and as

such necessary to pursue or avoid, are present or in prospect in the future.

Figure 1: Stoic emotions, from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book IV, 6-7.

Present Future (in prospect)

things taken to be Delight (hêdonê, gaudium) Desire (epithymia, spez)

good
things taken to be Distress (lupê, dolor) Fear (phobos, metus)
bad

28 Diogenes Laertius, Lives. VII.41.

29 See Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Inwood & Dononi, “Stoic Ethics”, in
Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. K. Algra et al (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 699-717; M. Frede, “The Stoic Doctrine of the
Affections of the Soul”, in The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 93-110..
30 Ench., sec. 5.
 8

These pathê are to be extirpated, for the Stoics, not simply moderated. The reason is that, in each

case, the shaping belief of the emotion is demonstrably false. Each emotional response reflects an

evaluative claim: that we imperatively need the things in question, say to avoid someone, or to

possess something. This evaluation justifies the directive impulse that the emotion gives body to:

that it is “appropriate” (kathêkon) for us to respond with anger, or with tears, frustration, envy,

desire, etc. But if it can be philosophically demonstrated that we do not need the things in

question, it follows that the tendency of a person to remain subject to the corresponding emotion

both should and can be removed.

That such philosophical demonstration, for the Stoics, is forthcoming points to the third, clear

Socratic debt of the Porch. As A. A. Long and Gisela Striker have pointed out, the Stoics’ central

ethical claim concerning what human beings need to be happy is deeply Socratic.31 It echoes

Socrates’ famous claim to the Athenians in the Apology that all he had ever tried to convince anyone

of was of the need to first of all take care of their souls, instead of first pursuing external goods,

like wealth, fame, and power.32 Socrates’ argument for this paradoxical claim is defended directly

in Plato’s Euthydemus 278c-281e. Cast in the form of a dialogue of Socrates with Euthydemus, it

can be formulated as follows:

1. Everyone wishes to fare well.

2. Faring well involves the possession or use or enjoyment of good things.

3. These include, according to accepted opinion:

[a] external goods: wealth, health, beauty, strength, noble birth, power, honour …;

(b) temperance, justice and courage (the virtues);

(c) wisdom;

31 See Gisela Striker, “Plato’s Socrates and the Stoics”, in The Socratic Movement, ed. Paul A. Vander Waerdt (Cornell: 1994) pp.
241–251; A. A. Long, “Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy”, in Stoic Studies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 1-
34; A.A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 67-96; William O. Stephens,
Marcus Aurelius: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2002), 59-62..
32 Apo. 29d-30b.
 9

(d) good fortune.

4. But wisdom [c] is good fortune [d], since it always makes men act well [so to aim for

wisdom is to aim for good fortune, and [d] is identified with [c]].

5. All truly good things benefit their possessor, enjoyer or user (this is what it means for them

to be “good”).

6. Good things benefit their possessor by being used or enjoyed, not simply possessed.

7. The correct use of external goods [a] is the wisdom [c] which guides choice and actions

concerning how to use or enjoy these.

8. Thus, wisdom [c] provides men both with good fortune [d], and also ensures that the

external “goods” [a] are actually good for their possessor. By contrast:

9. without such wisdom [c], these goods [a] may harm people, not benefit them.

10. Hence, contra unexamined endoxa, wisdom [c] is the only true good, alongside the virtues

[b] which embody that wisdom in different concerns of life.

11. As for external goods [a], they are properly speaking neither good nor evil, but

“indifferent” (ta adiaphora) or “intermediary” things (ta mesa).

It follows from 11, directly, that it is false to believe that any external thing, outside of the inner

character of peoples’ psyches, is good or evil: which is to say that we could imperatively need to

possess or avoid it in order to flourish. The Stoics delight in reminding people, by example, of

how beauty, riches, fame and power do not necessarily bring satisfaction with them:

Why do you seek this possession [eudaimonia] without? It lies not in the body; if you do not

believe me, look at Myro, look at Ophellius. It is not in wealth; if you do not believe me,

look upon Crœsus; look upon the rich of the present age, how full of lamentation their life

is. It is not in power; for otherwise, they who have been twice and thrice consuls must be

happy; but they are not …”33

33Epictetus, Disc. III.22.26.

 10

Nevertheless, it is just this kind of false belief that fuels humans’ passing delights, desires, distresses

and fears in all of their different manifestations. The sage, for this reason, will experience no such

emotions. In this sense his inner state will be characterised by apatheia, a deep inner tranquillity or

serenity. His only imperative attachments will be to the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. Yet these

are both within the reach of his own ruling faculty (hêgemonikon) to achieve, neither hostage fortune

nor vulnerable to the vices of others. In place of the pathê, that is, the Stoic sage will feel only what

are called the eupatheia: a caution to avoid evil, the wish to attain virtue, and joy, the “elation of a

spirit that trusts in its own goods and truths…”.34

We turn now to what the key Roman Stoics tell us about the “exercise” of philosophy, and its

difficult pursuit of wisdom, the eupatheia, and the ideal of the sage.

3. From Musonius Rufus to Seneca

With the exception of Cicero, who cannot be counted a Stoic (see chapter 4.2), the first two Stoics

from whom we have relatively complete works both hail from the early imperial period: Gaius

Musonius Rufus (c. 30-101 CE) and Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger (4 BCE-65 CE)).

Both of these philosophers were active in the reign of Nero, with Musonius being exiled by in 65

CE, and Seneca, who was much closer to the deranged Emperor and his circles, being compelled

to commit suicide in the same year.

Twenty-one of Gais Musonius Rufus’ logoi (“lectures”, “discourses” or “speeches on philosophy

bearing his name”) survive, courtesy of a student, one Lucius, and the compiler Stobaeus.35 These

discourses span what we would call metaethical subjects, such as “That Man is Born with an

Inclination Toward Virtue” into more immediate, prescriptive considerations: “That One Should

Seneca, Ep. 59. On the eupathê, see Graver, Stoicism and Emotions, 57-60.
34

See Gaius Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Sayings, Introduction and Translation by Cora E. Lutz ( Yale Classical Studies (Yale
35

University Press, 1947[volume X]).

 11

Disdain Hardships”, “On Sexual Indulgence” or “Must One Obey One's Parents under all

Circumstances?” There are also a series which directly concern themselves with figure of the

philosopher, and what is appropriate to him (or indeed her), such as “That Women Too Should

Study Philosophy”, “That Kings Also Should Study Philosophy”, “Will the Philosopher Prosecute

Anyone for Personal Injury?”, “What means of Livelihood is Appropriate for a Philosopher?”,

and “Is Marriage a Handicap for the Pursuit of Philosophy?” Of particular interest for us here are

the fifth and sixth logoi collected, which are directly given over to considering: “Which is more

Effective, Character (Ethos) or Theory (Logos)?”, and a discourse “On Exercise (Peri Askêseôs)”.

“The problem arose among us whether, for the acquisition of virtue, character (êthos) or theory is

more effective,” Musonius’ fifth discourse begins.36 Musonius’ position is that ethical cultivation

is more important. Echoing Socrates, Musonius asks his pupils to consider whether they would

place their faith in a doctor who could discourse well on healing, or a doctor who could heal

patients effectively; a theoretician of navigation without practical experience or an experienced

pilot; or again, a musical theoretician or a virtuoso to make music? “Well then”, Musonius draws

in the analogy, the same should apply concerning moderation (sôphrosyne) and self-control

(enkrateia). It is clearly superior for someone to be self-controlled and moderate, than to be able to

speak well concerning these things.37 Theoretical understanding of such subjects is necessary for

correct or skilful action. But the ethos takes precedence (proteroi) over words, when it comes to

effectively changing peoples’ actions.38

Indeed, in “Of Practice”, it becomes clear that Musonius Rufus thinks that teaching the virtues

will require students to undertake practical testing and exercises. Theory alone will always fall

short. Once a student has learned what a virtue is, Musonius counsels, askêsis of different kinds

must follow straight after, if benefit is to be yielded from the teachings.39 This is all the more so,

