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

For the most part, Cicero steered clear of the city. He turned, as much as he could, back to writing and philosophy. He pored over the books at the library of Faustus Sulla near his villa in Cumae, which was once the home of the Stoic teacher Blossius. He worked on a book, On Oratory (56 BC), where he compared Cato’s use of rhetoric to that of Rutilius Rufus, showing how Rufus’s decision to maintain his Stoic brevity in the face of his accusers failed him at precisely the moment good rhetoric could have saved him. Worried about the future of Rome, he wrote two works, Republic and Laws, which drew on the Stoics Diogenes of Babylon and Panaetius.

But like many historians, and even readers today, he was missing what was staring him in the face: the lives these figures had lived. He was missing the common thread through those four Stoics. Character. Commitment. Purpose.

In 51 BC, Cicero was awarded the governorship of Cilicia—a position well out of the fray of Roman politics, which helped to reburnish his reputation. Really, though, it was a brief respite from the chaos fate had in store for him and for Rome.

Cicero once wrote that the beginnings of things are small. He would also find in those few short years that the ends of things are surprising and fast. In early 49 BC, Caesar—Cicero’s former friend and peer—would cross the Rubicon. Caesar’s ambition had been slower burning than Cicero’s, less self-aggrandizing, but far more aggressive and unbending—and it was backed by the wealth produced by an unmatched and deeply feared army in Gaul. Civil war ensued. By September 48 BC, Pompey—whom Cicero had praised in his first major political speech, and whom his teacher Posidonius had tried to instruct about virtue—would be dead.

Who could stop Caesar now? One would think that this would be the pivotal moment for such a student of philosophy, and a master orator like Cicero—when fate met the man whose time had come. But Cicero, the ambitious striver, was not prepared to meet it. We have, with the benefit of hindsight, the perspective to see that he had wasted himself on the wrong crisis. Thinking that the Catiline conspiracy was his moment to perform for history, he had moved too soon, too severely. He gained fame from it, but the victory was Pyrrhic.

Now the Republic really was hanging in the balance. Never before had Cicero’s talents—his ability to persuade, to move the crowd, to tell a story that would drive people to the barricades—been more needed, but he could not summon an audience that would listen. He was impotent too, without much power. Spent, he could do nothing.

Or was he a coward? Offered a command of troops in the Republican cause, Cicero inexplicably turned it down.

Only Cato—the Stoic who wrote less but lived the ideas—was willing to fight. But it was not enough. By 46 BC, with Caesar ascendant, Cato committed suicide in Utica, forever a martyr to the Republican cause. Cicero eulogized him, attempting to capture in words the power of this Stoic he both admired and judged, but whose commitment to principles he lacked. He, along with the rest of Rome, was ready to yield to Caesar and “accept the bridle,” as Plutarch puts it.

Cicero’s eulogy of Cato is a case in point—although only fifty words of the tribute survive, we know he censored himself for fear of angering Caesar and Caesar’s supporters. Both Cato and Cicero cared about what was right—but Cicero cared about himself a little bit more. Cato believed in courage. Cicero believed in not getting killed.

The choice earned Cicero a few years of life, but the Stoics would ask—as we should ask of all self-preserving compromises—“At what cost?”

The one upside of Cicero’s capitulation and his fair-weather commitment to philosophy is that by living he was able to continue writing, and to serve as a kind of bridge between Greek and Latin philosophical thought, especially in the area of ethics. And when it came to ethics, he knew of no better source in all of Greek and Latin literature than the Stoics. In the end it wasn’t the accomplishments of public office that made his glory, or how Cicero lived his life, but what he set down in writing—wisdom from the Stoics that would endure to our own time.

In 46 BC, Cicero published the Stoic Paradoxes, dedicated to Marcus Brutus, who himself had strong Stoic leanings. In what was more a rhetorical exercise than a serious philosophical treatment, he explored six of the primary Stoic paradoxes:

that virtue is the only good;

that it is sufficient for happiness;

that all virtues and vices are equal;

that all fools are mad;

that only the sage is truly free;

that the wise person alone is rich.