Empedocles’ image of the self-contained soul as a perfect sphere (8.

41,
12.3), and he alludes once to the mystic doctrines of the Pythagoreans
(11.27). Several entries explore the implications of phrases attributed to
Democritus, one of the inventors of the theory of atoms, which would later
inspire the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus.
Neither Heraclitus nor Socrates had founded a school. That was an
achievement reserved for Plato, and then for Plato’s student Aristotle, who
broke from his master to found the Peripatetic movement. Marcus never
refers to Aristotle, though he does quote approvingly from the latter’s
successor Theophrastus (2.10). Probably more important was another
fourth-century B.C. movement: Cynicism. The Cynics, of whom the first and
most notorious was the irascible Diogenes of Sinope, were united less by
doctrine than by a common attitude, namely their contempt for societal
institutions and a desire for a life more in accord with nature. Diogenes
himself was largely responsible for the image of a philosopher as an
impoverished ascetic (the “philosopher without clothes” evoked by Marcus
at Meditations 4.30 might well be a Cynic). His famous claim to be a
“citizen of the world” surely anticipates, if it did not actually influence, the
Stoic conception of the world as a city-state. Marcus refers to Diogenes in
several passages, as well as to the latter’s student Monimus (2.15), and
invokes another Cynic, Crates, at Meditations 6.13, in an anecdote whose
tenor is now uncertain.
Marcus’s relationship to Epicureanism, Stoicism’s great rival among
Hellenistic philosophical systems, is much more vexed. The followers of
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) believed in a universe radically unlike that posited
by Zeno and Chrysippus. The Stoic world is ordered to the nth degree; the
Epicurean universe is random, the product of the haphazard conjunctions of
billions of atoms. To speak of Providence in such a world is transparently
absurd, and while Epicurus acknowledged the existence of gods, he denied
that they took any interest in human life. As for humans, our role is simply
to live as best we can, making the most of what pleasures are available to us
and insulating ourselves as far as possible from pain and anxiety. In
particular, we are to feel no anxiety about death, which consists simply in
the dissolution of our component atoms. This process is not only inevitable,
but harmless, for the simple reason that after death there is no “us” to suffer
harm.