36 Musonius, Lectures, V.1.

37 Musonius, Lectures, V,2-4.
38 Musonius, Lectures, V,4.
39 Musonius, Lectures, VI, 3.
 12

insofar as we each come to philosophy having been corrupted to different degrees by our

prephilosophical environments and experiences.40 Usually, even after we have learnt the

theoretical tenets of Stoic ethics—that pleasure is not to be desired, death or poverty or pain

feared; that virtue is the only good, and so on—when actual hardship comes, or some prospect of

pleasure, we act as if we did not know these things. What is required, accordingly, since human

beings are at once souls and bodies, are different forms of askêsis: one form, directed to the soul

alone, which is preeminent; but another, aimed at the body as well as the psychê.41 As Musonius

specifies, in one of the clearer statements of a philosophical regimen of practices in the Western

tradition:

We use the training common to both when we discipline ourselves to cold, heat, thirst,

hunger, meagre rations, hard beds, avoidance of pleasures, and patience under suffering. For

by these things and others like them the body is strengthened and becomes capable of

enduring hardship, sturdy and ready for any task; the soul too is strengthened since it is

trained for courage by patience under hardship and for self-control by abstinence from

pleasures.42

On the other hand, the training which aims solely at the psyche involves the deep internalisation

of the Stoics’ theoretical tenets, beginning from the Euthydemus argument we have seen. Such a

philosophical askêsis:

consists first of all in seeing that the proofs pertaining to apparent goods as not being real

goods are always ready at hand and likewise those pertaining to apparent evils as not being

real evils, and in learning to recognize the things which are truly good and in becoming

accustomed to distinguish them from what are not truly good. In the next place it consists

of practice in not avoiding any of the things which only seem evil, and in not pursuing any

40 Musonius, Lectures, VI, 3.

41 Musonius, Lectures, VI, 4.
42 Musonius, Lectures, VI, 5.
 13

of the things which only seem good; in shunning by every means those which are truly evil

and in pursuing by every means those which are truly good.43

Having thus outlined the genii of different kinds of Stoic exercise, together with their philosophical

justification, nevertheless, Musonius does not in “Of Exercise” give details of how the aspirant

should undertake these exercises. A good deal more on this and other aspects of Stoic philosophy

is forthcoming in Musonius’ near contemporary, Seneca the younger, to whom we now turn.

Seneca was the author of at least fourteen philosophical works, almost all of which have survived

intact since antiquity: these were in fact the only extant Stoic texts available for much of the middle

ages (chapter 5).44 The texts include works of theoretical ethics, describing “The Constancy of the

Sage”, “On the Happy Life”, “On Leisure”, “On Tranquillity of Mind”, “On Benefits”, and two

works in Stoic physics, “On Providence” and “Natural Questions.” Each of these texts is framed

as an epistolary response to a named interlocutor, and arguably Seneca’s most famous work, The

Moral Letters to Lucilius, is presented as an extended correspondence of the philosopher with this

Lucilius, a Roman equestrian and procurator of Sicily with sympathetic leanings towards

Epicureanism. Finally, there are three extant works of consolation, preeminent exemplars within

this long-standing ancient genre of philosophical writing whose very presence powerfully attests

to the extent to which ancient philosophy was conceived as a “guide to life,” in Seneca’s own

phrase.45

In an important study, Ilsetraut Hadot has argued for the need to conceive of Seneca’s

philosophical persona as that of what she calls a “spiritual director”, if we are to bring order to his

philosophical production.46 According to her, this figure stands in a genealogy looking back to

43 Musonius, Lectures, VI, 6.

44 See Gerard Verbeke, Presence of Stoicism in Medieval Thought (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1983).
45 Seneca, Moral Epistles to Lucilius, letter 16, section 1. Hereafter abbreviated as Ep. 16.1.
46 Hadot, Sénèque. See Ilsetraut Hadot, “The Spiritual Guide”, in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek,

Roman, edited by A. H. Armstrong (NY: Crossroad, 1986), 436-59.

 14

divine guides, like Phoenix for Achilles in the Iliad.47 The relationship of wise counsel that it

enshrines also accords with the idealised Greek and Roman norms of friendship as the vehicle for

“counsel, conversation, encouragement, consolation, and sometimes even reproof ...”48 Hadot’s

work places great emphasis on the 94th and 95th Letters to Lucilius for understanding the parameters

of Seneca’s philosophical discourses.49 In the two letters, Seneca counters the scepticism of Aristo

of Chios about the idea that the philosophical ethicist could do more than generate general

teachings (placita or decreta) about ethical subjects, of a kind we find for instance in the Nicomachean

Ethics. According to Aristo, philosophy can provide no specific guidance about how to better a

student’s character, and how they should live.50 In response, Seneca invokes the authority of the

second Stoic scholarch, Cleanthes, who commented that to produce a set of ethical teachings

without specific precepts to assist students in attaining to the virtues is like “merely … showing

the sick man what he ought to do if he were well, instead of making him well.”51 By contrast, the

philosopher interested in shaping practice by philosophical reasoning must also cultivate what

Hadot calls a “paraenetic” dimension of philosophy (une partie parénétique)52. Such parénésis

presupposes and applies theoretical philosophy. Yet it operates, Ilsetraut Hadot claims, in “relative

independence” to the theoretical claims of the different philosophical schools53—a claim which

we shall see momentarily most certainly applies to philosophical consolatory literature.

Philosophical paraenesis involves forms of persuasive speaking and writing to assist people in

attaining to the goods described by theoretical discourses. Paraenetic philosophising hence adds

specific precepts addressing particular situation-types and cases to general decreta, and forms of

47 Hadot, Sénèque, 36.

48 Cicero, De Off. I 58.
49 Hadot, Sénèque, 19-21, 25-28.
50 Ep. 94.2; cf. Hadot 2014: 25-27.
51 Ep. 94.5.
52 I. Hadot, Sénèque, 27.
53 Hadot, Sénèque, 55.
 15

exhortative rhetoric to inspire ethical change their ways of acting in the world.54 As Seneca

underlines:

if the other arts are content with precepts, wisdom will also be content therewith; for wisdom

itself is an art of living. And yet the pilot is made by precepts which tell him thus and so to

turn the tiller, set his sails, make use of a fair wind, tack, make the best of shifting and variable

breezes—all in the proper manner. Other craftsmen also are drilled by precepts; hence

precepts will be able to accomplish the same result in the case of our craftsman in the art of

living.55 Seneca’s paraenetic spiritual direction is most clearly manifest in the three

consolations he addressed, one to his a grieving mother, Marcia, one to Polybius, and one

to his own mother Helvia, at the time of Seneca’s exile by the Emperor Claudius. The first

thing to note about these texts is that they belong to a venerated ancient literary genre.

Hellenistic handbooks of letter-writing list logoi paramuthikoi, “exhortatory” or “consolatory

discourses” as an established epistolary form.56 Skill in the genre of “assuaging grief”

through logoi, whose antecedents look back to the Homeric funeral oration, seems to have

been advertised as early as the sophist Antiphon, a contemporary of Gorgias and Socrates.

