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

But as a challenger he had his enemies. He would say that “when people build up their reputations little by little, other people attack from all sides,” which is true, though one suspects his contrarianism and challenging demeanor had something to do with the antagonisms he faced more than anything else. Could a more conciliatory and respectful Aristo have accomplished more? Almost certainly, and it would be left to the later Stoics to prove that working within the system was a more effective way of changing minds than challenging everyone and everything.

Aristo taught that beyond following virtue or excellence, when dealing with indifferents, the wise man will simply do whatever pops into his head. He was the first Stoic we know to push the argument that the wise person is like an actor who willingly takes on the roles assigned by fate. We’ll hear this very same argument from Epictetus centuries later, who himself would reprimand his students for asking for rulebooks, as if they could run their whole life by a script. Aristo and Epictetus both felt that when it came to playing our role in life, the script was already written and we shouldn’t be trying to come up with our own. We should work hard at living up to our given roles. But unlike Aristo, that didn’t stop Epictetus from giving lots of good advice.

Diogenes also tells us that Aristo was fond of the idea that he, being a wise man and having true knowledge, would therefore not be misled by mere opinions. This so alarmed the Stoics that they sent Zeno’s scribe to prove him wrong. The prank was simple: He had one twin deposit a sum with Aristo for safekeeping and then the other brother, pretending to be the one who had deposited the money, come and reclaim it. Aristo, who had so arrogantly claimed that he could make a wise decision in any circumstance, stupidly gave the money to the wrong brother.

It was a simple case where a rule—like checking for identification—was vastly superior than relying on your gut. When Aristo discovered that he had given the money to the wrong brother, he was dumbfounded and embarrassed that his wisdom had been so refuted.

Once again, was it Stoic for them to play such a trick? To do so with the intention of humiliating a fellow Stoic over such a minor difference of opinion? The rift was bigger than that, however.

Aristo’s school, in a kind of deliberate hard fork that deviated from Zeno and Cleanthes, had abolished the topics of physics and logic. The former is beyond us and the latter not worthy of concern, was Aristo’s position. Only ethics mattered, only virtue.

With little irony, this master of clever arguments held that the arguments of a logician were like a spider’s web—clearly a product of expertise, but completely useless (though quite useful to spiders!).

Aristo’s questions encouraged other heterodox and renegade thinkers, which must have created the sense inside third-century BC Athens that Stoicism was a school tearing itself apart.

It should humble and shame us a little to see, in retrospect, how insignificant these intensely—and violently—argued debates were. To the early Stoics who fought them, however, the distinctions of “preferred indifferents” were a matter of life and death. Power and influence and ego played a part in this. Only Cleanthes had kept his day job, which meant that these philosophical debates were everything to a Zeno or a Chrysippus or an Aristo. They were like cloistered monks arguing over how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

It was the narcissism of wanting to be right—to be the one who settled the debate. With the future of the school up for grabs after Zeno and Cleanthes, who could afford to concede? Being remembered by history does very little for you after you’re dead . . . but it’s hard to be indifferent about your legacy.

All understandable, but hardly philosophical, let alone Stoic. It would have been far more impressive if these men could have prevented antagonisms from dominating their relationships with people with whom they mostly agreed. They should have focused on their work, their self-improvement.

As should we.

In any case, the passing of history sorted it all out. Aristo’s work, and his questions, though quickly stamped out by the Stoics who came after him, would make a great impression on the young Marcus Aurelius. At age twenty-five, a generation or two after Seneca, Marcus found himself reading Aristo and was so shaken by the challenge of Aristo’s questions that he couldn’t sleep and had to step away from them. Instead of seeing a heretic, all he saw was someone urging him not to memorize but to practice and train until virtue became second nature. As he wrote to his rhetoric teacher, Fronto: