Building on this point about the genre of the Meditations and seeking to establish its particular philosophical content, Hadot 1998 organizes Marcus’ thoughts around the Epictetan disciplines of (i) desire, (ii) impulse and (iii) assent; according to Hadot, these appear in Marcus as the rules of (i) being contented with whatever happens, (ii) conducting oneself justly towards others, and (iii) exercising discernment in one’s judgments (35–36).[4]  By contrast Gill 2013 identifies four recurring ‘strands’ in Marcus: (i) aspiration to an ethical ideal conceived in Stoic terms as the understanding that only virtue is good and that all human beings are akin, which involves (ii) acceptance of death and transience as features of our existence that are not up to us; both (i) and (ii) are enabled by (iii) our rationality and (iv) our sociality, two aspects of human nature that make us a special part of the whole cosmos; according to Gill, Marcus assumes the Stoic theory of the ethical development of (iii) and (iv) by appropriation (oikeiôsis) and focuses on its last stage, which is the bringing about of (i) by self-cultivation.