The pseudo-Platonic Axiochus pictures Socrates consoling the eponymous protagonist

against his own imminent death, while 4th century Platonist Crantor penned a work on grief

(Peri Penthous), and the 3rd century Cynic Teles penned a work On Exile with the same

psychotherapeutic intentionality. Later, there is Cicero’s lost Hortensius (and, to some degree,

The Tusculan Disputations), a consolation of (pseudo-)Plutarch, and Musonius’ ninth recorded

discourse, On Exile.57

54 I. Hadot, Sénèque, 318

55 Ep. 95.7.
56 See Frank Witt Hughes, “The Rhetoric of Reconciliation: 2 Corinthians 1.1-2.13 and 7.5-8.24, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in

New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy, ed. Duane Frederick Watson (Michigan: JSOT Press, 1991), 246-248.
57 See Han Balthussen, “Personal Grief and Public Mourning in Plutarch’s Consolation”, Amercian Journal of Philology 130:1 (Spring

2009), 70-76 (“Beginnings of Consolation”)

 16

When Seneca turned his mind to these consolatory works, then, the Roman Stoic was far from

breaking new ground. Nor was he undertaking a counselling task specific to the Stoics, as Cicero

underscores in The Tusculan Disputations:

There are some who think with Cleanthes [the Stoic], that the only duty of a comforter is to

prove, that what one is lamenting is by no means an evil. Others, as the Peripatetics, prefer

urging that the evil is not great. Others, with Epicurus, seek to divert your attention from

the evil to good: some think it sufficient to show, that nothing has happened but what you

had reason to expect, and this is the practice of the Cyrenaics. But Chrysippus [the Stoic]

thinks that the main thing in comforting is, to remove the opinion from the person who is

grieving, that to grieve is his bounden duty.58

Seneca belongs to the next group Cicero addresses who, like himself, “bring together all these

various kinds of consolations, for people are differently affected…”59 Near the beginning of the

Ad Helvium, Seneca indeed confesses that he has been “turning over all the works which the

greatest geniuses have composed, for the purpose of soothing and pacifying grief.”60 Hans

Balthussen has shown the common argument topics that span across the different sophistic,

Platonic, cynical and Stoic consolations, including those of Seneca: the reminders that time heals;

that others, including noble figures have suffered worse; that death has delivered the beloved one

from the hands of misfortune; that we do not grieve the dead, but for our own loss, which is

irrational and not what the beloved would want for us; coupled with exhortations to noble

behaviour, to study as a noble distraction, and for the grieving one not to neglect their duties; nor

to complain against the unchangeable unfolding of providence or fate.61 Seneca’s Consolation to

58 TD III 31.
59 TD III 31
60 Seneca, Consolation to Helvia, 1.
61 Balthussen, “Personal Grief”, 71-81; see Valerie M. Hope, “Living Without the Dead: Finding Solace in Ancient Rome”, in

Coming Back to Life: The Permeability of Past and Present, Mortality and Immortality, Death and Life in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. F. S.
Tappenden and C. Daniel-Hughes, with the assistance of Bradley N. Rice (Montreal, QC: McGill University Library, 2017), 39-
70.
 17

Marcia concludes with one of the more extraordinary examples of what Pierre Hadot has called

“the view from above”, a philosophical exercise in reconceiving one’s own affairs, which we tend

to take as all-consuming, as one miniscule part of a larger order.62 Seneca uses proposopeia,

enjoining Marcia through the mouth of her dead father, to reconceive her sorrow in the perspective

of an eternity in whose light they appear as very small:

Imagine then, Marcia, that your father, … in a mood as much more joyful as his abode now

is higher than of old, is saying, as he looks down from the height of heaven, ‘My daughter,

why does this sorrow possess you for so long? why do you live in such ignorance of the

truth, as to think that your son has been unfairly dealt with because he has returned to his

ancestors in his prime, without decay of body or mind, leaving his family flourishing? Do

you not know with what storms Fortune unsettles everything? … Need I remind you of

kings who would have been the happiest of mortals had death sooner withdrawn them from

the ruin which was approaching them? or of Roman generals, whose greatness, had but a

few years been taken from their lives, would have wanted nothing to render it complete? or

of men of the highest distinction and noblest birth who have calmly offered their necks to

the stroke of a soldier's sword? … I used to take pleasure in compiling the history of what

took place in one century among a few people in the most out-of-the-way corner of the

world: here I enjoy the spectacle of all the centuries, the whole chain of events from age to

age as long as years have been. I may view kingdoms when they rise and when they fall, and

behold the ruin of cities and the new channels made by the sea, If it will be any consolation

to you in your bereavement to know that it is the common lot of all, be assured that nothing

will continue to stand in the place in which it now stands …’63

62 Pierre Hadot, “The View for Above”, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 238-250.
63 Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 26.
 18

Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius remain Seneca’s most widely read text. It is also that text in which we

find many of his most arresting statements concerning the role of philosophy.64 The Stoic

philosopher aspires to wisdom. But in this aspiration, he aims at securing the conditions for

happiness, and the life in harmony with nature. Moreover, to the extent that philosophy aims to

identify and overcome the causes of unhappiness and disharmony, like excessive grief, it is

therapeutic:

The old Romans had a custom which survived even into my lifetime. They would add to the

opening words of a letter: ‘If you are well, it is well; I also am well.’ Persons like ourselves

would do well to say. ‘If you are studying philosophy, it is well.’ For this is just what ‘being

well’ means. Without philosophy the mind is sickly, and the body, too, though it may be very

powerful, is strong only as that of a madman or a lunatic is strong …65

Letter 33 in particular makes clear Seneca’s distance from today’s conception of much of

philosophical activity, and his own distance from being a mere commentator on others:

‘This is what Zeno said’ [someone says]. But what have you yourself said? ‘This is the

opinion of Cleanthes.’ But what is your own opinion? How long shall you march under

another man's orders? ... For this reason I hold that there is nothing of eminence in all such

men as these, who never create anything themselves, but always lurk in the shadow of others,

playing the role of interpreters, never daring to put once into practice what they have been

so long in learning …66

64 “It is clear to you, I am sure, Lucilius, that no man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of
wisdom,” Seneca tells his charge in Letter 16.3. He continues in the following terms, which we have seen in the Introduction:
“Philosophy is no trick to catch the public; it is not devised for show. It is a matter, not of words, but of acts. …. It moulds and
constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone; it sits
at the helm and directs our course as we waver amid uncertainties.”
65 Ep. 15.1.
66 Ep. 33.7-8.
 19

According to Seneca, the kind of ‘all books and no practice’ of a figure such as Didymus, reputed

to have written some 4000 tomes, make for a “boring, wordy, insensitive, and self-satisfied” man.67

Letter 88 indeed contains Seneca’s famous critique of encyclopaedic learning as “puny and puerile”,

to the extent that it is not undertaken as preliminary to the truly liberal “study of wisdom … that

is lofty, brave, and great-souled.”68 In this vein, as John Cooper has criticised69, Seneca can

anticipate later passages in Epictetus, where the famous Stoic attention to logic itself is attacked as

a distraction: “[d]o we really have so much time? Do we already know how to live, and how to

die?”70 The therapeutic calling of philosophy, Seneca sees, demands the variety of different speech

acts Ilsetraut Hadot identifies as paraenetic and exhortative, rather than simply syllogistic:

Our master Zeno uses a syllogism like this: ‘No evil is glorious; but death is glorious;

therefore death is no evil.’ A cure, Zeno! … Will you not utter sterner words instead of

rousing a dying man to laughter? Indeed, Lucilius, I could not easily tell you whether he who

thought that he was quenching the fear of death by setting up this syllogism was the more

foolish, or he who attempted to refute it, just as if it had anything to do with the matter!71

In these lights, Hadot has argued that we need to read the Letters to Lucilius as a master work of

spiritual direction, and one that, as such, operates in two complementary dimensions as the 124

letters proceed.72 On the one hand, as the text proceeds, Seneca systematically introduces his pupil

to different, more complex elements of the Stoic philosophical discourse. This is what Hadot calls

as “centrifugal” movement, gradually expanding his understanding. Letters 1-30, Hadot notes, are

thus by far the briefest. Seneca presents the Stoic ethical decreta in striking, memorable sentences,

alongside many from Epicurus, adapting himself pedagogically to Lucilius’ pre-existing sympathies

67 Ep 88.37.
68 Ep. 88.37.
69 John M. Cooper, “Moral Theory and Moral Improvement: Seneca”, in Knowledge, Nature, and the Good: Essays on Ancient

Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 309-334.

