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

If you want the job done right, there’s no one better to do it than a Stoic. If you want someone to aid you in your crimes and corruption, there’s nobody worse.

Marius, who lived and ate with his troops, and who dropped the property requirement that had previously limited who could serve in the army, was enormously popular with the masses. He was also brutal and merciless. In 101 BC, following his fourth consulship, Marius achieved a dramatic victory over the Germanic Cimbri, in which 120,000 of their fierce troops were slaughtered. Marius was thus heralded as “the third founder of Rome,” but like any figure whose career rested on the whims of the crowd, he was deeply feared by the Roman elite, who wondered what his intentions were.

Rutilius’s first conflict with Marius was simpler: He believed Marius had bribed his way to one of his electoral victories by paying down debts and purchasing votes. Having been on the wrong end of this kind of cheating himself, Rutilius was not the type to take it lightly, even if Marius had done an admirable job keeping the peace. Besides, what was the point of having elections if they were going to be fraudulent? So when Rutilius saw something, he said something—and in the process made an enemy who was not likely to forget this betrayal.

For a time, Rutilius was safe, if only because Marius’s command over the mob was starting to look shaky. A group of angry aristocrats proved too much for even Marius to control. They attacked and murdered one of his former allies, literally ripping the roof off his prison cell, despite Marius’s attempts to protect him. Tensions on all sides now exploded, and since the Senate had never quite trusted Marius, it was time for him to leave town for a while.

Plutarch says it was during his exile that Marius incited Mithridates, king of Pontus and Armenia Minor, to start a war against Rome, which he was certain would ease the Senate’s fears of him and force them to call Rome’s “third founder” back into service once again. It was a time of intrigue and political violence and outright corruption—swinging abruptly from reactionary to deeply conservative political figures—as all times of revolution and unrest are.

Even if he hadn’t tangled with Marius, it was probably inevitable, then, that Rutilius, meticulously honest and ruled by his sense of Stoic duty, would eventually find himself a target. Not only had he gained acclaim for his well-disciplined troops, but he had also begun making reforms to bankruptcy law in the face of rising indebtedness, spearheading an initiative to protect Greeks in Asia Minor from the tax gouging of the publicani, members of the Roman equites.

It’s a populist irony—the strongman comes to power by making impossible and destructive promises to the disenfranchised. Do they actually have any intention of helping these people? Of course not. In fact, they’ll actively stymie any reforms that will actually make the system more fair. All that matters is their iron grip on their ignorant base and the power that comes from it.

We can see Rutilius simply doing his job, following his sense of how, in our self-interest, we must never lose sight of the interests of others. His own practice of Stoic oikeiosis, in service of the public good, put him on a fast track to a major conflict much bigger than himself. Did Rutilius know who he was crossing by deciding to advocate for reforms that came at the expense of the rich? Did it matter that he was earnestly attempting to stop a gross injustice? No. What happened next is a very old trick, the same one that Scaurus used: Accuse the honest man of precisely the opposite of what they’re doing, of the sin you yourself are committing. Use their reputation against them. Muddy the waters. Stain them with lies. Run them out of town by holding them to a standard that if equally applied would mean the corrupt but entrenched interests would never survive.

So it was that Rutilius, who had instigated and presided over the prosecution of various cases of corruption charges himself, was brought up on false charges, accused of extorting the people he was protecting . . . by the people who were actually doing the extorting. It didn’t help that some of his writings had been critical of the people he was accused of stealing from. Still, he seemed almost stunned by the animus of his enemies and the lengths to which they were willing to go. The jury was stacked. Marius operated behind the scenes, pushing the prosecution. How could he not have been involved? The historian Dio Cassius tells us that a man of Rutilius’s “excellence and good repute had been an annoyance” to Marius. Annoyance? He was a mirror. A walking condemnation of everything the corrupt and selfish stood for.