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

These were not paradoxes in the logical sense, only in that they flew in the face of common sense. It was actually the counterintuitiveness of these ideas that the Stoics leaned on to catch people’s attention: How can virtue be the only good if we need health and money to live? Is a lie really as bad as killing someone? Plenty of philosophers were visibly poor; how are they rich? The possibilities for discussion, for counterexamples, for gotcha moments, were endless—and Cicero loved noodling with the prompts laid down by Zeno and Cleanthes and Aristo and everyone else.

Ironically, what hurt Cicero in politics—the size of his ambition, his vacillation, his desire to please—suited him supremely well in the self-appointed task of being the first to give an eloquent and detailed account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. While drawn to the rigor and precision of the Stoics, and to their well-developed ethical thinking, he danced with the Academic/Platonist school most regularly, with its skeptical method and insistence on arguing every side of any issue.

As an Academic, his opportunism made for great writing. So too his ability to talk and entertain ideas he didn’t actually believe. He was a little like Carneades, arguing all sides of the discussion. This habit, infuriating to those around him, undoubtedly preserved all sorts of disparate sources for us that we can continue to enjoy today. It was beautiful writing, with ideas that would shape the world. Saint Jerome would later worry that he loved Cicero’s works more than the Bible. Saint Augustine was converted to philosophy by reading Cicero’s now lost work, the philosophical dialogue Hortensius. Seneca and other Stoics would read his works with great interest. But as a person, as a leader, his foot-in-both-camps mentality was a shameful vice.

Eventually the bill from the latter came due. The last years of Cicero’s life were a mad dash to write and to escape the blows of fate. Indeed, with the exception of a book on rhetoric, De Inventione, composed at the early age of around twenty, his major books were all written in a twelve-year span between 56 BC and 44 BC, and in fact the bulk of them between 46 and 44 BC.

If Cicero had completely retreated into his books, we might admire him. Plutarch tells us that he made it a point to visit Rome and pay his respects to Caesar, and even awarded him honors. When Caesar rebuilt a torn-down statue of his own rival, Pompey, Cicero was there to flatter him, perhaps in the way that he himself had always wished to be flattered. In setting up these statues of Pompey, Cicero slobbered, you have firmly established your own.

Cato, whose martyred body lay fresh in the grave—as did Pompey’s—would have been sick at the scene.

In 45 BC, Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia died. Here, Stoicism might have served him well, as he would later advise his friend Brutus over his own tragic loss in a few years. Instead, with nothing to fall back on, nothing to reassure himself, only the ideas in his books and his faltering ambitions, he was bereft and broken. His career seemed over. His life was falling apart.

So Cicero continued to write, but not live, philosophically. He continued to write about Stoicism, but declined to take any of it to heart. In a way, this would be a major contribution of his to the philosophy. By falling short of the doctrines he passed along from Zeno, from Chrysipus, and even from Stoic peers he wrote about like Rutilius Rufus and Cato, he was proving why the ideas matter. He was like Diotimus, showing us what not to do.

Cicero would dedicate his book Tusculan Disputations to his friend Brutus, and in 45 BC, Brutus in turn would write a book inspired by Stoicism, On Virtue, which he would dedicate to Cicero.

Unlike Cicero, Brutus wasn’t just dabbling. Like Cato, like a real philosopher, he was prepared to risk everything to save the country he loved: He was going to assassinate Julius Caesar, now the dictator of the republic Cicero and Brutus had loved. When Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators hatched their plot to kill Caesar, however, they left Cicero out of the loop. They believed he was too nervous, too untrustworthy, too likely to second-guess the plot or undermine it, unintentionally or not. In short, when the moment counted, Cicero couldn’t be counted on. He wasn’t Stoic enough.

Shakespeare renders it this way:

CASSIUS

But what of Cicero? Shall we sound him?

I think he will stand very strong with us. . . .

BRUTUS

O, name him not! Let us not break with him,

For he will never follow anything

That other men begin.

They feared their friend lacked courage and that his ego would hold them back. History would bear this out. Almost immediately after Caesar’s death, Cicero began to take credit for the other men’s deed, claiming that Brutus had shouted his name as he plunged the dagger in.