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

Many early Stoics had held that all sins and wrongs were equal. To be away from home, went the argument, is to be absent—whether you’re one mile or a hundred miles distant. But of course this is ridiculous. Being outside is not the same as being gone, just as murder is not the same as a lie, even if both are far from ethical. Similarly, the lie of omission that Antipater’s teacher Diogenes argued for in his Caveat emptor, or the misdirection of a diplomat trying to shore up peaceful relations, is not the same as a tyrant who manufactures a pretense for war at the cost of many lives.

Antipater was the major force in moving the Stoics in this commonsense direction. He loosened the absolutism of being either all virtuous or vicious. He stopped minimizing the “indifferent” things of daily life—whom we marry, how we dress, what we eat—and brought ethics to the forefront of the philosopher’s concern, so that philosophy could be a productive life practice. A guide to living. An operating system.

And again, we can imagine him modeling these very things at his dinner parties and in his daily life, just as Zeno had first modeled the way of the sage to Cleanthes long before.

Not that Antipater was the first Stoic to care about practical ethics. Chrysippus had used his experience in sports to suggest a “no shoving” principle—the idea that we should never cheat or resort to foul play in order to win. Antipater not only took it further, but proposed that ethical behavior—or even sportsmanship—was itself a kind of craft that required real work and effort. For him, the human being in action is better understood as an archer. We train and practice. We draw back the arrow and aim it to the best of our abilities. But we know full well that despite our training and our aim, many factors outside our control will influence where the arrow hits the target—or if it falls short entirely.

This is what the pursuit of virtue is in real life. We study. We train until things become second nature. The moment arrives. We commit. We hold up what’s right as our target. We take action. But much happens after that—much of it not remotely up to us. Which is why we know that our true worth doesn’t reside in whether or not we get a bull’s-eye.

In the real world, we miss. Sometimes by a lot. But we have to keep trying. The more we work on it the better we get. The more shots we take, the more times we’ll hit the target and the more good we’ll do.

It’s hard to overstate, again, just what a big breakthrough this ethical model is. Just as Diogenes realized that philosophy would have to enter public life, Antipater made sure to bring it into private life too. He tried to help solve for the real situations that humans face: Who should we marry? Is work or family more important? What rules should govern a transaction between two people where the law is not clear? Should we be honest even if it will cost us money? How do we treat those less fortunate than us? Does society owe anything to the poor or the unlucky?

Monks would later argue about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Today, philosophers debate whether we’re living in a computer simulation or how to respond to the so-called “trolley problem.” But the truth is that you will never have to pull a lever to stop a trolley from running over one person or five. You have no way of knowing whether this life is real or an illusion. We do have, however, just as the citizens of Athens had, real concerns and decisions to make on a daily basis. And how these decisions are made in the polis affects the larger cosmopolis.

That Stoic idea of oikeiosis—that we share something and our interests are naturally connected to those of our fellow humans—was as pressing in the ancient world as it is today. Should we donate some of our income to charity? Is it fair for some people to have more money and resources than others? Doesn’t everyone have the right to be happy and to live with dignity?

Let us go back to that debate between Diogenes and Antipater about selling grain or a piece of property. Diogenes is right that the demands of commerce make full transparency unrealistic. But Antipater’s concern is nuanced and important—finding the balance between acting justly and crippling, self-defeating moralism. There is obviously a tension between self-interest and the interests of others, but are we not, at least in a way, all on the same team? As fellow citizens? As fellow believers in justice? The man who fails to disclose faulty sanitation in a home he is selling may be helping his family’s fortune, but it might come at the direct expense of another family’s health and well-being. How is that fair? And doesn’t the suffering of that family come at the cost of the success of the city, of the state of which you are also a part?