make the ultimate sacrifice when he was put on trial at the
age of seventy on trumped-up charges of impiety. His display
of integrity at the trial and his comportment in the days
leading up to his execution made it easy to view him as a
forerunner of first-century Stoic martyrs like Thrasea Paetus
or Helvidius Priscus, and it is in this light that Marcus
evokes him in Meditations 7.66.
Of Socrates’ predecessors (the so-called pre-Socratic
thinkers), the most important, both for Marcus and the Stoics
generally, was Heraclitus, the mysterious figure from
Ephesus (in modern-day Turkey) whose Zenlike aphorisms
were proverbial for their profundity and obscurity alike.
Heraclitus’s philosophical system ascribed a central role to
logos and to fire as the primordial element. Both elements
were naturally congenial to the Stoics, and may well have
influenced them. Heraclitus is mentioned in a handful of
entries in the Meditations (4.46, 6.47), but his doctrines can
be traced in many others. Moreover, his concision and
epigrammatic phrasing anticipate the kind of enigmatic
apothegm we find in a number of entries:
The best revenge is not to be like that. (6.6)
Straight, not straightened. (7.12)
The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer’s is part of
him. (12.9)