Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

We can easily imagine young students nodding their heads at these disruptive critiques and Zeno struggling to explain himself, despite his relatively commonsense position. (Is it really up for discussion that it’s generally preferable not to be sick?) These questions are also seductively fun to discuss—for in disputing Zeno’s gray area, Aristo was introducing endless amounts of gray himself. He was saying that circumstances always and uniquely alter the value of things.

Aristo’s point in pressing on all these soft spots in the philosophy is that, like the general dispensing with precedents, a skilled pilot doesn’t go to a ship’s manual when he’s hit by a wave—no, he uses his deep grounding in the principles of seamanship and his training and experience to make the right call. There is a part of this argument that appeals to the ego: We want to see ourselves as wise, with flawless intuition. We want to believe that all an athlete is doing is going with the flow. But the best athletes also stick to a strict game plan, they submit to a coach. What tattoos the walls of most locker rooms? Inspirational sayings, reminders, and codes of conduct. There are rules that each athlete is following, that they have to be aware of for their performance to count. It’s less sexy to count those other factors, but it’s the truth. It’s this role—the coach—that Zeno and Cleanthes had attempted to stake out for the philosophy teacher.

Sources tell us that Aristo added to this contrarian approach a rather forceful style, and that he spoke much more than he listened, flouting quite deliberately Zeno’s dictum about the natural ratio between ears and mouths. Diogenes reports that Aristo would discourse at great length, and with little grace, overwhelming weaker minds in the process. At times, Zeno had no choice but to interrupt and cut him off. You’re a babbler, he once shouted at him, and I suspect your father was drunk when he sired you.

It wasn’t a Stoic response, but one every frustrated and exhausted teacher can sympathize with. Still, has yelling ever deterred a contrarian? It didn’t stop Aristo’s questioning or contradictions either. Indeed, his antipathy to Stoic orthodoxy extended into writing, where he attacked his fellow Stoics aggressively, even publishing an argumentative book on Zeno’s doctrines and a book titled Against Cleanthes.

These written attacks were answered, Cicero tells us, by Chrysippus, who returned fire with a book against Aristo, and also had a direct personal confrontation with him about the dangers of his commitment to total indifference. “We might ask,” Chrysippus pressed, “how could we live a life if it didn’t matter to us whether we were well or sick, at ease or racked with pain, whether we could keep off cold or hunger or not.”

Indeed, how could we? Life would be chaos.

Aristo was undeterred, answering with confidence and a smile, “You’ll live, splendidly, wonderfully. You will act as seems right to you, you will never sorrow, never desire, never fear.”

It’s as tempting—and empty—a call as any Siren has ever made. And a little beyond the reach of most, however enticing it sounded. Yes, the true sage firmly grounded in the right principles will intuitively know just what to do in every situation and won’t need a rulebook. But what about the rest of us?

Is that even possible—a world where everyone, as Aristo claimed, should simply do “whatever may enter one’s head”? Is that a world anyone would want to live in?

We can imagine these great Stoics pulling their hair out in frustration. We can see their desperation in their tricks and lost tempers. This guy is giving Stoicism a bad name. I thought we were on the same team here. Aristo presents to us the conundrum that John the Baptist presents to Christians and that contrarian figures have always presented to incipient movements. Is this person a rival or a follower? A saint or a heretic? A friend or a foe? Aristo was all these things, then and now.

Shunned by the Stoics, while perhaps still considering himself in their camp, sharing many of the ideas of the Cynics, influenced by the skeptical Academy, locking horns with the Peripatetics, Aristo by his independence earned himself a spot outside the walls of Athens, away from the Stoa Poikilē, in a Cynic gymnasium called, appropriately, the Cynosarges. As with the Sirens for whom he was nicknamed, men flocked to him. Aristo taught there with other radicals like Antisthenes, one of the founders of the Cynics. Aristo earned fame and was soon regarded as the founder of his own school, as Diogenes tells us: the Aristonians, who were known for persuasiveness and decency.