of two modern novels set in the Antonine period, Walter
Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Marguerite
Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Neither should be
mistaken for a primary source, but each is, in its different
way, a masterpiece.
Recent work on Hellenistic philosophy has done much to
illuminate the philosophical background of the Meditations.
A clear and helpful introduction to both Stoicism and
Epicureanism can be found in A. A. Long, Hellenistic
Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1974); on a much larger
scale is Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes and Jaap Mansfeld,
eds., The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On
Stoicism see also F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1975), and J. Rist, Stoic Philosophy
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969). The
works of the two most important Stoics, Zeno and
Chrysippus, are largely lost; their surviving fragments are
translated in the first volume of A. A. Long and David
Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), which also includes
much material on Epicureanism. An important source for the
history of both schools is Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the
Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, in the Loeb series (2
volumes, 1925).^13
For Stoicism under the empire, the most important sources