The high tone of Stoic wisdom, and the often modest personal and social achievement it produced in lesser men than Marcus, provide sobering food for thought. There seemed to be something in the Stoic way of life and thought that diminished the drive for effective living. It may be that these good and wise people so resigned themselves to the evils of life that they became apathetic and indifferent toward the root causes of these evils, unable to act to remove them. Possibly their stress on universal reason made them cold to the emotional flow and pulse of life, so that human sympathy finds relatively little place in their way of living. Yet Stoicism has added a dimension to life and thought for which people ever after have been grateful.
Life is short at best.
Live as on a mountaintop. It matters not whether your place be here or there. Wherever you are, be a citizen of the world. This Aurelian ideal is not to be quickly forgotten, and it has not been. To the eternal credit of the Stoics is their magnificent conception of human oneness on the earth, their cosmopolitan sense of human relatedness, predating Christianity by a considerable time.