70 Ep. 45.5; cf. Ep. 48.12; 44.7.
71 Ep. 82.9: cf. Ep. 83.4; 82.22; 94.27.
72 Hadot, Sénèque, 116-117.
 20

and not yet confronting his charge with the porch’s “hard” teachings.73 Letters 31-80 represent a

second pedagogical stage wherein Seneca now cautions Lucilius concerning rote learning from

others’ teachings, without making ideas truly one’s own.74 Recourse to Epicurus decreases, and

Seneca reports sending Lucilius notes, epitomes or summaries of philosophical texts75: as against,

in the first stage, copies of philosophical texts with specific passages marked out for his reading.76

In the culminating pedagogical stage, Letters 80-124, Seneca reports sending Lucilius full theoretical

treatises (notably, the Naturales Questiones and De Providentia) and promises his student an ethical

treatise.77 Now, for the first time, he engages in lengthy criticisms of the claims of the Epicureans

and other philosophical schools.78 As this centrifugal theoretical education unfolds, however, it is

punctuated at every stage by a contrary, centripetal movement “of concentration, of reduction to

the essential, of unification of all [Lucilius’] knowledges” around the key principles of the Stoic

regula vitae.79 Again and again, in “all the most subtle letters as in the treatises”, Seneca thus beckons

his addressee back “to the essential” Stoic principles80, rather than undertaking an exclusively

expansive, curious seeking out of new knowledges:

‘But,’ you reply, ‘I wish to dip first into one book and then into another.’ I tell you that it is

the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and

varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when

you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before. Each day acquire something

that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well;

and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day

…81

73 Ep. 13.4.
74 Hadot, Sénèque, 116.
75 Ep. 39.1.
76 Hadot, Sénèque, 116.
77 Hadot, Sénèque, 116-117.
78 Hadot, Sénèque, 117.
79 Hadot, Sénèque, 117.
80 Hadot, Sénèque, 117.
81 Ep 2.4.
 21

It is precisely this simultaneous unfolding of a gradually expanded theoretical purview, with a

concentrated, ever-renewed understanding of the Stoics’ key ethical principles, that Hadot suggests

“has led modern commentators to believe that the developments of Seneca lack any coherence”.82

Once the pedagogical dimension is introduced into the text, Hadot claims, this “lack of coherence”

disappears.

4. Epictetus’ Paraenetic Discourses, and his Handbook

The writings we have of Seneca are from his own hand, albeit addressed to a refined circle of

Roman interlocutors. With Epictetus (c50-c135), the situation is quite different. Epictetus was

born near Hieropolis, a province of Roman Turkey. The lame slave was acquired by one

Epaphroditus, secretary of Emperor Nero. While in Rome, he attended Musonius’ lectures, and

after being manumitted, began teaching in his own right, until he was exiled by Domitian in 96

CE. At this time, Epictetus went to Nikopolis, the Greek city set up by Augustus to celebrate his

victory over Marc Antony at Actium), and set up his own school. By the end of his life, this

provincial school had become famous, attracting students and dignitaries from around the Empire,

including the Emperor Hadrian. Yet, like his heroes Socrates and Diogenes, Epictetus wrote

nothing. The writings that today bear his name, like Musonius’ lectures, are recorded for us by his

student, Arrian, who was a consul under Hadrian, then governor of Cappadocia, and the author

of an Anabasis describing Alexander’s journey to the East. Arrian recorded eight books of Diatribai,

“Discourses” or “Conversations”, of which four survive. “I tried to write down whatever I heard

him say, in his own words as far as possible,” Arrian tells us in the epistolary “Preface”: “to keep

notes (hypomnêmata) of his thought and frankness (parrhêsia) for my own future use …”83 The result,

82 Hadot, Sénèque, 117. I have dealt more extensively with Ilsetraut Hadot’s reading of Seneca in Matthew Shape,
“Ilsetraut Hadot ’s Seneca: Spiritual Direction and the Transformation of the Other”, in M. Dennis & Sander Werkhoven eds.
Ethics and Self-Cultivation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018), **.
83 Arrian, “Arrian to Lucius Gellius, Wishing all Happiness,” in Epictetus, Discourses, trans. W.A. Oldfather, in two volumes

(Books I-II, Books III-IV, with Encheiridion and Fragments) (London: Loeb Classical Library, Reprint Series, 1925), Vol. 1, **.
 22

as with many other texts we are examining here, seems to lack a clear ordering principle. The

“discourses” the philosopher deliver respond to questions from students in his classes, or to the

concerns of eminent visitors. Epictetus employs a host of rhetorical techniques, including acerbic

humour. The subject matter of the Discourses passes freely between theoretical, methodological,

polemical, psychological, social and ethical topics.

As we commented, it is clear that Epictetus’ classes devoted considerable time to analysing

Chrysippus’ texts. Nevertheless, like Seneca, he is at pains to specify that philosophy cannot be

identified either with textual exegesis, or the mastery of logic alone. “And is it for this, then, that

young men leave their country, and their own parents, that they may come and hear you explain

words?”, he asks rhetorically.84 Philosophy as Epictetus conceives it has an ethical intentionality.

“If you could analyse syllogisms like Chrysippus, what is to prevent you from being wretched,

sorrowful, envious, and in a word, being distracted and miserable? Not a single thing,” Discourses

II 23 44 declaims. “The goal of philosopher’s principles is to enable us, whatever happens, to have

our hēgemonikon [governing faculty] in harmony with nature and to keep it so,” Epictetus contends.85

Again, we are told that “Philosophising is virtually this—enquiry into how it is possible to apply

desire and aversion without impediment.”86 Echoing Socrates’ criticisms of Gorgias, Prodicus,

Hippias and others, Epictetus reserves some of his harshest criticisms for the orators of the

“second sophistic” of his time, who aspired to win popular fame.87 Unless the discourse of a

philosopher, like Musonius Rufus’, prompts its addressees to confront “that you are in a bad way,

and that you take care of everything but what you ought; that you knew not what is good or evil,

and are unfortunate and unhappy,” then as far as Epictetus is concerned, it has failed.88 “The

84 Disc. III 21.

85 Disc. III.9.11.
86 Disc. III.14.10; IV.5.7.
87 Long, A Stoic and Socratic, 5-6, 62-63.
88 Disc. III.23.30.
 23

school of a philosopher is a surgery (iatreion)”, Epictetus instead explains, using a medical analogy

we will meet again in Petrarch, Bacon and others:

You are not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain; for you do not come there in

health; but one of you has a dislocated shoulder; another, an abscess; a third, a fistula; a

fourth, the headache. And am I, then, to sit uttering pretty, trifling thoughts and little

exclamations, that, when you have praised me, you may each of you go away with the same

dislocated shoulder, the same aching head, the same fistula, and the same abscess that you

brought?89

What then are the prescriptive details of this philosophical surgery? It was Pierre Hadot who first

showed how we can trace a hidden unity underlying Epictetus’ Discourses and the Encheiridion (or

Handbook) by recognising three species of philosophical exercises. Epictetus himself points us in

this direction in two key discourses90 in which he aligns three “topics” of askêsis that the

“prokopton” (one who would make progress) should occupy themselves with, with three activities

of the soul:

There are three topics in philosophy, in which he who would be wise and good must be

exercised. That of the desires and aversions (tas orezeis kai ta ekkliseis), that he may not be

disappointed of the one, nor incur the other. That of the impulses and avoidances (tas hormas

kai aphormas), and, in general, the duty of life (to kathêkon); that he may act with order and

consideration, and not carelessly. The third includes integrity of mind and prudence, and, in

general, whatever belongs to assents (synkatatheseis).91

89 Disc. III 23 30
90 Disc. III 2; III 12.
91 Disc. III.2.
 24

Hadot’s further claim is that these three practical topoi correspond to the three parts of Stoic

theoretical discourse we mentioned above: logic, physics, ethics.92 So what we think and believe

corresponds, in practical life, to the field theoretical logic analyses. What we do clearly corresponds

to what ethicists study. But what we desire and despise, Hadot suggests, corresponds in our

practical lives to what physics (the understanding of nature) studies in theory.

Figure 2: the three fields of Stoic practice, using Hadot’s idea

Practical physics: concerning desire (orezis) and aversion (ekklisis); the relation between

what we want and don’t want, and the way the world really is (thus “physics”).

Practical ethics: concerning the impulses (hormai) to act and not to act, regarding others,

and appropriate actions (kathêkonta).

Practical logic: concerning our judgments, thoughts, and “assents” (synkatatheseis): namely,

what we accept as true, good, or appropriate.

