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

For all the hoopla about these visiting ambassadors, their learning and eloquence, and the heated arguments over Carneades’s contradictory lectures, this historic political mission was a resounding success. The fine was lowered from five hundred talents to one hundred, and the reputations of the three, especially Diogenes, were established firmly in the Roman mind. Cato the Elder, as appalled as he was by what he witnessed, would unknowingly be proof of the wisdom of the mission. His great-grandson, Cato the Younger (see our subsequent chapter on Rome’s Iron Man), would not only not escape the “corruption” of philosophy, but would become one of the greatest students of Stoicism and win eternal glory through it.

But it was actually Greece and the Stoics themselves who gained the most from this exchange—or rather by the process through which the exchange occurred. Philosophy for the previous several centuries had been primarily a classroom exercise. It had been about the pursuit of the good life—about truth and meaning—but for the student first and foremost. Almost all the philosophical schools—Cynic, Platonist, Aristotelian, Epicurean, even Stoicism—had tuned out the real world of social and political life.

Instead, they argued among themselves about the definition of “virtue.” What need did they have for anything else? Athens may have been the cradle of democracy, but it was like life in a small town. Insular. Sheltered. Self-absorbed. While Zeno had maintained that Stoics must participate in public life unless they are unable—and a few of his students had done so—most, to this point, did not.

The rise of Rome, the call to public service in a crisis like the one that Diogenes had answered, changed that. Cicero, “whose knowledge of previous political philosophy was extensive,” Dirk Obbink writes in his “Diogenes of Babylon: The Stoic Sage in the City of Fools,” “is aware of no Stoic writings concerned with practical political questions before Diogenes.” Sure, there had been some lesser-known Stoics who had served as generals and even died in battle, and others who had advised and consulted with kings, but the teachers of the philosophy had remained largely out of the fray by dealing with politics only in the abstract.

Early Stoic political thought had structured itself largely in opposition to Plato’s Republic and Laws beginning with Zeno’s own quite radical Republic, and continuing in Chrysippus’s work in Against Plato on Justice and in his Exhortations. These debates were little more than arguments about different types of utopia. Before Diogenes of Babylon, Stoic thinking on politics up to this point was best expressed by Chrysippus, who presumably got it from Zeno, that only the sage is truly fit for political leadership.*

It’s an appealing notion, but hardly one that scales. How possible would it be to find enough sages to fill the Senate, let alone to rule an empire? If Carneades is any indication, Athens seemed to have trouble finding enough wise men to fill its embassy to Rome! Exactly why Diogenes would suddenly prioritize a more practical political philosophy makes sense when you understand the shift of power that took place during his lifetime, when the tiny world of Greece fell under the enormous shadow of the rising monolith of Rome.

While it was ultimately successful in the mission to Rome, we know that Athens decided not to pay even the reduced fine that Rome’s magistrates had levied. Was Rome going to go to war over it? Over a fine for Athens’s raid on a neighboring city? After Athens had so masterfully distracted and dazzled the Romans with its philosophy and talk of justice? It was unlikely. And it seems Athens got away with its bluff.

For Diogenes, it must have been an illustrative political moment. While a few centuries later Marcus Aurelius would remind himself that life was not “Plato’s Republic,” Diogenes saw that it wasn’t Zeno’s Republic either. Instead, he saw a world filled with confused and flawed people. Diogenes had seen the truth of this firsthand—and perhaps first of all the Stoics—as he entered Rome and the diplomatic arena. What came from it was a crucial sense of pragmatism that the philosophy desperately needed.

Aristo had seemed to think that philosophy was for the wise man exclusively, for the individual’s self-actualization. His Stoicism worked well in the classroom, and raised interesting debates, but it would not work in the world. Diogenes saw Stoicism differently. It was a way of thinking—as well as a set of rules—for serving the common good, for serving one’s country.