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

As bad as it was, the Stoics of Rutilius’s time had little idea of what the future had in store for them. They could not have known that as bad as what they were witnessing was, it was only, as the writer and podcaster Mike Duncan would describe it two thousand years later, “the storm before the storm.” The Roman Republic’s institutions had been greatly weakened and all that remained was valiant resistance from great and honorable men. How much longer could they hold back the tides? How much longer could they preserve the ethics and political institutions that Greece had brought to Rome?

With Julius Caesar coming, the answer, sadly, was not much longer.

But for a time, Rutilius Rufus had let his light shine. He had been a force for good in the world and had suffered for it. But never, it seems, did he question whether it was worth it. Nor did he harbor any bitterness about his fate. He had looked at himself and the corruption around him and decided that no matter what other people said or did, his job was to be good. He knew, as Marcus Aurelius would remind himself over and over, that all he controlled was his character and his ability to let his true colors shine undiminished. You can lay violent hands on me, Zeno had said, but my mind will remain committed to philosophy.

But Zeno only had to say it. Marcus was never wrongly convicted. He never lost his home. Rutilius believed it, spoke it, and lived it.

It was he who had to stand there as they brought him up on trumped-up charges, as they soiled his reputation, stole his possessions, and sent him far from the country he loved. And yet, under all this pressure, he did not crack. He did not compromise. He did not bend the knee. He refused what must have been the implicit carrot that went along with the legal stick: Drop these pesky objections and we can make you rich and important.

Publius Rutilius Rufus was, uncompromisingly, the last honest man in Rome. It’s an example that calls down to us today, as it did to the brave Stoics of his time and every one of them who came after.

POSIDONIUS THE GENIUS (Po-si-DOUGH-knee-us)

Origin: Apamea, Syria

B. 135 BC

D. 51 BC

Posidonius of Apamea was yet another Stoic born into a prominent family in a time of anxious abundance. The year of his birth, 135 BC, in what is now Syria, marked the beginning of political turmoil that in a sense continues to this day. But for Posidonius, it was the same kind of formative incubation in uncertainty that had created Zeno and Cleanthes before him.

Perhaps these are the ideal conditions in which Stoicism emerges: a homeland lacking strong leadership and buffeted by powerful outside forces; a ringside seat to the perils of excess and greed. It was all an early lesson that in an unpredictable world, the only thing we can really manage is ourselves—and that the space between our ears is the only territory we can conquer in any kind of certain and enduring way.

In any case, Posidonius would later recall with disapproval that the abundance of Syria in those days made its people “free from the bother of the necessities of life, and so were forever meeting for a continual life of feasting and their gymnasia turned into baths.” He wrote of the “drunken ambition” of the local tyrants. Things were good, but good times rarely make for great people, or great governments.

Ultimately, he voted with his feet as many of the other early Stoics did, leaving his birthplace at eighteen or twenty years old for Athens.

When Posidonius arrived in Athens sometime between 117 and 115 BC, he found the Stoa Poikilē firmly in the hands of Panaetius, who was by then an old man and a towering figure, not only in the Stoic school but also in the empire. Fathers from across the Roman ruling class—from senators to generals and even kings of distant provinces—had begun to have their children educated by philosophers. Where Panaetius had taught Rutilius a generation earlier in Rome, many of Rome’s richest and most powerful were now sending their most promising children to him in Athens to prepare them for entry into Roman life.

And yet even amid these star pupils from the Eternal City, the young Posidonius must have stood out for his brilliance. Sources portray him as a polymath with diverse interests in natural history, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, geography, geology, seismology, ethnography, mathematics, geometry, logic, history, and ethics. Perhaps it was Panaetius, who had traveled widely on his fact-finding mission, who encouraged his young student to take his studies on the road. What we know is that after his time in Athens, the next large chunk of Posidonius’s life was spent studying in far-flung places from Italy, Sicily, Greece, and Dalmatia to North Africa and the Near East.