We can see the operation of these three topics, and their connection with Stoic philosophical

discourse, through paying specific attention to Epictetus’ Encheiridion. This little book (the –idion

is diminutive) has been called by the early modern Neostoic Justus Lipsius “the soul of Stoic

philosophy”.93 And it has had a continuing afterlife, including its use by Jesuits to proselytise in

China. Compiled by Arrian, and addressed to his friend C. Ulpias Prastina Messalanos, governor

of Numidia, it is small enough to be carried around “in hand,” as the title also suggests. The text

has come to be divided into 52 sections condensing small, memorable formulations epitomising

Epictetus’ wider philosophy (there is in fact one repetition of the Discourses (II 15) in Encheiridion

92 See Pierre Hadot, “Marcus Aurelius”, in Philosophy as a Way of Life ed. A. Davidson, trans. M. Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell,
1996); also Pierre Hadot, Inner Citadel trans. Michael Chase (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2001) ch. 5, pp. 82-98, and several
untranslated pieces in French, notably Hadot, “Une Clé des Pensées de Marc Aurèle: Les Trois Topoi Philosophiques selon
Épictète”, in Pierre Hadot, Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface d’Arnold Davidson (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel,
2002), 165-192.
93 Lipsius, at Sellars, Art of Living, 129.
 25

27). Simplicius, a 6th century Neoplatonic commentator explains the intentionality of the text in

the following terms:

It is called Encheiridion because all persons who are desirous to live as they ought, should be

perfect in this book, and have it ready to hand (procheiron): a book of as constant and

necessary use as a sword [which commonly went by this name, from whence the metaphor

seems to be taken] is to a soldier.94.

The task of this text, as a “manual” for a prokopton, is signalled in the opening two sections. Here,

advice is proffered to the student in a provisional way, “for the moment” (para ta paron/epi tou

parantos), pending their further advancement. In sections 12-13, 22-25, 29, and 46-52, again, the

text addresses itself to someone who “desires (epithymeis) philosophy”95 and needs to consider what

this will require. As Seneca’s conception of the paraenetic calling of the spiritual director would

suggest, so the Encheiridion is riddled with imperatives: memnēso (remember [2, 3]), epimimnēske seauton

(remind yourself [4]). Section 50 in particular stresses the urgency of starting now to pay attention

(prosezeis) to yourself. Section 33 opens with the injunction to take on a rule for conduct of life,

and abide by this rule as if it was a law (nomos). There is almost no point of detail about mundane

social life that the text fails to consider: whether speaking, laughing, clothing, sexual relations,

gossip, or meeting different people. In short, the text proffers perhaps the best ancient example

of a prescriptive regimen of “spiritual exercises”. As Simplicius again comments, this time drawing

on the old Socratic parallel between training of body and the mind:

For as the body (soma) gathers strength by exercise (gymnazetai) and frequently repeating such

motions as are natural to it; so the psyche too, by exerting its powers, and the practice of such

94 Simplicius, “Preface” to Commentary on Ench., 18-20; at Ilsetraut & Pierre Hadot, Apprendre à philosopher dans l’Antiquité:
L'enseignement du Manuel d'Epictète et son commentaire néoplatonicien (Paris: proche, 2004), 53.
95 Ench. 22.
 26

things as are agreeable to nature, conforms itself in habits, and strengthens its own

constitution.96

Both John Sellars and Matthew Sharpe, following Hadot’s lead, have proposed divisions of the

text according to the three exercise topics.

Figure 3: the Encheiridion, divided according to the three disciplines97

Discipline of Discipline of Discipline of Other/training to

desire & impulse/action: logic/judgment/assent be a
aversion duties /& others philosopher/the
persona of the
philosopher
1.2-1.5, -# 2 #1 end #1.1 (general, the
three topoi)
#3 #3-6
#8-11 #10 #7, on philosophy
as guide (ship)
[#13, cf. #22] [#13] #12 #12-13: advice for
prokoptonta /
students
#14-15; 17; 19 #17 end #16, cf. #5 start; 18
#21; #23 #20, concerning #20 (representation of #22-23: advice for
insults (cf. 33, 42, 22) insults) prokoptonta /
students
#26-27 #24 (duties &/v. #29
virtue)- #25; #28
#31;#34; #38- #30-31; 32;33; 35-36; #31; #32; #44; 45. #33;#37
9; 41 40;42-43;45
#50.3 #46-51/2.
#52/3 (1st & 2nd #52/3 last quote #52/53
quote)

96Simplicius, “Preface”, 82-87; cf. Sellars, Art of Living 129-131.

97We follow here the division from Matthew Sharpe, “It’s not the Chrysippus you Read: On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus and
Stoicism as a Way of Life”, Philosophy Today 58.3 (Summer 2014), 367-392.
 27

There are nevertheless inescapable difficulties about securing such categorisations. According to

the Stoics, as we have seen, all considerations concerning physical things—and what to desire or

avoid—will involve selections amongst perceptions or cognitions: and hence, the exercise of

“logical” vigilance, in examining each representation in the way we have seen Epictetus enjoining

above. The same consideration applies to the impulses or hormai we form concerning others, and

how to respond to their speeches and actions. “Men are not disturbed by things which happen (ta

pragmata), but by the opinions (dogmata) about the things,” we have cited Epictetus underscoring,

at the opening of Encheiridion 5. So the path to either reforming our desires, or treating others

ethically, passes through the logical reform of our opinions It is no mistake then that sees the

Manual opening with the robust articulation of what, in Epictetus, represents a kind of master rule,

binding all three topics. “Of things, some depend upon us [eph’hêmin],” Epictetus begins,

… and others do not. In our power are opinion [hypolêpsis, topic 3, logic], movement toward a

thing [impulse, topic 2], desire, aversion, [topic 1, ‘physics’], and in a word, whatever are our

own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever

are not our own acts.98

Epictetus then continues to articulate his own version of the Stoic ‘master argument’ from Plato’s

Euthydemus, aiming to show that wisdom or self-mastery alone, not external goods, is the key to

happiness. Epictetus’ version runs as follows:

1. Happiness or tranquillity is the fulfilment of all our desires, not wishing for anything we

don’t or can’t have; and not despising anything we do have or can’t avoid.

2. But external goods, including political power, wealth, even bodily health, are never fully or

lastingly within our control.

98 Ench. 1.
 28

3. Thus, if we take these eternals to be necessary to our happiness, “you will be hindered, you

will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men” ; “perhaps you will not

gain even these very things (power and wealth) …: certainly you will fail in those things through

which alone happiness and freedom are secured.99

The end of this opening section of the Encheiridion then gives us a leading example of what Hadot

intends when he talks about Stoic “practical logic”. We will need to actively train ourselves every

morning and night100 to distinguish everything we encounter according to whether or not it

depends upon us, so we can avoid all unnecessary inner tumults. “Straightway then practice saying

to every harsh appearance, ‘You are an appearance, and in no manner what you appear to be’,”

Epictetus exhorts:

Then examine it by the rules which you possess, and by this first and chiefly, whether it relates

to the things which are in our power (eph’hêmin) or to the things which are not in our power:

and if it relates to anything which is not in our power, be ready to say that it does not concern

you.101

Section 44 gives another example of practical logic, the dispassionate analysis of our beliefs, awake

to the kinds of non sequiters that habit and custom can naturalise:

These reasons do not cohere: I am richer than you, therefore I am better than you; I am

more eloquent than you, therefore I am better than you. On the contrary these rather cohere,

I am richer than you, therefore my possessions are greater than yours: I am more eloquent

than you, therefore my speech is superior to yours. But you are neither possession nor

speech.102

99 Ench. 1.
100 Epictetus, Disc. III.3.16.
101 Ench. 1.
102 Ench. 44, cf. 13, 32
 29

What Hadot calls, literally, “lived” (veçu) physics is at first breath the hardest idea in Stoic practical

philosophy to get a sense of. There seems no manifest link between the disciplining of our desires

and aversions and any kind of study of physical things. The operative Stoic idea is simply that

such “externals” are the things we typically desire, together with the further psychological

observation that often our desires paint them in illusory lights. Indeed, the Stoics claim, when we

desire something—particularly if the desire is strong—the desire presents it for us as what in fact

it can never be: necessary or sufficient to secure our happiness. The whole urgency of our

emotions, whether of desire or fear, consists in this sense of an unconditional need for some

external thing or event to occur—or to last—or not. The key to practical physics in Epictetus’

