reviving Cleanthes’s (successor to Zeno) strong religious sense. There is no transcendent god for any of the Stoics—a key difference from
Christianity. Epictetus says we must seek to bind up our choice with the will of God (Discourses 4.1.89). Marcus tends to refer to the divine in
a looser, often more polytheistic way (see 9.1.1), but he shares Epictetus’s views, especially when he says, “hold sacred your capacity for
understanding,” a gift from God requiring obedience to God (3.9). Seneca, too, speaks often of the divine in plural, but all three are agreed that
we must accept fate and seek to correct our own faults rather than blame others or the gods (Moral Letters 107.12).
Tonos (τόνος): tension, a principle in Stoic physics accounting for attraction and repulsion; a way of seeing what gives rise to
virtue and vice in the soul.