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

Diotimus’s infamy stained his fellow Stoics to enough of an extent, for example, that it prompted Posidonius to write what was certainly a more measured book against Diotimus’s accuser, Zeno of Sidon, than he might have otherwise intended. It’s not as if such an honorable man would have defended Diotimus’s forgeries. Instead, it’s likely that he needed to shift the focus away from the student and toward the school, clarifying what Stoicism’s actual objections to the teachings of Epicurus were. Did Posidonius apologize for Diotimus? Did he disavow the man’s despicable tactics? Did he correct Apollodorus’s own slander against Chrysippus? One hopes, but does not know.

Still, it remains interesting that we have no record of any of the Stoics disavowing Diotimus’s crime, at the time or in the generations after. Seneca, who writes expansively on all sorts of philosophers and their behaviors, and about the Epicureans more than eighty times across his surviving works, never once mentions this incident and the sad failing of his own school.

Perhaps the desperation of the intra-academic squabble hit too close to home.

It has never been easy to understand the bitterness of disputes between classical scholars, Samuel Johnson once observed. “Small things make mean men proud,” he said, “and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politics against those whom he is hired to defame.”

He could not have captured the folly of Diotimus better. Nor could Shakespeare’s funeral oration of Caesar be any more apt. For in that play, the once-Stoic Brutus’s single deed—the assassination of Julius Caesar—would come to overwhelm and obscure everything else the man would do in his life. And so it went for Diotimus, a philosopher who may well have had many interesting and profound things to say about the pursuit of moral perfection and well-being, but instead is known to us only for his evil and vengeful decision to attempt to destroy the reputation of the founder of his rivals’ school.

CICERO THE FELLOW TRAVELER (SIS-er-oh)

Origin: Arpinum

B. 106 BC

D. 43 BC

It cannot be said that Cicero was a Stoic. Nor would he have claimed to be. It’s undeniable, however, that he was a dedicated student of the Stoics. He spent time directly under Posidonius. The blind Stoic Diodotus lived with him for years and even died in Cicero’s home, leaving his estate to the powerful young man he had long tutored. It was the Stoics who, Cicero deemed in his book Tusculan Disputations, “are the only true philosophers.” In fact, it is through Cicero’s writing that much of what we know about Stoicism in the ancient world survives.

But for all this, Cicero could never convince himself to actually live by the principles he would do so much to articulate and preserve. He was a fellow traveler, a man without a party, who for all his success and ambition would turn out to be deficient in the courage and character that his moment in history demanded—that Stoicism demanded he demonstrate.

He was, nonetheless, the great talent of the age.

The first century BC was a time in which the old way of doing things began to break down. There was political conflict and populist uprisings. Demagogues had amassed incredible power. The justice system devolved into a rigged game. The empire frayed at the edges and turned on itself.

This chaos could never slow down a striver like Cicero, but it would define his life.

Cicero was born into a wealthy equestrian family on January 3, 106 BC, in Arpinum, a provincial town about seventy miles southeast of Rome that had only recently received the rights of Roman citizenship. His family name derived from the Latin word for chickpea (cicer), which suggests they had, like Zeno’s family, once been involved in trade.* Unlike the earlier Stoics who had been drawn to politics or public life out of a sense of duty, Cicero was looking for something else—upward social mobility.