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

Where Zeno was a founding genius and Chrysippus was the cleaver to the Academy’s knots, while Aristo favored absolutism over pragmatic direction and Antipater moved in the opposite direction of trying to lay out rules for everyday life, Panaetius was a kind of weaver—tying Stoic and Roman ethical perspectives together, introducing philosophical consideration to Rome’s elite with one hand, subtly directing them to protect and service the interests of his distant homeland with the other. Effectively, the Stoa had a supremely well-placed and practical ambassador in Rome.

The timing could not have been more essential.

It’s not hard to detect a provincialism in the early Stoics. Zeno insisted on his hometown being inscribed next to his name on a building he had paid to restore. Cleanthes’s frugal lifestyle had little room for travel, let alone concern for international affairs. Even Diogenes had quickly returned to Athens after his trip to Rome. These were not attitudes well fitted to a global empire.

Panaetius was, unlike his predecessors, a born globalist. His life began in Rhodes but expanded when he studied abroad in both Pergamum and Rome. He traveled across most of the Mediterranean. He fell in with Romans fascinated by the East. Panaetius was able to manage and integrate all these diverse and conflicting ties in a surprisingly modern way. Marcus Aurelius would, in Meditations, describe himself as a “citizen of the world,” and in so doing was following the new course for the philosophy that Panaetius had first set.

Yet even with this international mindset, Panaetius never lost his connection to where he came from. When Athens offered him citizenship, he politely declined, saying that “one city was enough for a sensible man.”

All were aware that Panaetius had a moderating effect on the frenetic yet practical Scipio, balancing out his ambition with mildness and principles. But he was clearly no wet blanket, or he would not have been able to cultivate such a vivacious and diverse social circle. Scipio got enough out of Panaetius’s company that in the spring of 140 BC he asked him to accompany him on an ambitious embassy to the East. This mission was recorded in many sources and logged stops across Egypt, Cyprus, Syria, Rhodes, and various places in Greece and Asia Minor. Plutarch writes that Scipio summoned Panaetius directly, and another source explains that the Senate sent them to “to view the violence and lawlessness of men.” Today we might call this a “fact-finding mission.”

We like to think that the world has changed a great deal since Panaetius’s time, but the truth is that senates are still sending men to the same regions to make the same kinds of observations that this soldier and philosopher were dispatched to make more than twenty-one hundred years ago—just as we are still struggling to strike the right balance, as Panaetius did, between nationalism and globalism, the concerns of the many and the concerns of ourselves.

In the way that Zeno followed in his father’s trade, so too did Panaetius, the son of a diplomat and the student of two philosopher diplomats, continue the family business—and continue Stoicism’s transition from the Stoa to the levers of power, from the provincialism of the Athenian agora to the world stage. In a time when many still believed that the gods played an active role in human affairs and when sacrifices and ritual were designed to placate them, Panaetius was a freethinker. He rejected the silly theories of soothsayers and astrologers, and it was likely on his advice around this time that Scipio banned them from his regiments.

Plutarch tells a colorful story from this nearly two-year fact-finding mission in his Moralia: Roman Sayings that, when Scipio arrived in Alexandria, traveling in a retinue which included Panaetius and five servants, the people were in such a frenzy that they yelled for Scipio to take his toga off his head so they could get a good look, and when he did the masses burst into applause. He writes that the Egyptian king Ptolemy “the Fat” VIII “could hardly keep up with them in walking because of his inactive life and his pampering of his body, and Scipio whispered softly to Panaetius, ‘Already the Alexandrians have received some benefit from our visit. For it is owing to us that they have seen their king walk.’”

Fat and lazy heads of state are another recurring character of history.

In 138 BC, Panaetius and Scipio returned to Rome. Panaetius was now forty-seven years old and had gained a wide life experience. His schooling long finished in Pergamum and Athens, an interim public career in Rhodes behind him, including time spent in the navy, he now found himself ensconced in the inner workings of Rome. It was again timeless and modern that he would, as so many men do at that age, begin to turn some of his attention to writing.