When formulating the triple rule of life, Marcus also likes to insist on the fact that we must concentrate on the prese111 moment: the present representation, the present action, and the present inner disposition (whether of desire or of aversion).
We find nothing of the sort in Epictetus, yet Marcus' attitude here is in complete accord with the fundamental Stoic attitude of attention (prosoche) as directed toward the present moment. 'Oii Nothing must escape the vigilance of consciousness: neither our relationship to destiny and the way of the world - this is the discipline of desire - nor our relationship with our fellow men (discipline of the active will), nor, finally, our relationship to ourselves (discipline of assent).
Elsewhere, Marcus links the three philosophical exercises to their corresponding virtues. We thus have the following schema: Discipline
Corresponding virtue
Of desire
Temperance (sophro�J'1fe); absence of worries (al<1rtu·ia) Of inclinations
Justice (dikaitJ�J'llt')
Of assent
Truth (11/etl1ei<1); 11hi;cncc of hurry (t1prt1ptosi11).
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Marcus enumerates the three virtues corresponding to the three disciplines in the following terms: "Absence of hurry, love of our fellow-men, obedience to the gods." 109
This vocabulary is totally absent from Epictetus' Discourses. How are we to explain these differences in the way Marcus and Epictetus present the three fundamental exercises of philosophy?
In the first place, it seems certain that Marcus possessed more information about Epictetus' teachings than we do today. In the first book of his Meditations,1 10 Marcus tells us that he came to know the writings of Epictetus thanks to Quintus Junius Rusticus, a statesman who had taught Marcus the fundamentals of Stoic doctrine before going on to become one of his counsellors. Marcus states that Rusticus loaned him his personal copy of Epictetus' hypomnemata; that is, a book of notes taken down at his classes.
This statement can be interpreted in two ways:
The book in question could be a copy of the work by Arrian. In the prefatory letter he placed at the beginning of his edition of Epictetus'
Discourses, Arrian himself describes his work as a collection of hypomnemata: Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write down, using his very words as far as possible, so that I should have in the future some "notes intended to help me remember" [hypomnemata] of his thought and his frankness. As was to be expected, these notes often have the appearance of an improvised, spontaneous conversation between two men, not such as one would write if he was expecting them to be read one day. 11 1
Now, Arrian had come to attend the classes o f Epictetus sometime between AD 107 and 1 09. His prefatory letter to Lucius Gellius was probably written after Epictetus' death, some time between 1 25 and 1 30, and the Discourses themselves were published ca. AD 1 30. Aulus Gellius recountsl lZ
that, in the year he spent studying at Athens - around AD 1 40 he had
-
been present at a discussion in the course of which the famous millionaire Herod Atticus had brought to him from a library a copy of what Gellius refers to as the dissertationes of Epictetus, arrangei:l (digestae) by Arrian. He also tells how, on the way from Cassiopeia to Brindisium, he came across a philosopher who had a copy of the same work in his baggage. This shows that is was at least possible that Marcus read a copy of this book, which had been loaned to him by Rusticus.
2 We might also consider another suggestion, which has already been proposed by Farquharson. What Rusticus loaned to Marcus, on this hypothesis, would have been Rusticus' own notes, which he himself had taken durinic Epictetus' lectures. From the chronological point of view, if we Rl'1111t 1 h11 t l•:11i,•1ct us died between AD 1 25 and 1 30, and if Rusticus was
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born at the beginning of the second century, as we are entitled to deduce from his official cursus, it would then be entirely possible for Rustious to have been Epictetus' student. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that there was no copy of Epictetus' Discourses available in Rome around AD 145-6, even though the work had been widely diffused in Greece by 140. Besides, Marcus represents Rusticus' gift as something exceptional; we are thus entitled to wonder if the gift may not, after all, have been Rusticus' own notes. It is, moreover, more or less certain that Marcus had read Arrian's work, since the Meditations are full of literal citations taken from it.
Whether Marcus had read only the Discourses as arranged by Arrian, or whether he had read Rusticus' notes as well, one thing is beyond doubt: Marcus was familiar with more texts concerning Epictetus' teaching than we are today. We possess only a part of Arrian's work; and if Rusticus' notes did in fact exist, they may well have revealed to Marcus some aspects of Epictetus' teachings which had not been noted down by Arrian.
It is thanks to Marcus that we know some otherwise unknown fragments of Epictetus, such as the following: "You are a little soul, bearing the weight of a dead body." 113 This fragment also goes to show that "pessimistic"
features are not exclusively characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, as has often been claimed. Thus, we may suppose that the differences in presentation of the three exercises which we find in Marcus and in the extant works of Epictetus can be explainc:d by the influence of passages of Epictetus which were known to Marcus, but subsequently were lost.
Finally, we must not forget that there is a profound difference between the literary genre of Epictetus' Discourses and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.
Arrian's work, even if it was more extensively rearranged than its author is willing to admit in his preface, is quite literally a series of Discourses given before an audience. Their subject-matter was inspired by specific circumstances: questions directed to the master, or visits of people from outside the school. The argumentation was adapt<.>d to the capacities of the audience, and its goal was to persuade them.
By contrast, Marcus wa"> alone with himself. For my part, I cannot discern in the Meditations the hesitations, contradictions, and strugglings of a man abandoned to his solitude, which some scholars have thought to detect in them. 1 1� On the contrary, one is rather astounded by the firmness of thought and technical nature of the philosophical vocabulary one encounters from beginning to end of the Meditations. Everything points to the conclusion that either Marcus had perfectly assimilated the teachings of Rusticus and Epictetus, or else that he always had Epictetus' own texts at hand, for the practice of his meditation exercises. One is also astonished, moreover, by the extraordinary literary quality of the majority of the Medittitions. M11rcus'
former teacher of rhetoric, Fmn10, had tnuicht him how tu finely chiHd his
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sentences, and Marcus always sought to give to his thoughts the clarity, rigor, and striking formulations necessary to give them the sought-after therapeutical and psychagogic effect. After all, it is not enough merely to repeat some rational principle to oneself, in order to be persuaded of it; 1 15 everything depends on how you formulate it. The Meditations have the appearance of variations, sometimes executed with supreme virtuosity, on a small number of fundamental themes; indeed, they are variations almost exclusively on the three themes first taken up by Epictetus. In some passages, such as those we have seen cited above, the triple schema, enunciating the three philosophical exercises we must practice at each instant, is presented in its entirety, with only some slight variations. Elsewhere, only two of the themes, or even a single one, are presented.