Time and again, Marcus exhorts himself to stop thinking and act. Stop describing a good man. Be one. The difference between philosophy and talking about philosophy is the difference between drinking wine and talking about wine. A single sip of a good pinot noir tells you more about a vintage than years of rigorous oenology. Marcus’s ideas didn’t simply materialize. No philosopher’s does. He was a Stoic, but not exclusively. He imbibed other sources: Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, the Cynics, and Epicureans. Marcus, like all great philosophers, was a wisdom scavenger. What mattered was an idea’s
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