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

Where Carneades was content to argue contradictory positions on alternating days as he had in Rome, relishing the opportunity his newfound fame offered him to mislead his Athenian audiences at every turn, Antipater became a stickler for truth and honesty. Where Diogenes had brought politics to the realm of philosophy—or philosophy to the realm of real-world politics—Antipater sought to bring the practice of everyday ethics to all facets of life. And as ambitious as his aims were, he brought a humility back to Stoicism too.

No one would find Antipater fighting for the spotlight. He was too busy, as a good philosopher should be, working.

Even the medium through which he made his arguments was relatable and ordinary. Previous Stoics had held forth at the Stoa and in theaters, but Antipater opted out. Instead, he invited friends over for dinner to have long discussions about philosophy. Athenaeus tells us in his book called The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, that Antipater was a wonderful storyteller at these gatherings, illustrating his points with powerful anecdotes. While supporters urged him to challenge Carneades’s oratory with bombast of his own, and Carneades attempted to goad him into public debates, Antipater channeled his energy into this dinner-table diplomacy as well as into written works aimed not at triumph over current rivals but to help with the timeless trials of everyday life.

Antipater’s quiet arguments were befitting a man with a fine-tuned sense for ethics, because on the page he could better articulate his views. In these small gatherings he could really connect with an individual, he could get specific, and he could be kind. It also allowed him to see up close the needs, the wants, and the struggles of real people—not just faces beneath the rostrum. Had he been born a couple thousand years later, one could easily imagine him having made a great advice columnist. If Diogenes had been the diplomat and statesman, then we might picture Antipater playing the political ground game, developing relationships, persuading in person, focusing on the individual and improving their lives.

For instance, Antipater was the first Stoic to make strong arguments for marriage and family life, something that had been strangely neglected by earlier philosophers. Zeno had left no natural heirs. Cleanthes had no room in his frugal existence for a wife. Chrysippus tried to be a single parent to his nephews when the need arose, yet he ultimately lived for his work. But Antipater broke new ground for Stoics by speaking passionately on the importance of choosing the right spouse and of raising good children. Try to learn from Socrates’s mistakes, he warned the young men he taught, as he told them another story about Socrates’s wife, who had a disagreeable reputation and a bad temper. If you don’t choose whom to marry wisely, your wisdom—and your happiness—will surely be tested.

To Antipater, a successful city and a successful world could only be built around the keystone of family. Marriage, he said to his students, was “among the primary and most necessary of appropriate actions.” Did Antipater get married himself? Was he a better husband and father than Socrates? The records are scant, but this sentence from his book on marriage sure makes it sound that way: “Moreover, it is the case that he who hasn’t experienced a wedded wife and children has not tasted the truest and genuine goodwill.”

Stoics can love and be loved? Absolutely. Not only can they, but they should, as Antipater clearly did.

Michel Foucault, the twentieth-century French philosopher and social theorist, would credit Antipater for pioneering a new concept of marriage, where two individuals blend their souls and become better for joining together, as opposed to some legal or economic transaction. As Foucault notes, the Stoic oikos, home, is perfected in marriage, creating a “conjugal unit” that can withstand the blows of fate and create a good life.

It was an important and humanizing shift for a philosophy that was previously focused on maintaining the boundaries of indifference when it came to everyday life. As Diogenes Laërtius wrote, the Stoics came to approve “also of honoring parents and brothers in the second place next after the gods. They further maintain that parental affection for children is natural to the good, but not to the bad.” It was thinking that would not only transform Stoic philosophy and then Roman life but be absorbed into Christianity and the very world we live in today.

Is that not the job of an ethicist? And far more important than winning debates?