Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xviii INTRODUCTION SECT.
the expression of a moving power, not of separable
substance or identity, but manifested only in the passage
of continuous phenomena. The many are the moving
realisation of the eternal One.
'
Being '
was always
*
not a state but a process, not rest but
becoming '
motion and its true image
kindling extinguishes, and in extinguishing
was the flame which in
kindles that
which is its fuel. 'All things are in flow' 1 was the
central and lasting summary of his teaching, which
eventually supplied the basis of Stoic physics, and
became the key to ethics, history, and life.
'
Being is
a river in continual flow, its action for ever changing,
its causes infinite in variation ' 2 ; and in the pages of
Marcus no figures are more recurrent than the Hera-
clitean metaphors
'
of the river,' 3 the *
flame,' 4 and the
'
upward and downward path ' 5
of the elements of being.
To Heraclitus himself, except
in so far as he was
content to let figure usurp the place of fact, '
living fire' remained material, akin (though
the ever-
more in
virtue than in kind) to the visible fire '
that burns and
crackles,' that uses all substances for fuel, but in con-
suming re-endows with new forms, and properties, and
use the effective instrument or medium by whose
operative power
'the death of earth is the birth of
water, the death of water the birth of air, the death of
pet, quoted or illustrated, ii. 3, 17 ; iv. 3, 36 ; v. 10, 13 ;
vi. 4, 15, 17 ; vii. 25 ; ix. 19, 28 ; x. 7, and many more. For the
ethical place accorded to Heraclitus, cf. iv. 46 ; vi. 42, 47 ; viii. 3.
j-
3 ii. 17 ; iv. 43 ; v. 23 ; vi. 15, 37 ; vii. 19 ; ix. 28, 29 ; xii. 3, etc.
4 iv. i, 19 ; viii. 20; x. 31.
5
iv. 46; vi. 17, 46; vii. I ; ix. 28.