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“That is what I mean by keeping your character: such is its power with those who
have acquired the habit of carrying it into every question that arises.”
4
It is sometimes said, though perhaps it is an exaggeration, that in Greek
thought there is no idea of an agent’s being the source of his actions and hence no
category of the will. In Roman thought and culture, perhaps due in part to the
development of a superior legal system, there gradually emerged a vocabulary of
the will. As a partial consequence, individual human subjects emerge as agents,
the sources of their own actions, which they create and for which they are respon-
sible. Epictetus made an important contribution to this development in the con-
text of advising people to be true to themselves and explaining what he took that
to involve. His explanation appealed centrally to the recognition that each of us
has a potentially distinctive character, to an awareness of what that character
consists in, and to knowing that what a person should do is to act in accordance
with his or her character, regardless of the consequences, with the proviso that
part of what may be involved in acting in accordance with your character is
developing your character. However, he cautions that you should not act out of
the character toward which you are developing but only out of the character that
you possess at the time.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 c.e .), a follower of Epictetus who became emperor of
Rome, was also concerned with character and individualism. However, Marcus
was preoccupied with the spiritual state of his soul. Hence, his thought is distin-
guished from that of Epictetus by its being religious. It is also distinguished by a
heightened interiorization. And, in Marcus’s thought, unlike in that of everyone
who came earlier and most who would come later, interiorization is fiercely
focused in the present moment. He claims, for instance, that since “the present is
the same for all” when the moment of death arrives it makes no difference whether
one has lived for three years or for thirty thousand years, for “no man loses any
other life than this which he now lives.” The past is gone. Hence, the person who
lives longest “and he who will die soonest lose just the same.” The present moment
“is the only thing of which a man can be deprived.”
5
And what is one in the present? In Marcus’s view, all humans are a combina-
tion of form and matter, neither of which “will perish into non-existence, as nei-
ther of them came into existence out of non-existence.” He said that every part of
himself “will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again
will change into another part of the universe, and so on forever.” He concludes
that it is “by consequence of such changes” that he exists, and those who begot
him, “and so on forever in the other direction.” Typical of his view is the sagelike
attitude expressed in his remark on the assumption that souls continue to exist
after bodily death: one should suppose that they “are removed into the air and