Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

ii i BIRTH OF STOICISM xxxvii
well to anticipate the future of the parent name and
sect.
The Cynic tradition, remaining true to its emphasis
on practice rather than on theory, survived in more
or less close association with the Stoic, and shared
its revival under the Roman Empire. There the Cynic
profession resumed its protest against worldliness and
self-indulgence with so much conviction and success,
that charlatans and schemers found it worth while
to disguise themselves in its livery, and from Plutarch
to Lucian, from Antoninus to Julian, the Cynic figures
now as the butt of the satirist, and now as the cynosure
of the moralist. To Juvenal the Stoic differs from the
Cynic only by the cut of his cloak. In Marcus Aurelius,
as habitually in Epictetus, 1
Diogenes is coupled with
Socrates as the pre-eminent and authoritative type of moral
courage, rectitude, and tranquillity. Even the sincere
Cynic, with his crude and often rampant individualism,
was constantly in danger of ignoring social claims, and
straining moral independence
into mere nonconformist
bluff; but in the true Cynic, purged of insincerity and
ostentation and intolerance, inured to hard ways and
to harsh words, Epictetus 2
recognises
still the ideal
'athlete of righteousness,' ready and clean and strong,
who, having disciplined all passion and desire, and
attained the perfect freedom of the will in harmony with
the divine,
is able to renounce the allurements of am-
bition, the distractions of wealth, and the preoccupations
1 viii. 3; cf. Arr. Epict. i, 24, 6; 2, 16, 35; 3, 21, 19; 3,
22, 24; 4, 7, 29; 4, 9, 6 ; 4, n, 21 ; and Ench. 15.
'
2
Arrian, iii. Epict. 22, On Cynism.