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

Having checked all the boxes by the end of his twenties, it was time for Cicero to begin his political ascent, which he had planned for so long. At thirty, a Roman was eligible to stand for the office of quaestor—which translates to “the one who asks questions,” but were simply those who drew up laws and answered to petitioners—and then become a member of the Senate. Cicero’s family leveraged their wealth and contacts to make sure he won his first election handily. He wasn’t just a natural, but a worker. Inspired by craftsmen who knew the names of each of their tools or instruments, Plutarch tells us, Cicero actively cultivated the habit of knowing not only the names of all of his eminent constituents, but the sizes of their estates, their businesses, and their needs.

Not needs in the Stoic sense, as in what was good for the polis, what was good for the state, but needs in the raw political sense. What did they want? What could he do for them? Where did their interests align, quid pro quo. There’s no question that Cicero was an able politician. He was, in fact, the best in a generation. But he operated by a compass quite different from that of Diogenes or Antipater or Posidonius.

By 75 BC, Cicero was ensconced in office, and assigned as a tax collector and manager in Sicily. He took to administration quite easily and ably, but unlike the populists of his time, he remained a lover of high culture and philosophy. While in Sicily he tells the colorful story of tracking down the grave of Archimedes in Syracuse, which by this time was nearly a century and a half old and abandoned and overgrown. In his classic and rather egotistical style, Cicero would praise himself for his work in uncovering it: “So you see, one of the most famous cities of Greece, once indeed a great school of learning as well, would have been ignorant of the tomb of its one most ingenious citizen, had not a man of Arpinum pointed it out.”

If the self-indulgence rings awkward now, imagine what it must have sounded like then.

Sicily had been only a way station for Cicero and served what later biographers would describe as his philodoxia and philotimia—loves of fame and honor, precisely what the oracles had warned him to be wary of. He took the job so he could become a senator, which in and of itself was a dizzyingly high honor for a man whose family just a few generations before was not even afforded the rights of citizenship. By no means sated by this accomplishment, Cicero quickly began planning to leap to higher and higher ones. In 71 BC, he took on as prosecutor the case of extortion brought by Sicilian citizens against Verres, hoping it would aid his next step in his cursus honorum—what the Romans referred to as the “ladder of offices” that the ambitious climbed—to the post of aedile, which regulated and enforced public order, in 70 BC. Cicero conducted a backbreaking fifty-day investigation and returned to Rome with a vast trove of documentary proof against the crimes of Verres.

It was a dramatic case. Verres had stolen forty million sesterces during his three years in Sicily, and Cicero had the proof. As he told the court in his opening statement, “It is this man’s case that will determine whether, with a court composed of Senators, the condemnation of a very guilty and very rich man can possibly occur. And further, the prisoner is such that he is distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offences and immense wealth: If, therefore, he is acquitted, it will be impossible to imagine any explanation but the most shameful; it will not appear that there has been any liking for him, any family bond, any record of other and better actions, no, nor even any moderation in some one vice, that could palliate the number and enormity of his vicious deeds.” Cicero knew the jury had been bribed, and yet he somehow secured a conviction. And now, holding the office of aedile, he was doubly victorious.

It was a great day for that Stoic virtue of justice—of fairness and truth—but was that why he struck it? Does it matter?

The constant theme in Cicero’s life is movement—movement forward, movement upward. Nearly everything he did, including winning important corruption cases like the one against Verres, had a double motive. He often did the right thing, but he did it with more than half an eye on what it could do for him. It wasn’t exactly Stoic . . . but it worked.