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

Knowing in his heart that he was innocent, Rutilius declined to defend himself, refusing to call on his own political allies or even utter a word in his defense. Did he think his reputation would save him? Was he trapped by his own dignity? In his work On Oratory, Cicero remarks on how it wasn’t only Rutilius’s silence that condemned him, but in fact none of his defense team raised a voice in opposition to the kangaroo court. At such a staggering failure, Cicero joked that Rutilius’s defense team must have been afraid that if they had gotten worked up and made a spirited defense, they’d get reported to the Stoics. It was Socrates’s strategy: I refuse to dignify the charges. It was Martin Luther: I will not repent. Here I stand. I can do no other.

It was a noble stance, but it allowed his enemies to make quick work of him. The enormous verdict was more than Rutilius—or anyone but the most corrupt officials—could ever pay. His property was seized and he was exiled. No longer could this stickler get in the way of Marius’s looting of Rome, nor could the existence of this ethical man embarrass or show up the rising criminal class.

As he no doubt learned from his teacher, Panaetius, like the pankratist, you must be prepared at all times for the unexpected blows of life—if not to block them, at least to absorb and endure them without whining.

Rutilius’s enemies, in dealing this blow, offered this noble civil servant and military hero one small dignity, and in so doing, all but proved to history his perfect innocence. The false accusers offered their sacrificial victim the opportunity to choose the place of his exile.

Rutilius, with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps, or at least the stone-hard determination of a man who knows he did nothing wrong, chose Smyrna—the very city he had allegedly defrauded. Smyrna, grateful for the reforms and scrupulous honesty of the man who had once governed them, welcomed Rutilius with open arms. They even offered him citizenship. Suetonius tells us that he settled in Smyrna with Opilius Aurelius, “a freedman of an Epicurean, [who] first taught philosophy, afterwards rhetoric, and finally grammar . . . where he lived with him until old age.” Cicero would visit with Rutilius there in 78 BC and call him “a pattern of virtue, of old-time honor, and of wisdom.”

Was Rutilius bitter? It doesn’t appear so. Reports are that he got on with life, and that his fortune grew despite his removal from the circles of power. Gifts from admirers poured in. We are told that a consoling friend attempted to reassure Rutilius that with civil war likely in Rome, in due time all exiles would be allowed back. “What sin have I committed that you should wish me a more unhappy return than departure?” Rutilius replied. “I should much prefer to have my country blush for my exile than weep at my return!”

Better to be missed than to overstay your welcome.

When the state is beyond redemption and helplessly corrupt, the Stoics believed, the wise man will stay away. Confucius, himself a philosopher and an advisor to princes, had said something similar several centuries before. What we know is that Rutilius stayed in Smyrna and wrote his History of Rome in Greek. Hardly broken by the ignominy of what was done to him, he just kept working.

When Rutilius was eventually invited back to Rome by Sulla, who triumphed over Marius and became dictator, the “honor” was politely declined.

Rutilius’s fellow Stoics were livid at the treatment of this honorable man, but in a way it was an important lesson. Doing the right thing could cost a person everything. This was not Plato’s Republic—philosopher kings were not only not desired, they were the enemy of those trying to get rich through the empire. Disgraces had become commonplace. Every major figure of this period would be accused of either electoral or financial corruption.

Unlike Rutilius, almost all of them were guilty.

Why did it seem that the good were punished while the evil got away scot free? It is the way of the world, then and now, sadly. “When good men come to bad ends,” Seneca would write, “when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, and great Cato, the living image of all the virtues, by falling upon his sword to show that the end had come for himself and for the state at the same time, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune pays her rewards so unjustly.”

Still, who would you rather be? Because there is a cost to cheating, to stealing, to doing the wrong thing—even if society rewards it. Would you rather go out like Rutilius with your head high or live in denial of your own undeniable shame?