Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

II. BIRTH OF STOICISM
i. Debt to Socrates, Cynics, and Megarians
So far, though the centres of philosophic culture are as
widely separate as Sicily and Asia Minor, the development
of thought was in the main lineal and simple.
With the concentration of philosophic interest at Athens,
schools arise, divide, and multiply, and in the clash of
opposing creeds unity of direction disappears. Socrates,
the foremost pioneer of the new movements of thought
in the fifth century, stands at the head of the great
Delta, through which, by diverging and often interlacing
streams, Greek thought expanded into Oriental and
European Hellenism. Though Stoicism incorporates
large fragments from Plato and from Aristotle, the direct
line of affiliation is through the Megarians and Cynics,
and the divergence of view is fundamental.
In the Socratic and post-Socratic Schools Ethics and
Metaphysics become the main determinants. While in
Ethics, Plato and the Stoics both start from Socratic
premises, and by different routes reach kindred though
not identical results, in Metaphysics their solutions stand
fundamentally opposed. To those who argued that all
known forms of Being were phenomenal and all know-
ledge of it perceptional, and that such Being and