This theme is not specific to Stoicism. We meet it at every
turn in ancient literature. Marcus himself quotes the famous
passage in Book 6 of Homer’s Iliad in which the lives of
mortals are compared to leaves that grow in the spring,
flourish for a season and then fall and die, to be replaced by
others (10.34). He would have recognized the sentiment in
other writers too, from the melancholy Greek lyric poet
Mimnermus, who develops and expands on Homer’s simile,
to the Roman lawyer Servius Sulpicius, writing to his friend
Cicero on the death of the latter’s daughter:
I want to share with you something that brought me not a little consolation, in
hopes that it might have the same effect on you. On my way back from Asia,
on the voyage from Aegina to Megara, I gazed at the lands we passed.
Aegina was behind me, Megara before me, Piraeus on the starboard side,
Corinth to port—towns which flourished once upon a time, and now lie fallen
and in ruins before our eyes—and I said to myself, “Alas!... and will you,
Servius, not restrain your grief and recall that you were born a mortal?”
Believe me, the thought was no small consolation to me.This is not a point modern grief counselors would be
inclined to dwell on, but it is one that Marcus would have
understood perfectly, and its appeal to him casts light on both
his character and his background. Marcus may have been a
Stoic, but he was also a Roman, influenced not only by Zeno
and Chrysippus but by Homer and Vergil. Vergil is nowhere
mentioned in the Meditations, and in a Greek work could