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

Courage isn’t always rushing into the fray. Sometimes it’s endurance. Sometimes it’s looking inward. We have each of these abilities inside us, the Stoics believed, and it was a matter of matching the right virtue to the right moment. We must do our duty, whatever it is.

So it went with the second Zeno. When he quibbled with doctrine, they were minor cavils. In some places he sided with Cleanthes, in others with Chrysippus. But he does not seem to have had an ego. He didn’t thrive on conflict, though we can assume that when trouble knocked on his door it found him home (he published a book titled Against Hieronymus of Rhodes). He did not need the limelight, he did not need to write hundreds of books or hold big lectures. Zeno of Tarsus was a man who was boring enough—and wrote just little enough—to smooth over the ripples and conflicts of his day and pass the philosophy on to the next generation.

The first Zeno carved out new territory. Chrysippus threw punches and blocked some too. The second Zeno didn’t need to do any of that. Stoicism was well established, and had been now for decades. It was a boat that floated, a philosophy with thousands of practitioners spread across Greece. What the second Zeno needed to do was stabilize and carry on.

The timing could not have been more critical.

Greece was on the decline. Rome was on the rise. And Stoicism would be leaving the cradle of democracy and standing to meet the needs of a growing power. We don’t know when Zeno of Tarsus died, but he was succeeded by Diogenes of Babylon, another student of Chrysippus, a transition that would be marked by the rise of Roman power.

It would also usher in the golden age of Stoicism, when the Republic and philosophy met and merged, and then the Republic would become empire.

That Zeno of Tarsus would be mostly forgotten—remembered like so many important people as, at best, a transitional figure? Well, that’s something a Stoic can’t care about. What mattered is that he did his job when it needed to be done.

DIOGENES THE DIPLOMAT (Die-AHHJ-en-eez)

Origin: Babylon

B. 230 BC

D. 142 BC

In 155 BC, Diogenes of Babylon, the fifth leader of the Stoa, was sent on a diplomatic mission from Athens to Rome. There, he, along with the heads of the other great philosophical schools of Greece, would give a series of lectures about their teachings. This might seem like a minor event, yet it would change not only Rome but the world.

As a form of diplomacy, the idea of sending a group of old philosophers of rival schools to a city notoriously hostile to philosophy seems crazy. Just a few years earlier, the Roman Senate had decreed an outright ban on philosophers, and here Athens went, sending precisely these undesirables to argue and perform on its behalf. It was not sending soldiers. Or professional diplomats. Or lawyers. Or even gifts and bribes. It was sending philosophers. Why?

Desperate times required desperate measures.

The years since Alexander the Great’s death had been an endless series of raids and counterraids in Greece and Italy. The period was marked by the rise and fall of countless kings and principalities. Athens had been under garrison for much of the preceding century and a half as the Macedonian kings fought rivals to hold on to power. Into this breach, Rome slowly gained power, growing from a small city on the Tiber to an international hegemon with colonial ambitions. Supervising a dispute between Athens and a neighbor, Roman-controlled magistrates had decided against Athens and handed down a massive five-hundred-talent fine. It was an amount the city could scarcely afford to pay, so Athens fought back with one of the few weapons it had: its philosophers.

The leader of neither city knew it, but Athens’s decision to dispatch its towering intellectual minds to Rome to appeal the judgment was the first salvo in what would be a century-long battle for cultural supremacy. It was also Stoicism’s first major step out of the classroom and into the halls of power.

So it came to be that Diogenes of Babylon, born the year of Cleanthes’s death, was the first man the Athenians turned to in their hour of need. Hailing from the city of Seleucia in what today is metropolitan Baghdad, Diogenes had studied in Athens under Chrysippus. He was still a young man when Zeno of Tarsus inherited the mantle, and unlike his own more famous predecessor and namesake Diogenes the Cynic, this Diogenes was not some antisocial rebel. He was far too pragmatic for that.