Other Influences
Marcus Aurelius is often thought of and referred to as the
quintessential Stoic. Yet the only explicit reference to
Stoicism in the Meditations (5.10) is phrased in curiously
distant terms, as if it were merely one school among others.
The great figures of early Stoicism are conspicuous by their
absence. Neither Zeno nor Cleanthes is mentioned in the
Meditations, and Chrysippus appears only twice—quoted
once in passing for a pithy comparison (6.42) and included
with Socrates and Epictetus in a list of dead thinkers (7.19).
This is not to deny the essentially Stoic basis of Marcus’s
thought, or the deep influence on him exercised by later Stoic
thinkers (most obviously Epictetus). If he had to be identified
with a particular school, that is surely the one he would have
chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he
studied, his answer would have been not “Stoicism” but
simply “philosophy.”
There is nothing surprising about this. The imperial period
saw the development of a widespread ecumenical tendency
in philosophy. Adherents of most of the major schools—the
Platonists, Peripatetics, Cynics, and Stoics—preferred to
focus on the points they shared, rather than those that
separated them. Not all the figures Marcus credits as
influential on his own philosophical development were
Stoics; Severus, for example, was a Peripatetic. Although
authors like Seneca and Epictetus accepted the basic