Encheiridion, then, is the famous opening injunction of section 8:

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which

do happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.103

This injunction reflects the fundamental rule for practical logic, dividing what is and is not in our

control. But it also points to how the exercises in practical physics are at bottom exercises in

attempting to see things for what they are, as independently as possible of how we wish or fear

them to be. The Encheiridion’s third section hence directs us:

In everything which pleases the soul, or supplies a want, or is loved, remember to add this to

its description: what is the nature of each thing, beginning from the smallest? If you love an

earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken, [then]

you will not be so disturbed …104

The goal of Stoic practical physics is thus to cultivate—as here, by repeating the exercise with

“everything” we love—their famous inner reservation (hypezairesis) about externals. It is not that

we could ever cease encountering external things (money, fame, status symbols, etc.), and wanting

103 Epictetus, Ench. 8 start.

104 Epictetus, Ench. 3.
 30

to avoid others. It is just that we should always pursue or avoid them, awake to the way they

remain beyond our full possession and control, as someone who in effect says to themselves on

each occasion, as soon as their desire is prompted: “I want my friend to love me, but respect that

this is at his discretion” and so on. “If you have received the impression of any pleasure, guard

yourself against being carried away by it,” we are thus advised: “but let the thing wait for you, and

allow yourself a certain delay on your own part”.105 For Epictetus, we will never be able to achieve

lasting tranquillity until we learn to see things steadily, in the context of the whole of which they

are each transient parts, rather than through the lens of our fears or desires. It is against this

background that a series of sections of the Handbook stressing the transience of the objects of our

desire appear:

If you would have your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, you are a fool;

for you would have the things which are not in your power to be in your power, and the things

which belong to others to be yours.106

The task is difficult, so Epictetus advises (section 12) to: “[b]egin then from little things. Is the oil

spilled? Is a little wine stolen? Say on the occasion, at such price is sold freedom from perturbation;

at such price is sold tranquillity, but nothing is got for nothing.” These kinds of fragments urging

reservation cross over into famed Stoic exercises of the premeditation of accidents and of death.

Section 21 advises the student to “let death and exile and every other thing which appears dreadful

be daily before your eyes (pro opthalmōn estō soi kath’ēmeran) but most of all death …”107 Section 17

uses the theatrical metaphor of life as a play, in order to awaken a sense of the urgency of ethical

reform:

Remember that you are an actor in a play of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose;

if short, of a short one; if long, of a long one: if he wishes you to act the part of a poor man,

105 Ench. 34, cf. 20.

106 Epictetus, Ench. 14.
107 Ench., 21
 31

see that you act the part naturally; if the part of a lame man, of a magistrate, of a private

person, (do the same).108

The sobriety of the Epictetan life is especially clear in those sections concerning the third topic:

our ethical comportment and “duties” (kathêkonta) towards others. In section 47, the prokopton is

enjoined to gymnazein, perform exercises of physical abstinence, without seeking an audience.

Section 46 warns students not to call themselves philosophers, warning against “vomiting up

theorems” rather than attending quietly to one’s conduct.109 Boasting, flattery and gossip alike are

decried as inconsistent with dignity, probably involving untruth, and reflecting envious desire to

attain the fame of the other.110 Section 20 asks us to distinguish any insult we receive, or suspect

ourselves to have received, from our assessment of the insult, and attend to the latter, so as to

“gain time, so as to master yourself.”111 It is an ethical application of section 5’s distinction between

things, and our judgments concerning them. “When any person treats you ill or speaks ill of you,

remember that he does this or says this because he thinks that it is appropriate for him”, section

44 reminds us.112 It follows that, if his opinion is wrong, the fault and damage is his. But if his

theory is right, this should be turned into an opportunity for self-assessment and change. So,

section 33 advises: “If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not

make any defence (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, ‘The man did not know the rest

of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.’”113

We see each of these exercises carried out, with interesting variations, in Epictetus’ most famous

pupil, the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius.

108 Ench. 17.

109 Ench. 47, see 22
110 Cf. Ench. 25; 33; 46, 49
111 Ench. 20.
112 Ench. 44.
113 Ench. 33.
 32

5. Marcus Aurelius’ Ta Eis Heauton

Ernst Renan has written movingly of the strange fate that saw the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

saved from oblivion, lifted like some Stoic ring of power from the river Gran:

There came out of it this incomparable book, in which Epictetus was surpassed: this manual

of the resigned life, this Gospel of those who do not believe in the supernatural, which has

not been able to be understood until our own time. A true eternal Gospel, the Meditations

will never grow old, for it affirms no dogma … The religion of Marcus Aurelius is, like that

of Jesus was at times, absolute religion: that which speaks from the simple fact of a high

moral conscience faced with the universe. It is not of one race, nor of one country, no

revolution, no progress, no discovery will be able to change it.114

The author of this Stoic gospel was born in 121 CE. He rose to become the Emperor of Rome

from 161-178 CE. His reign was riven with troubles: the flooding of the Tiber and famine in 161,

major earthquakes in 161 then 178, constant warring in the Eastern provinces, an insurrection in

173, and a devastating plague in 166, which eventually took up to 18 million lives. Nevertheless,

Marcus is widely accounted as the last of the five, good Nerva-Antonine Emperors who presided

over the Pax Romana in the second century. To cite the famous encomium of Cassius Dio:

[Marcus] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body

and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for

my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary

difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire.115

114 Ernst Renan, at Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, trans. M. Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2002) 307-308.
115 Cassius Dio 71.36.3–4. Such is the nature of the “Meditations”, as the untitled volume has come to be called, that it is easy to
forget that this is a document written by one of the most powerful men in history. Of the 473 sections of this text, less than 40
address imperial experience. These exclusively treat imperial life as a barrier to living well, as in V 16: “Remember that where life
is possible, then it is possible to live a good life; life is possible in a palace; so it is possible to live the good life in a palace.”
“Beware that you do not “Caesarise” yourself”, Marcus chides himself at V 30: “[beware] that you are not dyed with this dye, for
such things happen.” (cf. I.17.3) As for the seemingly vindicated Platonic hope that here at last was a philosopher-King, Marcus
is as dismissive as Cicero had been of Cato: “How worthless are all these poor people who are engaged in matters political, and,
as they suppose, are playing the philosopher! All drivellers! Well, then, do what nature now requires. Set yourself in motion, if it is
 33

Marcus seems to have undertaken to become a philosopher, adopting the signature philosopher’s

cloak and electing to sleep on hard boards, as early as age 12. He was taught philosophy in late

adolescence by Quintius Junius Rusticus, and by Apollonius of Chalcedon, whom Marcus’

adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, seems to have paid to come to Rome.116 By 146, Marcus’ letters

to his rhetoric teacher, Fronto indicate his conversion to philosophy. Marcus reports reading the

Cynicising Stoic Aristo which:

show me to what extent my inner dispositions (ingenium) are distant from these better things,

then all too often your disciple blushes and is angry with himself because, at the age of 25, I

have not yet assimilated into my soul any of the salutary dogmas and purest reasonings. This

is why I am tormented, angry, and jealous, and I no longer eat.117

Of the text of The Meditations itself and its genre [5] the importance of the fact that these ’notes to

himself’ were never intended for publication cannot be overstressed.118 Its literary form, by

contemporary lights, is again confusing. From the 17th century onwards, it has been divided into

some 473, numbered fragments or sections, and 12 books, each containing between 16 and 75

sections. Yet the originals had no such numbering, and the divisions between the books were not

always marked.119 At the end of our books II and III, we read that the forgoing text has been

