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

No longer was it sufficient for the philosopher to fantasize about populating a small city exclusively with wise people in order to form the best social order. Nor were the quips and provocations of Diogenes the Cynic—the man who had treated Alexander the Great with disdain—sufficient either. Urgently, the skills of the philosopher—reason, virtue, logic, ethics—were needed outside the Stoa, even outside the agora. To solve problems. To build frameworks and write laws. To guide magistrates. To forge compromises. To persuade and to hold back the passions of the mob. To settle disputes between cities.

Diogenes of Babylon was certainly crafty and had a mind well suited to politics. Cicero tells us about a debate he had with his student Antipater over the ethics of selling a piece of land or a shipment of grain. His student believed that the seller was obligated to fully disclose all information—that several other shipments of grain were coming, likely to drive the price down, or that the asking price for the land was likely higher than its market value. It was only fair and just, he said. But Diogenes argued that nothing would ever sell if every fact was disclosed. How could a market work without the pursuit of mutual self-interest? Besides, sellers have multiple competing obligations, for instance to get the best return for their investors and to provide for their families. Cicero records his direct words of defense: “The seller should declare any defects in his wares, in so far as such a course is prescribed by the common law of the land; but for the rest, since he has goods to sell, he may try to sell them to the best possible advantage, provided he is guilty of no misrepresentation.”

As for everything else, Caveat emptor was his argument. Buyer beware.

“Even if I am not telling you everything,” Diogenes explained, “I am not concealing from you the nature of the gods, or the highest good; yet to know these things would benefit you more than to know that the cheap price of wheat was down.” Is there no better encapsulation of the pragmatic philosophy of this diplomat who had gone to Rome to argue for a reduction of a fine his city likely never intended to pay? Who with one hand dazzled the Romans with speeches while picking their pocket with the other, perhaps telling himself he was preventing Rome from doing the same to Athens? There were competing interests at stake: Athens versus Rome, commercial versus colonial power, paying one’s debts versus fighting an unjust sentence.

Somehow he made it work. He struck a balance of interests and competing loyalties—exactly the role of a diplomat and a political advisor.

He played a similar role settling, in practice, some of the more complicated debates in Stoicism. Aristo had tried to say that we should be indifferent to all things. Diogenes knew that was unrealistic as well. Wealth, he said, was “not merely conducive to achieving pleasure and good health, but essential.” It wasn’t more important than virtue, but it was important—if you could get it. And virtue, according to Cicero’s paraphrasing of his views, “demands life-long steadiness, firmness of purpose and consistency.”

Money made life easier. Virtue, on the other hand, was the work of our life.

Unfortunately, little to none of Diogenes’s writing survives to us, a sad fact given that he was, at least according to the texts that have been discovered entombed in the town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, one of the most cited authors in the ancient world, even more than Plato and Aristotle.

As Diogenes’s works are lost to us, so too was he lost to the world. We not only don’t know how he died, we’re not even sure when. Cicero says that by 150 BC—only a few years after his mission to Rome—Diogenes was dead. Lucian states that he lived to be eighty. But other sources have him living for another decade or until his student Antipater inherited the mantle.

In any case, this prince of philosophy did not live forever, but his legacy—Stoicism as a political force, and the character he exemplified—was only just beginning. In fact, it would soon conquer the world.

ANTIPATER THE ETHICIST (An-TIP-uh-ter)

Origin: Tarsus

B. Unknown

D. 129 BC

If Diogenes was the pragmatic politician, then his student Antipater, the next leader of the Stoa, was the real-world ethicist. Practical, yes, but intent on establishing clear principles from which every action must descend.

We don’t know when Antipater of Tarsus was born, or really any details of his early life in Tarsus, only that he succeeded Diogenes of Babylon as head of the Stoa after Diogenes’s death sometime around 142 BC. What is obvious is that Antipater’s worldview was very much defined by the influence of Diogenes and a reaction against his master’s former student, the seductive but amorphous Carneades.