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

What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee and vice versa, Marcus Aurelius would later say. It was an insight he drew straight from the life and work of Antipater.

Antipater believed that our affinity for the common good was our primary obligation. Cicero preserved his argument: “It is your duty to consider the interests of your fellow-men and to serve society; you were brought into the world under these conditions and have these inborn principles which you are in duty bound to obey and follow, that your interest shall be the interest of the community and conversely that the interest of the community shall be your interest.” Diogenes—who had no problem stiffing the Romans—believed that the individual’s good came first, arguing, as we saw, that knowing everything about your own moral state means more than protecting what others should find out on their own. Diogenes said, sure, stay within the bounds of what the law requires, but you don’t have to do any more than that for others when it comes to business. Professor Malcolm Schofield explained Antipater’s views in this way—that just as we shouldn’t commit violence against one another, we shouldn’t commit injustice against one another, and that we should treat others’ interests as not alien from our own.

How far was Antipater willing to take these arguments? How radically did they affect his politics? It is interesting to see that one of Antipater’s students and a prominent Roman teacher, Gaius Blossius, would become involved in the Gracchus affair, a controversial plot that sought to redistribute some of Rome’s land to its poorest citizens. Tiberius Gracchus would be assassinated for this revolutionary idea, and Blossius, questioned by the Senate for being Gracchus’s teacher and mentor, barely escaped with his life. Antipater was a very old man by this point, but one suspects he might have smiled at the thought of his student looking after the interests of the have-nots. Certainly he would have agreed that vast income inequality was an issue a Stoic in political service would need to address. Perhaps he even raised a toast to Blossius at one of his quiet dinner parties after hearing he survived the inquiry of the consuls. Even Diogenes, had he still been around, would have at least admired the political brilliance of Gracchus’s populism.

What’s interesting is that Antipater thought that most of these ethical questions were pretty straightforward. His formula for virtue was “in choosing continually and unswervingly the things which are according to nature, and rejecting those contrary to nature.” It was about making sure that our self-interest didn’t override the inner compass each of us is born with.

You gotta do the right thing. Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing. Whether you’re Panaetius, whom we’ll meet next, on the world stage or the ordinary citizen in the privacy of your own home.

Antipater died in 129 BC. The fear is that a highly ethical person living in an unethical world or an ardent dogmatist, as Antipater was once described by Cicero, would become bitter in old age. It’s hard to protect this kind of spirit, and over a long enough life, it often does break, and the wound it leaves quite easily becomes infected.

Not so with Antipater. Plutarch records that his last words were of gratitude. “They say,” he writes, “that Antipater of Tarsus, when he was in like manner near his end and was enumerating the blessings of his life, did not forget to mention his prosperous voyage from home [in Cilicia] to Athens, just as though he thought that every gift of a benevolent Fortune called for great gratitude, and kept it to the last in his memory, which is the most secure storehouse of blessings for a man.”

And so the generations marched forward, a little better armed in the pursuit of virtue than they were before Antipater walked the earth for his brief allotment of time.

PANAETIUS THE CONNECTOR (Pan-EYE-tee-us)

Origin: Rhodes

B. 185 BC

D. 109 BC

Stoicism was born in Athens, but it came of age and to power in Rome, a story that mirrors the life of Panaetius of Rhodes, who would become one of Stoicism’s great ambassadors to the world. We know that in 155 BC, Diogenes and his diplomatic mission had successfully introduced Stoicism to the growing empire, which would absorb the philosophy into its DNA. But it actually may have made a brief appearance thirteen years earlier when Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher from Pergamum, was sent on his own mission to Rome to protect his country’s interests in the Macedonian Wars.