“Written in the land of the Quades … at Canratum”. This allows us to date these parts of the text

in your power, and do not look about you to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the
smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter …” (IX 29)
116 Cf. Med. I.8.
117 What has become Book I of the Meditations involves a kind of spiritual exercise in gratitude and remembrance. Marcus looks

back over his upbringing, recalling his particular debts to all of his beneficiaries. Three central chapters (I 6-9) are devoted to his
philosophical teachers (Diognetus, Rusticus, Apollonius, Sextus. The longest, penultimate chapter (I 16) gives an idealized
portrait of his father, Antoninus Pius, as a perfect Stoic ruler. The final, 17th chapter, expresses gratitude to the gods for the
external goods accorded him by fortune or fate. It is notable that the debts Marcus expresses to the philosophers are ethical, not
theoretical. “From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline,” Marcus reports:,
”and from him I learned not to be led astray to sophistic emulation, nor to writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little
hortatory orations, nor to showing myself off as a man who practices much discipline, or does benevolent acts in order to make a
display; and to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing; and with respect to those who have offended me by words, or
done me wrong, to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled …”
118 Two centuries after Marcus’ death, Themistius mentions Marcus’ parragelmata or exhortations. But it is unclear whether he

had access to the 12 book we have inherited. The text resurfaces at the turn of the 10th century in Byzantium, with Bishop
Arethas in a letter of 907 CE describing “the very profitable book of the Emperor Marcus”. The first editions of the text then
appear in Western Europe in the early 16th century, although the Vatican appears to have had a copy from at least two centuries
earlier.
119 Hadot Inner Citadel, 28.
 34

in the last decade of Marcus’ life, when he was on campaign in these regions. The sections of the

text are of varying length. Some are mere aphorisms: “receive wealth without arrogance and be

ready to let it go”120; “everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is

remembered”121; “consider that benevolence is invincible”122; and “the best revenge is to not

become like he who has harmed you”.123 Others read more like pieces of argued philosophy:

impersonal, rational reflections spanning over forty lines. Yet others again are staged dialogues,

like: “Have you reason? I have.—why then don’t you use it? But if this does it work, what else do

you wish?”124 There are even compelling images:

… if a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending

up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and

wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shall you possess a perpetual

fountain? By forming yourself hourly to freedom conjoined with contentment, simplicity

and modesty.125

There is finally a great deal of repetition, sometimes direct, as for instance “Nothing is so capable

of producing greatness of soul” which appears in both III.11.2 and X.11.1, but more often with

small changes.126

Different modern interpreters have projected different images onto the Stoic mirror held up to

posterity by Marcus’ Ta Eis Heauton. The revolutionary approach opened by Pierre Hadot in The

Inner Citadel and other texts has afforded recent generations a very different comprehension of the

book. In several fragments of Epictetus’ Discourses, a text which we know Marcus greatly admired,

Epictetus issues direct injunctions to students to write down, every day, the principles and

120 VIII.33.
121 IV.35.
122 XI.18 (9).
123 VI.6.
124 IV.12.
125 VIII.51; cf. VII.59.
126 Compare eg “how could that which does not make a man worse, make life worse” with “that which does not make a man

worse than he is, does not make his life worse either” (II.11.4; IV.8; cf. IV.35; VIII.21.2).
 35

prescriptions of Stoic philosophy: “These are the thoughts that those who pursue philosophy

should ponder, these are the lessons they should write down day by day, in these they should

exercise themselves.”127 What then is at stake in these “Meditations”, Hadot has contended, is a

Stoic set of hypomnêmata (literally, aids to memory) answering to Epictetus’ exhortation: a kind of

writing as spiritual exercise [3], different forms of which we will encounter in due course in

Petrarch, Montaigne and Bacon. The result, here, is not a personal diary, although Marcus was

intended to be its only reader. For what the thoughts record (after book 1) are almost wholly

impersonal principles. These are drawn from the Stoic school. They are not the externalization

of the emperor’s “inner thoughts”. As Michel Foucault has written of this kind of this ancient

text in The Hermeneutics of the Subject:

Hupomnêmata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual

notebooks serving as memorv aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems

to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in

them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about,

reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind … They also formed

a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented

arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip,

flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace).128

Hyopmnêmata were, in Ilsetraut Hadot’s formulation, writings enabling the centripetal concentration

and internalization of core philosophical tenets.129 Their ‘aim’ is what is sometimes described in

the ancient texts through the analogy of a ‘dyeing’ (baptizein) of the soul130, or its “digestion” of

127 Disc. I.1.25. Again: “Let these thoughts be at your command [prokheiron] by night and day: write them, read them, talk of them,
to yourself and to your neighbor...” (Disc. III.24.103)
128 Michel Foucault, “Self-Writing”, section “The Hupomnemata”, online at www-site

https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.hypomnemata.en/, translated from Corps écrit no 5 (Feb. 1983): 3-23

129 Ilestraut Hadot, Sénèque, 116-117. See Seneca’s “Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against

death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested
that day” above.
130 Sellars Art of Living, 120-122; cf. on “dyeing” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, V.16; III.4.
 36

philosophical tenets, as in Seneca’s 84th Letter to Lucilius.131 Marcus uses the metaphor of a fire,

which needs ongoing tending if it is not to flicker out:

How can our principles become dead, unless the impressions [thoughts] which correspond

to them are extinguished? But it is in thy power continuously to fan these thoughts into a

flame. I can have that opinion about anything, which I ought to have. If I can, why am I

disturbed?132

The Stoic practice of writing hypomnemata closely relates to at least two other exercises [3] to which

the Stoic literature attests. The first of these is the examination of conscience, which Seneca in On

Anger for instance prescribes as an exercise to be undertaken at the end of each day. The link of

this practice with writing, as a means to prompt this examination, is explicit in Seneca’s Epistle 83.

Here, Seneca responds to Lucilius’ request to “give [him] an account of each separate day, and of

the whole day too.” The philosopher replies: “I shall … do as you bid, and shall gladly inform you

by letter what I am doing, and in what sequence. I shall keep watching myself continually, and—-

a most useful habit—shall make a review each day.”133 The second exercise related to Stoic self

writing, which we skirted in section 1 above, is imagining the perspective of the sage. Epictetus’

Discourses I 30 thus begins by prescribing that: “When you go to see some important personage,

remember that there is an Other watching what happens from above, and that it is better to please

this Other than that man.”134 Section 33 of the Encheiridion instructs that “[w]hen you are going to

meet any one, and particularly some man of reputed eminence, set before your mind the thought:

131Viz. “We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of
us. We must digest it: otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power [in memoriam non in ingenium]. Let us
loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements, just as
one number is formed of several elements …”
132 VII.2; cf. IV.3.1.
133 Ep. 83; See Foucault, “Self-Writing”, sec. “Correspondence”, 2.
134 Disc., I.30.
 37

‘What would Socrates or Zeno have done?’ and you will not fail to make proper use of the

occasion.”135

Again, as in Epictetus’ Manual, we should accordingly not be surprised at the frequency with which

Marcus addresses himself, in the second person, in the imperative form: “remember (memneso) how

long you have been putting off these things…”136; “remember (memneso) that it is a shame to be

surprised if fig trees produce figs …”137; “It is necessary then to (Chre men oun) …”138 There is an

urgency here, as in Epictetus’ Encheiridion, which attests to the dimensions of Marcus’ own struggle

to live up to his Stoic ideals: “Wrong thyself, wrong thyself, my psyche! But the time for honouring

yourself will soon have gone by …”139 As Hadot has claimed of the Meditations, in a memorable

passage:

if this book [the Meditations] is still so attractive to us, it is because when we read it we get

the impression of encountering not the Stoic system, although Marcus constantly refers to

it, but a man of good will, who does not hesitate to criticise and to examine himself, who

constantly takes up again the task of exhorting and persuading himself, and of finding the

words which will help him to live, and to live well? … In world literature, we find lots of

preachers, lesson-givers, and censors, who moralise to others with complacency, irony,

cynicism, or bitterness, but it is extremely rare to find a person training himself to live and

to think like a human being … the personal effort appears … in the repetitions, the

multiple variations developed around the same theme and the stylistic effort as well, which

always seeks for a striking, effective formula …140

135 Ench. 33.

136 II.4.
137 VIII.15.
138 III.4.2
139 II.6; cf. X.1.
140 Hadot, Inner Citadel, 312-13.
 38

Hadot contends that many of the sections of Marcus’ Meditations represent the writing down, as in

a condensed shorthand, of the key Stoic precepts or kephalaia. Thus, we find a series of one-line

aphorisms, denuded of all justificatory reasoning:

