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

Breaking his leg in a fall, Crates spent months recuperating and discoursing on philosophy with small audiences of Romans. As it happens, Panaetius’s father was in Rome on his own diplomatic mission at the same time as Crates’s convalescence. Did he attend his lectures? Bring home copies of the discourses that had spread through Rome in the form of poems and commentaries? Or did he bring his son with him on one trip and send him to see Crates directly?

Soon enough, the young Panaetius was a student of Crates back in Pergamum, the future diplomat and connector having been introduced to philosophy through a fortuitous diplomatic connection.

We don’t know much about Panaetius’s studies under this early Stoic, but clearly they were designed to prepare him to follow in his father’s footsteps and into the track that Diogenes and Antipater had set for future Stoics: serving the public good. In 155 BC, Panaetius was appointed to the position of sacrificial priest at Poseidon Hippios in Lindos. It would be the first of the many public roles he would serve in his active life.

Whatever he learned on this job, it became clear to Panaetius that he needed more formal education as well. He eventually made his way to Athens to study under Diogenes, now world-famous after his own diplomatic mission to Rome, and Diogenes’s protégé, Antipater. It’s as if Panaetius returned to get his PhD in philosophy—this second phase of education in Athens would last roughly five years—and then went right back to the real world once more, where he got to work applying what he’d learned at the highest levels of influence and power in Rome.

Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. This is the Stoic way.

During his time in Athens with Diogenes, Panaetius met a fellow student of Diogenes named Gaius Laelius, with whom he would continue to study. Through Laelius and then later, on a naval contingent, Panaetius met and served with Scipio Aemilianus, one of Rome’s great generals, an adopted son of one of its most powerful families and a lover of Greek thought and literature.

Back in Rome, these three men then formed a kind of philosophical club—known to historians today as the Scipionic Circle—that would meet in Scipio’s enormous houses to discuss and debate the Stoic philosophy they all pursued. Scipio footed the bill, Panaetius provided the intellectual nourishment. Many others joined them in these discussions and were shaped by them. Not unlike the way that the expat scene in France after the First World War nurtured the careers of Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, or how a company like PayPal would give the world Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk, the Scipionic Circle became a kind of breeding ground for influential Stoics and a generation of leaders. Publius Rutilius Rufus, who defied Rome’s culture of corruption and who you will meet in the next chapter, was often present. The historian Polybius was too.

It was a form of influence and access that neither Panaetius’s father, nor his teachers, Crates and Diogenes, could have imagined possible. Scipio, with time and with Rome’s growth, became the most powerful man in the Greek world. The kings of Greece now answered to him and to Rome as vassals, while Panaetius served as a kind of translator and advisor and confidant.

Some historians today debate just how often the Scipionic Circle met and how direct its influence was. But there was little of this doubt about its significance in the ancient world. Velleius Paterculus records in his History of Rome that Scipio “kept constantly with him, at home and in the field, two men of eminent genius, Polybius and Panaetius.” He describes Scipio as being deeply devoted to the art of war and peace, saying that he was constantly “engaged in the pursuit of arms or his studies, he was either training his body by exposing it to dangers or his mind by learning.”

Cicero, who was fascinated by stories of Panaetius, sprinkled his dialogues with scenes and anecdotes from these meetings. Later writers like Plutarch not only had no doubts about the Circle, but tell us of the kind of quiet political influence Panaetius managed to exert. In Moralia: Precepts of Statecraft, Plutarch writes that “it is a fine thing also, when we gain advantage from the friendship of great men, to turn it to the welfare of our community, as Polybius and Panaetius, through Scipio’s goodwill towards them, conferred great benefits upon their native States.”

This is what Panaetius had trained for—directing policy and shaping powerful decisions that affected millions of people.