Pleasure and pain are not true goods or evils.141

That the only shameful thing is ethical failure.142

That harms committed against us cannot harm us.143

Other fragments, Hadot notes, read more like rapid-fire lists of such Kephalaia, written down as a

mnemonic exercise, like XII 26:

When you are troubled about anything, you have forgotten this: that all things happen

according to the universal nature; … that a man's wrongful act is nothing to thee; and further

… that everything which happens, always happened so and will happen so, and now happens

so everywhere; … how close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it

is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence. And you have forgotten

this too, that every man's intelligence is a god, and is an efflux of the deity; and … that

nothing is a man's own, but that his child and his body and his very soul came from the

deity; … that everything is opinion; and lastly … that every man lives the present time only,

and loses only this.144

A third species of fragment sees Marcus returning to a single exercise theme, in order to

imaginatively vary its presentation, drawing on all of his rhetorical skill in order to make this idea

vivid before his mind’s eye. Perhaps the best example of this is an exercise in practical physics

141 IV.3.6; XII.8.

142 II.1.3.
143 II.1.3; XII.26; IV.26.3.
144 Cf. II.1; IV.3; VII.22.2; VIII.21.2; XI.18; XII.7; XII.8.
 39

for recalling the universality and constancy of change or metabolê, and the transience of all things.145

In IV 32, Marcus prompts himself to compare his times with those of Vespasian, and recollect

that these times, in which all of the activities which still occupy people at present, have now passed

away:

Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people

marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivating the

ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for some to die,

grumbling about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring consulship, kingly

power. Well then, that life of these people no longer exists at all.146

In VI 47, by contrast, the same philosophical thought is called to mind by evoking specific elevated

figures whom Marcus admires, all of whom are now deceased:

… think continually that all kinds of men and of all kinds of pursuits and of all nations are

dead, so that thy thoughts come down even to Philistion and Phoebus and Origanion.

Now turn thy thoughts to the other kinds of men. To that place then we must remove,

where there are so many great orators, and so many noble philosophers, Heraclitus,

Pythagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of former days, and so many generals after them,

and tyrants.147

The exercise themes of these “Meditations”, as Marcus severally indicates, can be divided into the

three Epictetan exercise topics of physics (the discipline of desire), logic (of thought), and ethics

(of impulses).148 To the Epictetan exercises we have adduced above from the Encheiridion, however,

several others emerge in the philosopher-emperor. In particular, Marcus returns to several

145 See Stephens, Marcus Aurelius, 101-124; John Sellars, “Marcus Aurelius”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at www-site
http://www.iep.utm.edu/marcus/#SH3e, section “c. The Point of View of the Cosmos”.
146 V. 32; Cf. VIII.31.
147 VI.47; cf. IV.50; VI.24; VII.19.2; VII.48; VIII.25; VIII.37; IX.30; XII.27.
148 VII. 54; IX.6; IV.33; Cf. VIII.7; IX.7.
 40

apparently ‘pessimistic’ exercises in practical physics, aimed at the chastening of desire, which

either do not appear in Epictetus, or are not given such emphasis.149 In one such exercise, for

instance, Marcus enjoins himself to look coldly, objectively and analytically at those objects, or

human beings, that most provoke his desire:

—Make for yourself a definition (poieisthai horon) or description of the thing which is

presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its

nudity (gymnon), in its complete entirety (holon), and tell yourself its proper name (onoma),

and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be

resolved.150

The most famous exemplar of this exercise of cultivated, analytic disenchantment of fascinating

impressions is VI 13:

When we have meat before us and such foods, we receive the impression, that this is the

dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig; and again, that this

Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dyed

with the blood of a shell-fish: or, sexual intercourse, a rubbing together of guts followed

by the spasmodic excretion of sticky fluid--such then are these impressions, and they reach

the things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what kind of things they are. Just

in the same way ought we to act all through life, and where there are things which appear

most worthy of our approbation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their

worthlessness, and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted …151

A second kind of exercise to which Marcus frequently returns works according to an apparently

opposite method. This exercise does not, as it were, ‘focus in’ upon the prosaic parts and details

149 See Stephens, Marcus Aurelius, 125-134.

150 III 11.
151 VI.13.
 41

of captivating impressions, so much as ‘pan out’ from these particulars, towards what Hadot has

called the “view from above”:

Look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities,

and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences among those

who are born, who live together, and die ...152

While this exercise appears severally in Seneca, and infrequently in Epictetus, Marcus returns to

and varies it in ways particular to his text. Notably, it is not simply the minuteness of human

concerns, in a spatial scale, that Marcus tends to stress: as it is, for instance in Seneca’s Consolation

to Marcia or his Natural Questions. Adopting the historical optic we have already remarked, it is

rather the lack of novelty or sameness that looking at human events in a larger perspective opens to

Marcus’ purview:

if you should suddenly be raised up above the earth, and should look down on human beings,

and observe the variety of them how great it is, and at the same time also should see at a

glance how great is the number of beings who dwell all around in the air and the ether,

consider that as often as you should be raised up, you would see the same things, sameness

of form and shortness of duration. Are these things to be proud of?153

We can see palpably how to live as a Stoic, for Marcus, is to call into question many of the

customarily-received understandings of what things are, and which have selective value. But there

are good reasons to reject assigning the pre-eminence of these disenchanting exercises in the

Meditations to any idiosyncratic condition or pathology allegedly at play in Marcus. Hadot notes

that in several sections Marcus calls upon himself to divide things exactly according to the four

basic categories of Stoic physics: their matter; form and/or cause; duration; and role in the wider

152 IX 30.
153 XII 27; cf. VII 48.
 42

cosmos.154 Marcus is operating wholly within the Stoic tradition, that is to say, rather than giving

voice to what we might call a personal philosophy, when he conducts the analytic and the expansive

view from above.155 Both exercises, he tells us, are in fact united by a stated intentionality to

engender “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia): the ability to metaphorically “look down upon”

(kataphronêsin) or scorn156 what other men take to be great—external goods and affairs, subject to

fortune—as neither compellingly good nor evil:

For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind (megalophrosyne) as to be able to examine

methodically and truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to look at

things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use

everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole, and

what with reference to man …; what each thing is [form], and of what it is composed

[matter], and how long it is the nature of this thing to endure [duration] which now makes

an impression on me, and what virtue I have need of with respect to it [relation to self],

such as gentleness, manliness, truth, fidelity, simplicity, contentment, and the rest…157

What Marcus is aiming at is that “good flow” of life, “in harmony with nature” that Zeno had

announced as the Stoics’ aim. In a famous section from book IV, from whence Hadot takes his

title for his book on the Meditations, Marcus gives his own compelling image of this goal [7]. The

exercise of the technê that aims at wisdom is the cultivation of an “inner citadel”: a place of

tranquillity closed off from fortune and its vicissitudes, because open to the world as it is and an

acceptance of our small place within it:

Men seek retreats (anachoreseis) for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and

mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a

154 II.4; III.11; IV.21; VIII.11; IX.25; IX.37; X.9; XII.10; PCES 155, & n. 1.
155 We follow here the analysis of Pierre Hadot, “La Physique Comme Exercise Spirituel ou Pessimisme et Optimisme chez Marc
Aurèle”, 145-164.
156 XI 2.
157 III 11.
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mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in your own power whenever you shall

choose to retire into yourself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from

trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such

thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity ... This then

remains: remember to retire into this little territory of your own, and, above all, do not

distract or strain yourself, but be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a

citizen, as a mortal.158

158 IV.3.